Category Archives: Children

Yoga, art classes help girls on probation in Dakota County

From Twin Cities.com

With olive oil facials and downward-facing-dog poses, girls on probation in Dakota County are learning new ways to cope with impulsive behavior, anger and trauma.

During two-hour yoga and art classes, the Twin Cities-based Purusha Project teaches at-risk girls how to make better choices, manage their anger, become accountable and find healthy emotional outlets, said Jennifer Mohr, 29, the group’s executive director.

“It’s a different type of therapy,” Mohr said.

The gender-specific classes are tailored for girls ranging from 13 to 18 years old. In the two years since the 16-week course began in Dakota County, 29 girls have graduated.

Next week, Dakota County Juvenile Services will begin its second year contracting with the Purusha Project, said Jim Scovil, the department’s director. Probation and court can order the classes as an alternative to anger management and community service.

“There are limited resources available to high-risk girls involved in the criminal justice system,” said Traci Pence, the county’s gender-specific senior probation officer, in a statement about the program. “This new curriculum has had an overwhelming response from the girls, their families and the staff within Dakota County.”

The Purusha Project tailored its classes after The Art of Yoga Project, a program that piloted its curriculum in 2002 and introduced it to the California juvenile justice system. More than a dozen groups

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across the country, like the Purusha Project, have adopted the classes since.

But counties are finding it more difficult to finance the classes because of budget restraints, Mohr said. Scott County used to offer the classes for girls in juvenile detention, but after more than a year, the county eliminated the courses from its budget in March.

“We’re finding that the budget cuts at the county are causing us to lose our place,” Mohr said. “We have got ourselves established. We’re hoping to find a way to be sustainable.”

The Hennepin County Home School, a state-licensed residential treatment center, also orders the classes for its juvenile offenders through a yearlong program, Mohr said.

The Purusha Project allowed Dakota County to pilot the classes in 2009 for free. Scovil said the county wanted to be sure the classes had positive outcomes before buying them. This year, the county replaced its traditional therapy for girls with the yoga courses.

The poses and art projects give “the girls something else to be doing while they’re talking, as well as teaching them how to calm themselves through yoga,” Scovil said.

Dakota County did not reveal the identities of the girls involved in the program because of Minnesota Data Practices laws that protect their privacy, Scovil said.

The Dakota County classes meet weekly and cost $150 per session for up to 15 girls, Mohr said. The price includes art supplies, an instructor, worksheets and journals.

The classes include a trained instructor from the Purusha Project and require a county staff member – usually a probation officer – to help monitor the group.

Along with 40 minutes of yoga, the girls journal and create an art project that focuses on a theme for the day, such as nonviolence, gratitude or positive body image, Pence said. Girls sometimes create sculptures, jewelry, collages or other artwork.

They also learn about healthy hygiene and how to be kind to themselves and others with affordable self-care projects, such as pumpkin and olive oil facials and aromatherapy.

This year, 11 girls graduated from the class. In 2009, 18 graduated.

Girls “came really begrudgingly and they ended up enjoying it,” Mohr said. “Some of our toughest gals are the ones that don’t want to leave.”

Yoga a Growing Trend Among Youth

From Daily Herald

Count kids among the people joining the yoga craze in the United States.

Yoga-loving parents are signing up their kids at yoga studios, Ys and park districts to learn the practice.

Whether it is an “Itsy-Bitsy Yoga” program for toddlers and their parents, practicing Kundalini or reciting Indigo affirmations, youngsters are developing muscular strength and learning good posture and breathing that can help them to find peace in their over-scheduled lives.

“Yoga should be about showing them the proper way to move and balance, about learning how to have proper body mechanics and alignment,” said Pam O’Brien of Greenleaf Yoga Studio in Geneva. She has taught yoga to children in the past, and intends to start classes again in January. She may also start teaching yoga to the children enrolled in an after-school care program at the Geneva Park District.

She adopts a different tone with children.

“To me, it is like you have to be playful,” she said. For example, to illustrate a point about breathing, she may place a stuffed animal on a child’s stomach. Back-to-back poses and buddy breathing are other favorite exercises, she said.

Besides yoga studios, many park districts offer yoga to young practitioners, including the Naperville, Lisle and Fox Valley districts. A Naperville studio, Universal Spirit Yoga, offers an extensive list of classes for children from infancy on up.

