Every Friday I’ll post ideas and inspiration for practicing yoga with kids and every Tuesday I’ll share a micropractice that helps busy moms (and dads and kids, and really anyone) to incorporate brief yoga practices into their day. Here’s the post to kick off this biweekly series that will last until the end of the year!
Bringing Yoga to Life
Maybe you’ve already heard it before: yoga is more than just poses. It’s breath, meditation, peace, balance. But did you know that yoga practice can also be an invitation to engage with your imagination?
Think along the lines of creative visualization, but we don’t only have to use the sense of sight here. In yoga, we sense into our environments (internal and external) with our sense of hearing, feeling, smell, and touch. What sounds do you hear around you? Can you also hear your own breath? What about the sound of thoughts in your mind? Can you feel the areas of your body that are supported by the Earth or your yoga mat? How does the temperature of the air feel on your skin? How do you feel on the inside (hot/cold)? There are so many lines of inquiry to notice what’s going on in and around us. It brings us into the present moment and opens the door to imaginative practice. And guess what? Imaginative yoga is irresistible for many kids!
Bhavana: a yogic way of setting the mood
Approaching yoga with imagination and creativity also helps kids (actually, yogis of all ages!) to get into a more intentional frame of mind for practice. We can wonder with our little yogis: how do we want to feel after yoga? Inspired? Energized? Calm? Happy? This is a great way to bring focus to the purpose of their practice and it sparks inspiration for how we move and breathe; if we want to feel calm, then maybe we move slowly and quietly. Or on the contrary, if we’re super hyper, maybe we find calm by burning off our extra energy with lots of big or fast movements. If we want to feel happy, we can imagine we’re in a place that makes us feel happy, or we can muse about where we feel happiness in our bodies. You get the idea; let it be an exploration and experimentation.
Once you reflect a little bit on how you want to feel after yoga and how you can bring focus to that bhavana, let’s bring this attitude/intention/imagining into a cozy, fun way to practice yoga: with stuffed animal friends! A prop like this adds another element of fun, provides physical feedback to help us keep posture steady or breath moving, and can even inspire empathy as kids use their imagination to enjoy practicing with their stuffed animals as ‘friends.’
Practicing with Stuffed Animals
This could work with all kinds of stuffies, but you might have to play around with ones that are the right size and shape to make it work just right. Beanie babies work well because they rest well on many surfaces, but your little ones will most likely want to practice with whatever favorite fuzzy friends they have.
Here are just a few ideas to get you started, but I’ll bet with your creativity and your kids’ imaginations, you’ll come up with more!
Lie on your back and extend legs up toward the sky. Place a stuffed animal on each foot and balance them there as you relax your breath. This is great for your core. If you want a more restorative version, stretch the legs up the wall and let the wall hold up your legs. (See photo above)
Stand tall in Tadasana, Virabhadrasana 2, or Goddess pose with a stuffed animal balanced on your head. Alternatively you can walk around slowly with the stuffed animal on your head.
Lie on your back and place a stuffed animal on your belly. As you breathe in deeply, notice if the stuffed animal rises with the expansion of your belly. As you exhale, feel the stuffed animal slowly descend with your belly. This can be great inspiration to keep the breath full and deep.
Yoga is mostly an internal practice; the poses are just catalysts for bringing our attention inward. But it can be so helpful and entertaining to work with fun props like stuffed animals to spark our imaginations and get external feedback from a cuddly object. After some poses, maybe your little yogis will get inspired to meditate with their stuffed animals, who are true masters at stillness, haha!