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Karma Yoga my way to the yoga center that is lush with foliage, fruit and birds. Children come to the studio from slums for weekly Kids Yoga classes and poke at the guppies that live in the fish ponds in the front yard after class. Teenagers from an organization that cares for young women rescued from human trafficking circles come for yoga therapy to reclaim ownership their bodies. These young people arrive at the studio for the first time bundled up in jackets and long trousers to protect themselves from the world, and after a few weeks can do backbends and shoulderstands, they are stretching out their arms and legs without feeling endangered, and they are confident and beautiful in sleeveless shirts and shorts. Two hundred and fifty kids come to yoga every week to reclaim their right to grow. One of the many tall trees in Phnom Penh slated to be cut down Growing Back Isabelle Skaburskis A BRANCH FELL ON SOMEONE’S CAR, SOMEONE WHO mattered, and the governor of Phnom Penh was outraged at the tree’s impertinence. To reassert his mastery over all things living, he ordered the tall trees in Cambodia’s capital to be cut down: 100- year-old Cannonball Trees were felled outside the temples; Boddhi Trees with trunks fat as elephants were taken apart until they were nothing but a stump wide enough for a family to sit on and eat their lunch in the burning sun. I train a group of young adults, aged 17-28, to teach these classes. To open space for others to grow, first they have to manage their own pain and fears; and as an optimistic young yoga teacher myself, I was sure yoga could help them build their capacity to open to their darknesses and let these pains out of their bodies and minds. As a team, we spent as much time talking about mental and spiritual healing as we did practicing physical postures and breathing, and one day a door opened for Rattana, 19, and she told me about being raped by her cousin when she was nine. She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around her legs and told me when she was 14 she was sick to death of seeing her family miserable with poverty, and she felt sorry for her mother who always tried to make it work and never made it work. She went to a brothel to borrow some money to help the family, and established terms of repayment, and every time she got close to paying off her debt they told her she owed more. Rattana’s voice went from soft to loud, and her eyes were tearing but she kept speaking, increasingly oblivious to the people around her—myself and two other girls she lives with at Transitions Global—and I was beginning to understand why it was so hard for her to speak gently to others or touch the kids with kindness when giving adjustments. She talked with increasing rapidity as if to get it all out; she talked of gang rape, when two young men hired her for the night and then took her to a cemetery where eight of their friends were waiting. I understood where the cigarette To reassert his mastery over all things living, he ordered the tall trees in Cambodia’s capital to be cut down The National Museum, an elegant historic building across the street from my house, dug in its heels and refused to chop the trees to the base. The foliage protected the wine coloured walls of the museum and offset the golden spires of the Royal Palace nearby. But the Governor is not one to accept resistance and one by one they cut off the branches, leaving naked trunks and a shrunken museum. Every day I make my way to a group of young adults I train to be community leaders, yoga teachers and entrepreneurs. And each day, I pass by men with power saws and bandanas over their faces on burns on her thighs came from. She said the police raided the brothel when she was 16 and they threw her in jail with criminals and they beat her for being a broken girl and then she was picked out by an NGO and sent to live with other girls who reminded her of herself: miserable, angry and used up. She leaned her head on her arms; the other girls in the room with comparable stories had blank faces, one clutched at her temples and said she had a headache. Then Rattana looked up and said she had a new life now, it was like one book was closed and a new one was open and everything was changed. She had a new family at Transitions, she 15