Juanita Monaghan teaches a family yoga class on Saturdays at her Fusion Mind Body Studio in downtown Elgin.

She emphasizes fun, taking advantage of children’s natural tendency toward pretend play. “Let’s be like snakes!” Monaghan tells the class, hissing during a snake pose, and she barks, “Arf! arf!” during a downward-facing dog. Children crawl under their parents during bridges.

“I hope what they do together they can do at home,” she said.

Monaghan sees yoga as an alternative to the competition-oriented sports — and something that can help children who aren’t interested in those sports.

Monaghan also wants kids to get a break — “a break from the rigidity at home, a break from the expectations,” she said. And because children are naturally more flexible (because their egos haven’t grown so much they get in the way, she said), they “feel good knowing they can do what their parents can’t,” Monagahan said.

She worries about the increasing rate of obesity among youth, and believes yoga’s practices can help with that, by teaching children to be mindful of what they put in their bodies and why, as well as the physical exertion. They learn “to make choices based on what is better for your body,” she said.

Fun is the key to getting children to focus in class, Monaghan said. If you give them something fun to do, they will become absorbed, according to Monaghan.

And she also believes children model what they see their parent doing, so if the parent is practicing yoga, the child will be interested.

Except for her own teenage daughter.

“My daughter won’t touch it,” Monaghan said, laughing.

Yoga used to help teen with Asthma

From ABC.com

FRESNO, Calif. (KFSN) — Asthma is the sixth most common chronic condition in the U.S. and it accounts for more than 10-million absences from school each year.

Breathlessness, a tight chest, wheezing and coughing. An asthma attack can be triggered by many different things.

Now researchers at the University Of Cincinnati are saying a way out of asthma episodes is to get close and personal with your spiritual side. They say teenagers that practice yoga and meditation are better able to manage their symptoms. They found spiritual coping affected mental and physical health outcomes as well as anxiety and quality of life.

“Kids these days, especially teens are under a lot of stress. When we are under stress we tend to hold our breath or breathe more shallowly and in yoga we teach you how to breathe more deeply,” said Audrey Tan with Fig Garden Yoga.

Tan demonstrates one popular inversion pose called the downward facing dog — it helps get more oxygen to the bottom of the lungs and increases blood flow at the top, making for healthier blood tissue.

Another easy way to increase oxygen to the lungs — and this is something kids can do during a break from class and adults can do at work — is conscious breathing: “Sit up straight, chest out and breathe in and out through the nose easily.”

Even though yoga has a lot of benefits for teens — better breathing and posture, more flexibility and strength — Tan said it must be done in moderation because teen’s bodies are still forming. “You don’t want to be doing a lot of forceful stretching because you can actually overstretch the muscles.”

Researchers say the findings on the benefits of yoga for asthmatic kids could help physicians and other health care providers consider alternative medicines to treat asthma in adults as well.

(Copyright ©2011 KFSN-TV/DT. All Rights Reserved.)

In Schools, Yoga Without the Spiritual

From the New York Times
By MARY BILLARD

TO “om” or not to “om”: For those who teach yoga in schools, that is a question that arises with regularity.

The little syllable, often intoned by yoga students at the beginning and end of class, signifies different things to different people. But with its spiritual connotations, it is a potential tripwire for school administrators and parents, along with “namaste” and other Sanskrit words, chanting and hands in the prayer position.

The om question ties into the wider debate over the extent to which yoga is entwined with religion. Yoga program directors, who train and place teachers in the schools and develop curriculums, try to avoid setting off a battle like the one that developed over the Lord’s Prayer.

“Every school is different, and every one has their own permutations and parameters of what you can and can’t do,” said Shari Vilchez-Blatt, founder and director of Karma Kids Yoga on West 14th Street, which holds studio classes and sends teachers to private and public schools in New York.

Bent on Learning, a 10-year-old program based on Grand Street that teaches 3,300 students a week in 16 public schools, is a namaste-free zone. “No namaste,” Jennifer Ford, the development director and one of the founders, said. “No om. No prayer position with the hands. Nothing that anyone could look in and think, this is religious.”

The hard-line policy is stressed in the 100-hour Bent on Learning teacher training. Perhaps a teacher accustomed to working in other settings inadvertently puts hands together in a prayer position, for instance. “It is easily explained, and fixed,” Ms. Ford said. “We weed it out quickly.”

