$150-a-day Sydney day-care-centre offers yoga

Curriculum at newly launched “ToBeMe Early Learning Centre” in the Sydney (Australia) suburb of Burwood, with the daily rate of $150 for each child of 0-6 years of age, includes yoga.

Claimed to a “world-class childcare facility” with curriculum “tailored around every single child”, it offers an onsite “children's restaurant” and services of professionals like speech therapists, paediatric occupational therapists, specialists in children's fitness and nutrition, etc.

It states that “every child has a plan” and believes that “family is a child's first teacher”. It provides “healthy meals” to children and cooking is also part of the curriculum. Its mission includes “Allowing children to become their best self” and it plans to open second such Centre in another Sydney suburb of Five Dock in April. Rob Yeldon is the Chief Executive Officer of the Centre, where enrolment fee is normally $800.

Meanwhile, distinguished Hindu statesman Rajan Zed, in a statement in Nevada today, welcomed the move to offer yoga in day-care-center, calling it “a step in the positive direction”. Zed urged all preschools in Australia to offer yoga to their children.

Yoga, referred as “a living fossil”, was a mental and physical discipline, for everybody to share and benefit from, whose traces went back to around 2,000 BCE to Indus Valley civilization, Zed, who is President of Universal Society of Hinduism, noted.

Rajan Zed further said that yoga, although introduced and nourished by Hinduism, was a world heritage and liberation powerhouse to be utilized by all. According to Patanjali who codified it in Yoga Sutra, yoga was a methodical effort to attain perfection, through the control of the different elements of human nature, physical and psychical.

According to US National Institutes of Health, yoga may help one to feel more relaxed, be more flexible, improve posture, breathe deeply, and get rid of stress. According to a “2016 Yoga in America Study”, about 37 million Americans (which included many celebrities) now practice yoga; and yoga is strongly correlated with having a positive self image. Yoga was the repository of something basic in the human soul and psyche, Zed added.