Levan is Out Live at Down Under
How Yoga Can Help You Get Ready to Go Back to School
August is a month where summer days are dwindling and the anticipation for fall builds. For some, that means a welcome return to routine. For others, it brings the stress and anxiety that comes with a new school year and everything it demands.
WBZ CBS Boston's Levan Reid invited Down Under to talk about exactly that: how yoga can ease back-to-school anxiety and help students of every age, from 3 to 93, move through the transition.
We spent the morning at our Wellesley studio with Levan discussing several different topics, each one a different angle on the same idea: yoga meets you wherever this season finds you.
We opened with beloved Down Under teacher Jojo Reger, who led Levan through a series of poses built around one simple truth: your body wants breath.
As Levan moved through each shape, Jojo showed him how yoga adds tools to your toolkit, poses and breath you can carry with you and reach for whenever the day pulls you off balance and you need to find your way back to happy and content. It was less a lesson in poses than a lesson in what those poses give you access to.
Next, our CEO Shilpa Reddy toured Levan through the studio and back through her own story, starting with her first formal class at 13, when her mother thought she could use help with the stress of middle school. Decades later, Shilpa is still showing up, just in a different role.
Her message to Levan was simple: motivation gets you through the door once, but community, the same teachers and the same faces, again and again, is what turns a single visit into a habit.
She pointed to research showing that habits don't stick because of willpower, they stick because the setting stays the same, so you stop having to decide and it just becomes what you do. It's the same thinking behind our unlimited membership: once you stop counting classes, you stop deciding whether to come, you just come.
And it's why our Newcomer Special is four weeks, not one class. One class shows you a pose. Four weeks shows you what it feels like to belong.
Dr. Eleanor Menzin, student, teacher, and physician, joined next to talk about practicing as a family. Her own path to the mat started with an injury that threw her off balance, literally, and led her to Down Under on a recommendation from another mother at her children's preschool. What kept her coming back was that the teachers were all about yoga, nothing else, and that the hour was hers alone, a rare thing in the pre-k years. Her kids found their own way onto the mat and yoga slowly became a family routine. Her daughter went on to become a teacher herself, and has said she can walk into a class grumpy and walk out relaxed, and that this is not a small thing.
As a physician, Eleanor pointed to real overlap between yoga and what she recommends for young people navigating anxiety and depression: breathing exercises, mindfulness, and learning to tolerate stress and uncertainty rather than avoid them.
David Magone brought the science, and a little bit of fun, to breathwork as a tool for coping with back-to-school stress, whether you're the one taking the exam or the one standing in front of the classroom.
He framed it as two tools working together: reconceptualizing your stress, and breathing through it.
A racing heart before a big day is your body delivering more oxygen to the brain, not a warning sign, but when stress gets too high, hands shaking, mind blank, the fix is simply to bring your heart rate back down. David demonstrated it live: one big breath in, then out through the teeth in a hiss, like a snake, or for something less noticeable in public, inhaling deeply and exhaling as slowly as possible through pursed lips. "I feel like we should do this before work," Levan said, trying it on camera and feeling the difference right away. By the end, he told David it was something he'd use forever.
We closed with our founder, Justine Wiltshire Cohen, joined by her son Henry. Twenty-five years ago, Justine opened Down Under in a church basement with nothing but a handful of students and an idea: that yoga belongs to everyone, at every stage of life. That idea has held. Today, a 3 year old and a 93 year old can still find their way onto the same mat, and that range is exactly the point, a reminder that yoga has a role to play in every chapter of life. She spoke with Levan about what it means to build a studio that is teacher-led and teacher-focused, including a sustainable living model with access to healthcare for our teachers. Henry, who has grown up around the practice, joined the conversation himself and put it simply: yoga is peaceful, and it helps him relax, a reminder that some of the best teaching happens by example.
The morning was full of laughter, connection, and honest conversation about how yoga changes lives. We're grateful to Levan and the CBS team for the chance to share some of the tools our community leans on every day, and we hope a few of them find their way into your back-to-school season too. We'd love to see you on the mat.