Generally speaking, the money to support yoga programs comes from parent-teacher associations, grants, fund-raising and school budgets. Bent on Learning, which holds a glamorous annual benefit dinner with yoga enthusiasts including Gwyneth Paltrow and Russell Simmons, pays for classes at New Design High School, a public school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

Kate Johnson, a Bent on Learning instructor, teaches more than 100 students each week at the school, in a basement room set aside for yoga. She leads the classes — an elective for gym — through a series of stretches, standing poses and sun salutations. Sanskrit terms for poses are used, on the theory that they are akin to French-derived terms like plié in ballet.

The class ends with students flat on their backs in corpse pose, savasana. Ms. Johnson tells the students to take a rare quiet moment to breathe.

After class, Allyson Lobo, 15, said, “I love yoga,” adding: “It’s relaxing. It makes me feel calm and takes me to a happy place.”

At Karma Kids, which works with more than 1,200 students in 16 schools, Ms. Vilchez-Blatt takes a more elastic position on “om.” “We om,” she said. “I don’t look at it as spiritual. When we say ‘om,’ it is all the sounds in the universe.” Still, she checks whether it is acceptable to school administrators before introducing it in class.

If the answer is no, Ms. Vilchez-Blatt has creative remedies, leading chants of “peace” or, at Chabad programs in Manhattan for children from prekindergarten through age 12, “Shal-OM.”

Jennifer Cohen Harper, director of Little Flower Yoga, which opened in 2006 and teaches about 700 students at 13 public and private schools, also discusses with administrators the content of classes. She may incorporate “om” and “namaste,” which she translates as “the light in me bows to the light in you.” The students do not do the prayer pose, instead placing their palms over their hearts.

If any qualms are expressed, Ms. Harper edits the language or behavior in question. “Occasionally someone will ask, ‘Do you guys do a lot of chanting?’ and you get the idea to stay away from it,” she said.

Jessica Soo, director of the after-school program at St. Luke’s School, an Episcopal elementary school in Greenwich Village where Little Flower teaches, has no objection to the use of “om” or “namaste.” She noted that in addition to the Little Flower classes, a staff foreign language teacher does yoga with students and discusses Sanskrit. “The kids are exposed to other cultures and religions in our school,” Ms. Soo said.

At Achievement First Bushwick Elementary School, a charter school, an after-school elective class taught by Little Flower instructors recently started when a teacher, Lisa Vandegrift, rang a singing bowl. Such a bowl is sometimes used in religious ceremonies, but here it had the secular goal of quieting rambunctious children and focusing their attention.

The students were led through energetic and playful sun salutations set to a song with Sanskrit lyrics describing a high to low push-up position. “What’s that funny word? Chaturanga!” Toward the end of the class, the students sat quietly in a cross-legged position, eyes closed, breathing in and out. One child made a ritual gesture called a mudra, with the backs of her hands resting on her knees and forefingers and thumbs forming O’s.

“I have no idea where she learned a mudra,” Ms. Harper, Little Flower’s director, who was observing, said with a laugh. “We never teach mudras. Kids come with ideas from TV.”

Seemingly an adult fitness activity, yoga allures a younger demographic – kids and student athletes

From The Republic

LAWRENCE, Kan. — Mitch Madl, 15, grew up playing all kinds of sports: basketball, football, soccer and wrestling. Then, last fall, while playing football, he was hit during a game and developed a pain in his lower back that wouldn’t go away.

Madl went for months unaware that he had a condition known as spondylolisthesis. At some point he fractured his spine, and one of the vertebra had slipped out of place. The doctor told him that his football injury had inflamed it and that he needed to refrain from many of his activities.

Being sidelined has been tough for him.

“I can’t play any contact sports right now,” Madl says. “They told me I had to quit my baseball team, too.”

While his doctor restricted his involvement in contact sports for the time being, at his last appointment, the orthopedist told him that he could swim and do yoga.

“Yoga makes me feel a ton better,” Madl says.

So this summer, in addition to helping his father on their farm outside of Baldwin, he has added yoga classes 3-4 days a week.

Madl is hopeful that when he enters Baldwin High School next fall as a freshman, he’ll be able to participate in his old activities.

“I want to get back to those sports again,” he says. “And be without pain.”

