Stronger Together

Hala Khouri reflects on the meaning of seva.

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WHEN I WAS A NEW TEACHER, I volunteered to teach yoga to teen girls at a Boys & Girls Clubs location in Venice, California. In addition to yoga, we’d also do art projects and talk about issues that affect young adults, such as low self-esteem. Negative body image had been a big struggle for me as a teen, and I’ve often thought about how learning yoga back then would have helped me regulate my emotions and reframe my insecurities. So, I made body image the theme of one of our classes and devised an art project to help the girls honor and love their bodies just as they were. Armed with poster board, pastels, and stacks of magazines containing inspirational messages about self-love, I opened the class with some questions I thought would segue to my planned project: “How do you feel about your body?” “Do you ever try to change the way your body looks?”