New York Times Article on Awake Youth Project

A couple of the Awake Youth Project students are featured here in a New York Times article entitled, “Zen for High Schoolers: ‘Notice the anxiety. Notice the Fear’.”  A quote from La-Keeyatta Steward, Brooklyn College Community Partnership intern and co-founder of the Awake Youth Project teen meditation group at Brooklyn Zen Center, follows:

“You notice yourself and find out what kind of a person you really are,” Ms. Steward said. “I’ve always been happy, but now I think I’m positive.”

Ms. Steward, who lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, one of six children raised by a mother who works with the mentally impaired, said that meditation helped her deal with tensions at school and with her mother at home.

“It’s hard, because she has to go work with them and then comes back to us,” Ms. Steward said. “Maybe a year ago, I’d have talked back and had a bad attitude, but now I let it go through me and accept it.” (She wrote a short essayfor a Web page about the Zen Center’s Sit-a-thon, a daylong meditation session planned for Saturday to raise money for the Awake Youth Project.)

For the whole article, go here.