Fortunately for Mitch, he found a style of yoga that suited him.

“I think the biggest misconception among teens and adults is that yoga is boring,” says exercise physiologist Kathleen Kastner, who has been teaching yoga for nine years and is owner of Maya Yoga in Kansas City, Mo. “People who like to be challenged and work hard tend to migrate towards asthanga, power and vinyasa yoga.

“I think practicing yoga for teens is extremely important because it helps complement traditional workouts and sports by elongating their muscles and giving (teenagers) increased flexibility and freedom in their bodies,” Kastner says. “The teenagers who come to my classes are usually extremely tight from their sport of choice and have very little flexibility and range of motion. It’s almost scary!”

This message seems to have made its way to at least one of the area coaches.

Last summer, Free State head soccer coach Kelly Barah incorporated yoga into the men’s soccer practice regimen. Classes for the women’s team were added a couple months later.

“Coach Barah is pretty in-tune with cross-training athletes,” says Lawrence resident Tami Keasling, who taught the classes. “He has been very open and encouraging of my involvement,” noting that there were no problems with ACL injuries for anyone on the women’s team this season.

“I would like to take credit for that!” she jokes.

A message Keasling relays to her students is that they should never compare themselves with anyone else in the room.

“It is not what your neighbor and friend is doing,” she says. “So many things impact our ability to do a certain pose — how we feel today, what happened at school yesterday, how much sleep we got, injuries…”

“The breathing techniques we incorporate into yoga can help calm a teenager who is stressed about a game, a test, a girlfriend, or a boyfriend,” Keasling says.

One area teen who has experienced the calming effects of practicing yoga is Katherine Marshall-Kramer, 15. Katherine Marshall-Kramer, 15, has performed yoga off and on since age 4. She won a silver medal in the U.S. Yoga Federations Yoga Asana Championship in March and competed in the international competition over the weekend.

“I know it’s good for me. I’m calmer, and I can handle myself better when I am practicing regularly,” she says.

“I can always tell when I’m not practicing yoga enough. I get moody, and my knee starts hurting,” says Marshall-Kramer, who has been practicing on and off since she was 4.

When she was 11, she began competing for titles.

Many might find “yoga” paired with “competition” to be incongruent, but for Katherine’s mother, Elizabeth Marshall, owner of Bikram Yoga Lawrence, there is no inconsistency.

“You’re competing with yourself,” Marshall says. “The training for the competitions is a relatively short amount of time, so it’s good for young people to have a goal and find out what they can accomplish in a short amount of time.”

An additional benefit to the competitions is the confidence they instill.

“The competitions are the only time I like being on stage,” Marshall-Kramer says. “I was so afraid that first year. I was a nervous wreck! But the people at the judge’s table were just smiling.”

Marshall-Kramer competed in March in the U.S. Yoga Federations Yoga Asana Championship, where she won the silver medal and the right to compete in the International Championships, which were this weekend in Los Angeles.

“It’s hard for someone who doesn’t practice yoga to grasp the magnitude of what a little movement combined with deep breathing and stillness can do for a person,” Kastner says. “But it truly can work miracles in people’s lives.”

Yoga Camp for Kids

From The Well Daily:

Kids are natural yogis; they’re open, flexible and fearless. Yoga is play for them (as it should be for us!) and provides tools that will serve them well for the rest of their lives. Summer yoga camps are a great way to encourage your kids to explore yoga—and just maybe fall in love with the practice for life.

Very little ones are welcome at Bija Kids in Clinton Hill, which runs half and full day camps for kids ages 3 to 8 from June 29th to September 2nd and a mini camp from August 1st to 12th. Camps open with an hour-long yoga session, followed by eco-friendly arts and crafts, music sessions, field trips to parks and museums and organic gardening.

Uptown campers can have Adventures in Yogaland at Land Yoga, open to ages 3 to 10 on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, June 21st to Aug 25th. This new yoga center in South Harlem is run by Ashtanga teacher Lara Lauchheimer, who has taught autistic and HIV+ children and spent three months working with genocide survivors in Rwanda. Lara teaches kids yoga poses by encouraging them to mimic plants and animals. Art and music projects and healthy snacks are included.

