Kidding Around Yoga

A meditation movement for children is emerging in schools, clubs, churches, Yoga studios and community centers. Various reports are appearing in newspapers, magazines, books and other media touting the benefits of child meditation.

Sarah Wood facilitates child meditation and in her book Sensational Meditation for Children, explores the many advantages of teaching children to
meditate. Sensational Meditation for Children contains various meditations that parents can use to guide their children through the process at home.

Teachers who build meditation into lesson plans report their classroom environments being more peaceful and attribute this to their students’ ability to express compassion to each other, according to Wood.

Therapists have told Wood that meditation reduces test anxiety, builds positive peer relationships and enhances anger management skills. Scientists have found that meditation decreases blood pressure and helps other physical functions.

Parents say meditation raises their children’s self-esteem, helps them relax in the doctor’s office, wind down at bedtime and stay healthier, notes Wood. Children say meditation helps them “prepare for tests and sports events, as well as improves their relationships with their friends, parents, brothers and sisters.” Other children tell Wood they enjoy meditating because it makes them “feel good when they are sad” and because it’s fun.

Guiding your child in the process of meditation is not only good for the child, but offers parents rewards as well. Seeing their children at peace within themselves can be empowering to an adult. Knowing that they’ve contributed to their child’s spiritual growth is immensely gratifying.

“The transformation we as adults experience when we become partners in learning with our children” is exhilarating, says Wood, who also observes “learning a meditation practice is a journey in growth, whether it is spiritual, emotional or mental.”

Meditating with your older children can bridge the emotional distance that can develop between a parent and child. For younger children, the process might be able to ward off the onset of child rebellion and build strong connections between families.

Children can start meditating by the age of five, states Wood. She reminds us that “meditation is an adventure just the blink of an eye away” and is for any child who “dares to journey into his incredible imagination.” Meditation should be fun for a child and is a time to “laugh and giggle, sing or shout for joy.” Because of the ease with which a child is able to meditate, it can be done in almost any setting— classroom, swing set or “in a tent made of couch cushions and blankets.”

Research shows teaching meditation to children can only benefit them. Meditation is non-denominational and though it can be considered a spiritual practice, follows no religious guidelines. Meditation is a win-win experience for children and their parents and has positive consequences that will last a lifetime.

By Pamela Heyer Santore, Certified Child Meditation Facilitator pesantore@hotmail.com

Kidding Around Yoga

Kidding Around Yoga is stress reduction. For children play is their language, it’s how they learn. KAY teaches Yoga as play. You can teach kids how to use Yoga/play in difficult situations.

General Suggestions:

• Encourage physical activities.
• Take a stretch break, a Yoga study break.
• Teach children that mistakes are ok in poses (and life).
• Everyone makes them, including you.
• Teach coping with difficulties: Stop, breathe, stretch.
• Tell stories about dealing with stress.
• Make up a story with asanas about coping.
• Give back rubs and hugs.

Teach Relaxation Skills:

• Have some routines in the class, particularly around relaxation. The more ADD or ADHD, the greater the benefit of the routine.
• Different helpful interventions: count backwards; tense and release your muscles; secret garden; play with play dough; dance; chant, “Shake it up baby” shake out tension.

Breathing Practices:

• Breathe out fully 3 times.
• Breathe out bad feelings, breathe in good feelings (breath out sadness, in cheerfulness with imagery)
• Breathe out pain, breathe in health (with imagery)
• Before a tough decision, breathe until you feel good again, then make a decision
• Use bubbles to teach children that slow, even breathing can relieve anger and stress. Children learn quickly that if they blow too hard or too softly, they will not produce bubbles. But steady breaths will produce a nice stream
• After the youngsters have mastered bubble blowing, ask them to practice once or twice a day, first with bubbles and then without. Instructs them to blow imaginary bubbles when they are angry or upset.
• If you’re stressed while with children, you can say, “Help me blow bubbles”. Role model good stress release.

Meditation:

• Find the quiet place inside
• Imagine a favorite place to be and visit that place in your mind (can be the secret garden)
• Repeat “Peace begins with me”
• Raja Yoga Teachings for Children’s Stress Release

1) Cognitive restructuring can teach us to change the root cause of stress: the mental interpretation that a circumstance is somehow dangerous to our well being.

