Poses We Do (To Varying Degrees)

I've been dreading this post a little bit, because it's the hardest part of camp to explain. So I made a deal-i-o with myself that I can do it, but not in crazy detail. If you know me, you know how much I can talk, and you know how much I love details! But I am going to give a more readable, breathable version of my self here this time. Here goes:

Butterfly

Boat (yes, the seated boat)

Roly Poly (rolling front to back hugging our knees - awesomely fun to do together!)

Candlestick (shoulder stand) - this obviously runs the gamut from lying down with legs sticking up in the air all the way to some pretty amazing full shoulder stands by the older kids. I help them a lot on this one.

Fish (starting with Fish Faces to make it more fun, because this one is challenging for small bodies!)

Cat/Cow - complete with lots of noise :)

Dog

3-Legged Dog - can also be hopping 3-Legged Dog

Baby Donkey Hops

Big Donkey Kicks

Dog Walk (walking around in Dog pose)

Handstands at the wall - endless variations!

Seed pose - we often need a rest after all the handstands :)

Dancer's Pose with one hand on the wall for balance (or not)

Star pose - this is what Half Moon pose is called in kids yoga - we do it leaning on the wall, mostly.

Snake - now I do this differently than a lot of people - we get down and slither around the room pretending to be snakes and hissing and making up things like snake names. There's a lot to be said for kids pretending to actually be animals and just going the whole 9 yards, as you well know :)

After Snake we grow our legs back and stand up for Tree pose

Airplane - kids yoga version of Warrior III

Bridge pose

Savasana with eye pillows

Now just a couple of details I think are so essential that if they're left out we may as well be playing T-ball:

Yoga breath (also called Flower Power breath in some kids classes) - gentle breathing through the nose. Our skulls make something like 28 movements/adjustments for every nostril breath, and zero for mouth breathing. Super important for the health of the skull and hence for the health of the whole being. But it should be gentle, natural breath - yogic breathing is not a good idea for kids at all. There are many reasons for this, and in many ways it's not all that great for adults, either, unless they find their natural breath first. So when you're doing yoga with little ones, just touch your nose every so often to remind them to breathe, and make sure they understand it's easy, gentle breathing in yoga.

Also that alignment, for kids, is irrelevant - the best thing is to model something (if they don't already know what shape to make with their body for a particular pose) and let them do it completely on their own. Physically putting them in positions is less than ideal because at the age I'm working with (and my own age, as well!) a huge part of the learning experience is actually seeing something and just giving it a shot. Whether they do it backwards, halfway, or totally 'wrong'  it's fine - it's great, even! They're figuring out so many relationships between body/gravity/up/down/forwards/backwards, etc...they'll get it all eventually if they keep playing around with it :)

No pressure :) I sort of started to talk about this with breathing and letting them figure things out on their own...please remember that 'yoga' really is an imaginary concept. There is no 'canon' of poses - there are no definitive yoga movements - almost nothing is known about what yoga was, originally, and it's changed so much over the years that none of us are doing 'real' poses. We're doing 'stuff' and we call it yoga because of the conditions we create in which to practice this 'stuff'. Right and wrong, etc don't apply very well in yoga. If you run out of things to do or feel at a loss, just start making things up, or have them invent some new poses :)

Love to all, and see you in the morning at camp!