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Raising Little Yogis: 4 Reasons Yoga Benefits Kids

Maybe you can’t survive without your Thursday evening yoga class. It calms you down, it gets your heart rate going, it stretches out tight muscles, and it makes you feel like you just gained about 3 inches in height and in self-esteem. So if yoga does this for you, think about what it might do for your child who has to deal with his or her own set of stresses?

In typical yoga for kids classes, the same postures that you breathe and sweat through, are taught to your little ones, but in a more creative, playful and fun manner. Here are three reasons why having your child learn how to down-dog is so important to their health and yours.

Enhanced flexibility: Keeping kids flexible is so important, especially since their day-to-day lives seem to become more  stressful and sedentary as they clock hours at school and in front of the computer. Stiff muscles can lead to injuries later on, particularly in the lower back since hips and hamstrings tug on the lower back to compensate for their immobility. Kids tend to be a lot more limber and daring than most of adults. So balancing on one foot and being able to twist their bodies into some pretzel-like positions comes much easier to them than to us. But we used to be that limber!

Years of walking, sitting on chairs, engaging in Western exercise like running and cycling or years of not exercising at all, has stiffened us up. Take a quick jaunt back down on memory lane and remember how you could swing from limb to limb on a tree, legs and arms outstretched. Or remember how you could sit in a cross-legged position for hours as you colored for hour in your coloring book? For adults, even though that kind of flexibility may no longer seem like it’s available to you, it is. But just as it took your hips and hamstrings decades to get to the stiff-place they are in now, it will similarly take you some time to soften those taut muscles and joints and get them moving again like when you were a kid.

Greater focus and attention: I’ve often wondered what would happen if we took a group of rambunctious kids and had them go through a 20-minute yoga class filled with closed-eye breathing and gentle postures. Could continuous and thorough yoga classes be a replacement or a therapeutic compliment to  many of the pharmaceuticals being dispensed to children all in an effort to quiet them down? I don’t know but a test experiment might me worth trying. It can’t hurt.

Fosters self-esteem and body awareness in a non-competitive way: By drawing awareness on how their young bodies feel and the power and strength in their muscles, kids yoga improves self-esteem and helps children connect how what they do to their body affects how they feel. This same kind of awareness can spill over from the yoga mat into the kitchen:   Kids can learn to make better food choices by realizing how what they put into their mouths affects how they feel. Withchildhood obesity and diabetes rates at record levels, having children become aware of what they are eating, why they are eating and how much they are eating is indispensable knowledge that can keep them feeling and staying healthy for years to come.

Creates a connection to Mother Nature: Today, so many children are so removed from nature and its surroundings. Whether they live in an urban area or whether their activity schedule leaves them little time to play outdoors, many of the children today don’t feel a connection to nature. When yoga postures were devised thousands of years ago, the Indian sages developed postures by mimicking the animals and plants that they lived in tandem with. Postures like tree pose, lion’s pose, cobra pose and turtle pose all get their names and appearance from the creatures in nature. This provides a powerful connection to nature for children who don’t enjoy such access to the natural world.

If you’re curious about yoga for kids classes, inquire with your local yoga centers and look for a teacher who either has a certification from a yoga for kids training program like YogaKids. There are also tons of DVDs for kids yoga. To make it more fun, do the DVD with them or invite some of your childrens’ friends over for a yoga party.

Have fun!

JUST BREATH

Breathing is important for two reasons. It is the only means to supply our bodies and its various organs with the supply of oxygen which is vital for our survival. The second function of breathing is that it is one means to get rid of waste products and toxins from the body.

Oxygen is the most vital nutrient for our bodies. It is essential for the integrity of the brain, nerves, glands and internal organs. We can do without food for weeks and without water for days, but without oxygen, we will die within a few minutes. If the brain does not gets proper supply of this essential nutrient, it will result in the degradation of all vital organs in the body.

The brain requires more oxygen than any other organ. If it doesn't get enough, the result is mental sluggishness, negative thoughts and depression and, eventually, vision and hearing decline. Old people and those whose arteries are clogged often become senile and vague because oxygen to the brain is reduced. They get irritated very quickly.

Poor oxygen supply affects all parts of the body. The oxygen supply is reduced to all parts of the body as we get older due to poor lifestyle. Many people need reading glasses and suffer hearing decline in old age.

When an acute circulation blockage deprives the heart of oxygen, a heart attack is the result. If this occurs to the brain, the result is a stroke.

For a long time, lack of oxygen has been considered a major cause of cancer. Even as far back as 1947, work done in Germany showed that when oxygen was withdrawn, normal body cells could turn into cancer cells.

Similar research has been done with heart disease. It showed that lack of oxygen is a major cause of heart disease, stroke and cancer. The work done at Baylor University in the USA has shown that you can reverse arterial disease in monkeys by infusing oxygen into the diseased arteries.

Thus, oxygen is very critical to our well-being, and any effort to increase the supply of oxygen to our body and especially to the brain will pay rich dividends. Yogis realized the vital importance of an adequate oxygen supply thousands of years ago. They developed and perfected various breathing techniques. These breathing exercises are particularly important for people who have sedentary jobs and spend most of the day in offices. Their brains are oxygen starved and their bodies are just ‘getting by’. They feel tired, nervous and irritable and are not very productive. On top of that, they sleep badly at night, so they get a bad start to the next day continuing the cycle. This situation also lowers their immune system, making them susceptible to catching colds, flu and other ‘bugs’. http://www.holisticonline.com/Yoga/hol_yoga_breathing_Importance.htm

I TOOK THE VOW

I recently attended the Become the Change Community Outreach Program in NYC. Where Dr. Deepak Chopra invited us to "Become the change that you want to see in the world..." Mahatma Gandhi 

So... I took the vow. It's time to step up to the plate with more than just words.