• We are a spiritual being “riding around” in a body-mind, like a car. This is the basis of Raja Yoga/ Integral Yoga.
• It can be taught through deep relaxation, meditation, and stories.
• Yoga can teach children to take back their power over their own happiness.
• You can choose happiness inside no matter what’s outside (tell stories— age appropriate)

2) Spiritual teachings from Raja Yoga that reduce stress:

• A perfect act is one that does good for someone, and harm to no one.
• It’s all for good. It’s all a movie.
• The golden rule (10 commandments, yama-niyama, basic ethics).
• What’s the problem right now? Where’s the joy/peace now?
• The “4 locks and keys”—good for dealing with interpersonal troubles.
• Friendliness to the happy
• Compassion toward the unhappy
• Delight in the virtuous

3) Disregard (indifference) to the wicked (mean, hurtful).
Use spiritual stories from the world traditions. Look for children’s versions, like Enlightening Tales.
– Two stories from Vedic culture (the ancient origins of Yoga, Hinduism and Buddhism):
– The Ramayana is a great adventure story, and teaches morality for all ages.
– The Mahabharata, (includes The Bhagavad Gita) teaches spiritual truth amidst war.
– Fairy tales often have a moral that you can discuss with children.

4) To children, when something bad happens, its a disaster and will last forever.

• Teach kids everything passes. It’s ok and it can be like a movie—an adventure. What’s Now?? What’s next?
• Expect the opposite of the current situation to come around in time.

5) Create as much order as possible in your Yoga class. Routines help children feel secure and comfortable.

• Have some basic routines of poses, stories, relaxation, and meditation.
• Keep the structure of class similar, even if content varies (e.g., there’s always an Asana section, even if postures vary).
• Keep the relaxation the same as much as possible

Swami Vidyananda, Copyright 2011

STRESS RELIEF

Yoga reduces the physical effects of stress on the body. By encouraging relaxation, Yoga helps to lower the levels of the stress hormone cortisol. Related benefits include lowering blood pressure and heart rate, improving digestion and boosting the immune system as well as easing symptoms of conditions such as anxiety, depression, fatigue, asthma and insomnia.

PAIN RELIEF

Yoga can ease pain. Studies have demonstrated that practicing Yoga asanas (postures), meditation or a combination of the two, reduced pain for people with conditions such as cancer, multiple sclerosis, auto-immune diseases and hypertension as well as arthritis, back and neck pain, and other chronic conditions. Some practitioners report that even emotional pain can be eased through the practice of Yoga.

BETTER BREATHING

Yoga teaches people to take slower, deeper breaths. This helps to improve lung function, trigger the body’s relaxation response and increase the amount of oxygen available to the body.

FLEXIBILITY

Yoga helps to improve flexibility and mobility, increasing range of movement and reducing aches and pains. Many people can’t touch their toes during their first Yoga class. Gradually they begin to use the correct muscles. Over time, the ligaments, tendons and muscles lengthen, increasing elasticity, making more poses possible. Yoga also helps to improve body alignment resulting in better posture and helping to relieve back, neck, joint and muscle problems.

INCREASED STRENGTH

Yoga asanas (postures) use every muscle in the body, helping to increase strength literally from head to toe. And, while these postures strengthen the body, they also provide an additional benefit of helping to relieve muscular tension.

WEIGHT MANAGEMENT

Yoga (even less vigorous styles) can aid weight control efforts by reducing the cortisol levels as well as by burning excess calories and reducing stress. Yoga also encourages healthy eating habits and provides a heightened sense of well being and self esteem.

IMPROVED CIRCULATION

Yoga helps to improve circulation and, as a result of various poses, more efficiently moves oxygenated blood to the body’s cells

CARDIOVASCULAR CONDITIONING

Even gentle Yoga practice can provide cardio- vascular benefits by lowering resting heart rate, increasing endurance and improving oxygen uptake during exercise.

FOCUS ON THE PRESENT

Yoga helps us to focus on the present, to become more aware and to help create mind body health. It opens the way to improved concentration, coordination, reaction time and memory.

INNER PEACE

The meditative aspects of Yoga help many to reach a deeper, more spiritual and more satisfying place in their lives. Many who begin to practice for other reasons have reported this to be a key reason that Yoga has become an essential part of their daily lives.

Stress

The feeling of stress is a combination of our perception of events or situations and our body’s physiological reaction. Work issues, difficulties, challenges, obstacles, deadlines, papers, tests, athletic events, performances, family problems, and tragic events are only a few of the situations that can instigate stress. Even joyous events like holidays, weddings and new additions to a family can also exacerbate stress. Natural disasters, world conflicts, tragedies, and stories of suffering and heartbreak, even those occurring on the other side of the world, can have wide- ranging impacts, affecting people’s mental health.

