The face-to-face TeenYoga course did not begin as a grand plan or a business model. It began with a knock on the door from local schools. Teachers asking, almost shyly at first, “Could yoga help our students? They are anxious, they are tired, they are struggling to be in their bodies.”
So we tried. Small halls, borrowed classrooms, curious teenagers with hoodies pulled low and arms folded across chests. We listened more than we taught. We learned that what worked for adults did not work for them. We learned that young people needed something different — something alive, honest, playful, and real.
Word travelled. Jo Manuel at Special Yoga saw what was happening and invited me to bring this work into her world. Later Elizabeth at Yoga Campus did the same. The course began to find its shape — not through marketing, but through need. Through professionals saying, “We need help to meet these young people better.”
Long before COVID pushed everything online, this face-to-face training had already become the flagship. The beginning. The hearth around which experts gathered — psychologists, teachers, therapists, neuroscientists, youth workers, yoga practitioners — all bringing their knowledge together with one intention: to support young people to thrive. Not to fix them. Not to make them calm and compliant. But to help them feel safe enough to become themselves.
Over the years the room has filled with an extraordinary mix of people. PE teachers longing to bring something kinder into competitive spaces. Youth workers wanting more tools than talk alone. Physiotherapists sensing that muscles hold stories. School nurses recognising that a bottom-up approach explains what top-down strategies never could. Parents searching for a bridge back to their children. This course has been a springboard. For better parenting. For braver classrooms. For services that remember the body is not separate from the mind. And we have learned — sometimes the hard way — that just yoga doesn’t work with teenagers. But TeenYoga does.
Because it has been co-created with them for over twenty years. Tested in real schools, real youth clubs, real CAMHS rooms, real messy lives. Fed back to young people in a format that is fun, respectful, and genuinely helpful.
The face-to-face course is more than training. It is a meeting place. A place to bring our concerns about this generation — the anxiety, the screens, the pressure, the loneliness — and to find practical, grounded solutions together. We arrive as professionals carrying our separate disciplines, and we leave as a community speaking a shared language of breath, nervous systems, boundaries, play, and compassion. From two decades in this field I know one thing for certain: young people do not need more techniques. They need adults who understand them — adults who can meet them with steadiness, humour and embodied presence. That is what this course grows.
So join us in London in April.
Come and be part of the story that began in a small classroom and has become a movement of people who believe that when we support the adults around young people, we change everything.
Charlotta – Teen Yoga