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This is a guest post by Sara Naderi. Sara is a busy mom of two, wife, licensed General Dentist and yogi who currently teaches yoga at Peace Through Yoga, in Zionsville. Whether she is interacting with anxious patients, students, or children, Sara relies on her yogic techniques to stay centered.
Why is yoga beneficial for children and their families? Let me count the ways!
- Yoga showers you with more benefits than just physical fitness. We gain strength, flexibility, mindfulness, reduction of stress, improved focus, less depression, more self-control, increased confidence, and fewer ADHD symptoms. It helps us develop more kindness toward ourselves, and others, all while being fun for the whole family!
- Yoga is accessible to all children, within any range of physical ability. The beauty of yoga is that it is a personal journey and a non-competitive one. In yoga, we try to improve for ourselves, not others. With school sports, there is often a competitive aspect that excludes those without natural athletic talent, or those who may not have been practicing the sport from a very young age. Yoga allows the opportunity for all children to feel successful, and with that comes increased self-confidence.
- Yoga makes you aware of yourself, and quiets the mindless chatter in the brain. Often we live in the past or in the future, upset or frustrated about something that occurred earlier, or anxious and nervous about something that may happen later. We have trouble being aware of what is happening at the present moment. Yoga teaches focused breathing, and the breath is what ties our mind to the body. Focused breathing techniques and awareness of body postures connect you to the very present moment. The popular term is “mindfulness”. Whether you call it mindfulness, concentration, or just being present in your action, we can’t deny the importance of this quality for children or for adults.
- Yoga helps us take a break from our fast-paced world, dominated by technology and electronic devices. With frequent screentime exposure, our brains begin to crave those quick visual changes and constant stimulation. The negative effect is that children get bored faster, have trouble concentrating on their schoolwork, and crave the technology over imaginative play and time spent in nature. Yoga can help counteract those negative effects.
- With yoga you practice concentration, relaxation, awareness of body, and breath. When was the last time you thought about your inhales and exhales? They’re automatic so we don’t need to. But what if I told you by elongating your breath and slowing it down, you could turn on your parasympathetic nervous system to help reduce the stress response? Right there is an amazing tool for any school-aged child to learn, especially when those teenage years begin, and hormones begin to cause havoc on their system. Rather than seek unhealthy options, children can use the tools they learned in yoga to calm themselves down.
The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis has a wonderful PlayFit event throughout the year. For part of last March's "Spring Into Health" event, I taught two twenty-minute yoga sessions to museum visitors. At the end of one session, a sweet blue eyed, blonde-haired nine-year old girl came bouncing up to me to say “great job,” with a thumbs-up, high five, and joyous smile. This was her first time doing yoga, and she got down on the floor to show me her favorite pose. It was “child’s pose,” which I referred to as “seed.” She told me that she often gets frustrated in school, and thinks that “seed” could help her calm down. I suggested she use the breathing technique to calm down in school, and when she gets home she can get into the safety of the seed pose.
Her experience was evidence of success—evidence that yoga can be beneficial, one breath at a time.