One of the ways in which we respond to stress is through our fight-or-flight response. This is a combination of the activation of our sympathetic nervous system and specific hormonal path- ways which result in the release of cortisol from the adrenal glands. Cortisol is one of our primary stress hormones, and is often used to measure the stress response. Stress in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Immediate, or acute stress, can often be as motivating, as it can be activating. We hear stories of people being able to accomplish physical feats in emergency circumstances because cortisol increases blood pressure, heart rate, and blood sugar, as well as increasing mental focus. Because the stress response increases mental focus, it can often help us meet a deadline or finish a project. But too much stress, or constant stress with no respite for the body and mind, can interfere with numerous physical and mental abilities.

On a long-term basis, chronic stress can be damaging. Stress hormones including cortisol decrease the responsiveness of our immune system. They also increase blood sugar levels as well as blood pressure and heart rate, helpful in a crisis, but not for long-term health and wellbeing. This is where how we respond to stress can have a significant impact.

Yoga and Stress

The practice of Yoga is well demonstrated to reduce the physical effects of

stress on the body, and has even been found to lower cortisol levels. This effect is noticeable, and it is one of the primary reasons why people often take up Yoga. People find that they feel more relaxed after practicing Yoga. The asana, or physical postures of Yoga, are helpful for reducing muscular tension, which reduces stress. We have a tendency to store stress not only in our nervous system, but distributed throughout the musculature and other tissues of the body; our digestive system, for example, responds very quickly to stress. Yoga can be a valuable and effective tool for releasing this stored stress. This can be true even for post-traumatic stress and recovering from the after-effects of traumatic events.

Yoga includes not only the asana or physical postures, but most Yoga classes end with savasana, or a pose of relaxation. Some classes include a guided relaxation where the teacher leads students through a progressive relaxation of the body, which further reduces the experience of stress. Yoga also includes meditation and breathing practices (pranayama) as well as a set of ethical precepts and observances (yamas and niyamas). Meditation, the ethical precepts and observances, focused relaxation techniques, and working with the breath all have beneficial stress- reducing qualities, through improving our relationships with the various aspects of our inner nature as well as affecting our psychology and physical body.

Yoga, the Breath and Stress

Working with the breath can be a particularly effective method for treating a negative response to stress. When we are experiencing stress, our breathing tends to become shallow and rapid. Shallow and rapid breath further stimulates the body’s stress response, and we can become caught up in an ineffective breathing pattern that only causes more stress. Many Yoga techniques emphasize slowing and deepening the breath, which activates the body’s parasympathetic system, or relaxation response. Just by changing our pattern of breathing, we can significantly affect our body’s experience of and response to stress.

This may be one of the most profound lessons from Yoga practice.

Selected Research Investigating Yoga and Stress

Studies of Yoga have demonstrated that Yoga practice has the ability to reduce stress. As mentioned earlier, Yoga can reduce cortisol levels, a finding which was documented in the October 2004 issue of the journal, Annals of Behavioral Science. In the June 2004 issue of the Journal of Clinical Psychology, researchers found that caregivers for people with dementia (a very challenging condition) improved physical and emotional functioning after practicing Yoga. February and August 2005 studies published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine analyzed the breathing techniques of a specific Yoga practice, Sudardhan Yoga Kriya, which the authors maintain reduce stress, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Another Yoga-based program that has been widely studied in the use of stress reduction is the mindfulness- based stress reduction program (MBSR), which is taught, studied and popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. The mindfulness-based stress reduction program includes guided instruction in mindfulness meditation practices, Yoga and gentle stretching, inquiry exercises to enhance awareness, individual instruction, group dialogue and home assignments.

The effectiveness of the MBSR has been studied in a variety of different scientific studies both at the University of Massachusetts as well as other medical centers around the world. Results that they have reported on their website which are still in the process of being written about include improved ability to react effectively under high degrees of stress. Published studies have found that program participants experience lower levels of stress. Kabat-Zinn and colleagues also found that people who practiced a meditation technique while receiving treatments for the skin disorder psoriasis (which is sensitive to stress) had skin that healed faster than people who did not listen to the meditation tapes during treatment.

©Yoga Alliance 2006