In thick morning mist it is hard to see what a group of children is doing in a bare cement-block room in a simple building in a city slum. Winter fog in Delhi hangs like a veil, almost hiding the children, but there are a hundred of them there in halasana, the plough. For half an hour at the end of the teaching day at this foundation slum school these children are removed from the narrow and harrowing parameters of their daily life. With breath they find possibility and release.

A clear airy room in Queen’s Park in Northwest London is packed with girls lying in savasana. This group of pre-teens find a place where they can drop into the silence so often unattainable to them in this jangling hormonal period of their lives.

Nathan is the father of Eyar who is four and a half and lives with Cerebral Palsy: ‘Eyar started yoga with Jo when she was two and a half. Through yoga her breathing improved significantly which is the basis for good posture and improved speech. The practice of yoga has helped with the stability of her upper body, increased her muscle tone, helped her motor control, gave her balance and allowed her to develop good co-ordination…our pediatrician and physio therapists are amazed by her progress…she is doing things they never thought possible.’

These children across the world and across circumstance are linked by a practice that gives them a sense of the intangible quality of peace, a thing practically impossible to describe to so many child.

Both the group in Queen’s Park and Eyar are linked by one person, the Jo of Nathan’s testimony. This is Jo Manuel, a yoga teacher and mother. She has been practicing for twenty years, and teaching for nine, having worked closely with Sonia Sumar, the creator of the programme Yoga for the Special Child. Jo recognized the potential of using yoga as a way of drawing children into a genuine awareness of their bodies, and hence their lives.

The slum children of the opening section absorb yoga as enthusiastic sponges, for the escape that it offers them, but also because it is an accepted and integral aspect of their culture. Some would say it is a part of their birthright. But it has taken the energy of someone like Jo to bring this idea to enhance the lives of children in this country, and particularly the day-to-day lives of those with special needs.

Yvonne Dykes is a Year Four teacher at Salusbury Primary School, where Jo has been working with the children: ‘After the yoga the children were able to sit quietly and think about being calm and how it feels. A carefully administered course of yoga classes is really needed. I am convinced that some of our more difficult and behaviourally challenged children need yoga to aid concentration and to feel more positive about themselves.’

When Jo began to see how much could be done with children she envisaged trying to find ways of introducing yoga to as many children as possible. So the idea of The Special Yoga Centre came into being; a place that offered support and wellbeing to families with a daily timetable of classes that provided for both children and adults. The plan was to run the centre as a non-profit organisation with charges on a sliding scale, so enabling the community of teachers to give one-on-one tuition to special needs children with such conditions as autism, epilepsy, Down’s Syndrome, cerebral palsy and microcephaly, as well as other developmental and physical difficulties.

Howard Napper, a fellow yoga teacher of Jo’s and the founder of the Agoy yoga company, is a trustee of The Special Yoga Centre: ‘Jo wanted to integrate yoga into the school system but she also wanted to take it to children that might find the greatest benefits – children with special needs. Over the past few years I’ve watched her challenging journey, which at last is s