Well it’s official – CNN SAYS SO – Yoga helps children with their energy and emotion (duh).
Charlie and the Chakra Factory! The Wizard of OM! - LOVE IT!!!
Well ya know, its really not “official” news until CNN says so, and fortunate for us yoga-heads they seem to be coming around! Today an article entitled “Yoga helps even little ones channel energy, emotion” made front page news on the Health section of CNN.com.
My favorite line from a caring mother: “It almost seems like we put him on a yoga mat instead of putting him on medication.” –> OMG ME TOO!
I’ve copy and pasted a bunch of the article below – for the full story click HERE
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Once an oddity reserved for only the crunchiest communities, downward dog for the grade-school set is now being taught in studios from Minnetonka, Minnesota, to Moscow, Russia. And educators, including Chicago’s Namaste School, which serves mostly poor kids who speak a language other than English, are turning to yoga to connect with a generation that many say has been dismissed as deficit this or hyperactive that.
Dylan goes to an Atlanta school known for its highly serious curriculum that offers German to first graders and lessons in “circle games” and “beeswax modeling.” His mother, Hanlie Laakmann, wanted her son to get involved in something and thought his sensitive nature might take to yoga. She’s been especially glad about the move lately since she and her husband told Dylan that they are divorcing.
“Like, it’s hard, with the divorce,” he says, sitting on a yoga mat, replying to a stranger asking him to open up in front of a television camera. He tunes it all out for a moment, crosses his legs and closes his eyes. He begins to breathe deeply and then slowly lifts himself into a headstand. When he comes down, he’s ready to answer more questions.
Dylan’s stoicism is broken for a moment by a dozen miniature yogis who’ve been unleashed in the studio. Kids like Gigi, some as young as 3, can take seven-week long sessions with names such as Charlie and the Chakra Factory and the Wizard of Om.
Watching a class is like watching puppies. It’s adorable. They bark in Downward Dog and hiss on their bellies in Snake pose. They imagine aloud what color their gum would be while repeatedly breathing deeply for “Bubble Gum Breath.” They act out “Go To Your Room” by bending over, grabbing their ankles and stomping backward, squatting down and mimicking slamming a door.
Except for a few tears and a brief tug-of-war over a mat, it all seems nothing more than cute until this stunning moment: Many of these first and second-graders remain completely still and quiet, in a meditative pose, for nearly five minutes.
“It’s just incredible,” Al-Yasha Williams said, shaking her head in disbelief when her 6-year-old daughter Sole Williams-Brewer walks out of class much more dialed back than when she bounded in. “My daughter has a lot of energy and this has channeled it.”
“Parents heard about it and wanted to know what I was doing. I just invited them over, shoved the furniture aside and showed them some poses they could do with their kids.”
Though radical at that time, teaching yoga to kids still isn’t entirely free of controversy. A Baptist minister complained a few years ago that a public school in Aspen was teaching a form of Hinduism.
In Columbia, Missouri, mom Sarah Wells Kohl heard about yoga for kids and enrolled her 9-year-old, Dakota. She had been struggling for months, trying every alternative arts program she could find, to address her son’s exceptionally high energy. ”He couldn’t settle himself, he was just very high-strung and bored with everything,” she said. “But, wow, yoga opened something in him. Pranayama breathing (slow, steady deep yogic breaths) put him in his space. When things get too tight, rough and crazy, do his own little Eagle pose.
“I once found him in his bedroom chanting,” she said. “It almost seems like we put him on a yoga mat instead of putting him on medication.”
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