Don’t worry; we haven’t forgotten your bored teenagers. Namasteens uses music to engage teens and pre-teens at Pure Yoga East (ages 10-12) and Pure Yoga West (ages 13-15). These classes are designed by Pure senior teacher Lara Benusis, who spent two years teaching in New York public schools and designed a yoga program for The Children’s Aid Society. Each weekly class uses games, creative sequencing, story-telling and music to draw teens out. The goal is to help teens express themselves, release stress and tension, focus their minds and build confidence and strength.

If your kids are adventurous and ready to try sleep-away camp (and you’re ready to part with them for a week), send them to Camp Yogaville for the last week of June. The camp is held at Satchidananda Ashram in Buckingham, Virginia, which is situated on 600 acres of woodlands on the banks of the James River. Against the backdrop of the Blue Ridge Mountains, 8- to 12-year-old campers will experience a week of yoga, meditation and vegetarian meals, plus more traditional summer camp activities like hiking and canoeing.

Wait, can we go?

Foot Traffic:
Camp Yoga
Bija Kids Yoga
900 Fulton Street in Brooklyn

Land Yoga
2110 Frederick Douglass Blvd

Pure Yoga East
203 East 86th Street

Pure Yoga West
204 West 77th Street

Camp Yogaville
Satchidananda Ashram in Buckingham, Virginia

The Well Wisdom:
One of the reasons yoga is so beneficial for children is that it teaches self-regulation—the ability to control and direct one’s thoughts and actions. Improving a child’s self-regulation skills can have a positive impact on attention, behavior, school performance and social skills. Just learning to breathe deeply will help children handle their emotions for the rest of their lives.

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Yoga Helps Kids with Autism in Florida School

From MindBodyGreen:

A school in Florida has turned to yoga to help children with autism. The results are not only amazing but inspiring as well.

Autistic children often have difficulty relaxing, but the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reports that’s where yoga comes in with poses like “pretzel” and “superman.”

Louise Goldberg , one of the founders of the yoga program says, “Children with autism don’t like change. They like predictability… We have a ritual beginning and ending, which gives them comfort. We offer challenges gradually. The postures make them feel better and teach them to redirect their energy before an [emotional] explosion.”

Another teacher adds, “Everyone tells them to relax, but this teaches them what it means to relax. This shows them that relaxing is safe and comfortable.”

Namaste to that!

Here’s a video of the program. It’s pretty awesome:

 http://sun-sentinel.vid.trb.com/player/PaperVideoTest.swf

Bikram Yoga is Not Child’s Play

From Yoga Journal:
“I do not recommend that young children participate in Bikram yoga. Children handle high temperatures differently than adults. They have a higher surface-area-to-mass ratio, which means they absorb heat more than adults do. They also have a smaller blood volume, which makes it harder for them to dissipate the heat. Lastly, they have a slower rate of sweat production than adults, and sweating is a mechanism to cool us off. Children are not ‘mini adults’ — and should not be treated as such.”

Click here for full article.

From Yoga Diary: Malasna in the Garden

Jessica Berger Gross, author of enLIGHTened: How I Lost 40 Pounds with a Yoga Mat, Fresh Pineapples, and a Beagle Pointer (Skyhorse), lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with her husband and two-year-old son, Lucien. In Yoga Diary, she wrote a beautiful post about spontaneous asana sprinkled throughout the day, a lesson Lucien taught her. It brought a smile to my face. Read it here.

Kids: Our Best Yoga Teachers

I spent the Memorial Day weekend with my 2-year old niece, Lorelei. We played, laughed, sang, watched movies, went for walks around the neighborhood, read books, and surprisingly, practiced yoga. Lorelei didn’t need any instruction from me. She does yoga all the time without even thinking about it. She improvs her way through her day. There she was, just hanging out, in Baddha Konasana, Supta Padangusthasana, Halasana, and Adho Mukha Svanasana.

Kids live in asana. They have amazing flexibility and boundless energy. Yoga is the natural way of being for all of us. As we grow into adults, we learn bad habits like sitting for too many hours (and in western chairs), slouching, and breathing shallowly. Kids show us our natural way of being, living, and moving. We would do well to take note:

1.) Play, actively, as much of the day as possible
2.) Sing your heart out at least once per day (Lorelei currently sings a knock-out rendition of “Down in New Orleans” from The Princess and the Frog)
3.) Remember that exercise is fun, not work
4.) Hanging out on the floor is a fun place to do just about anything from eating to singing to watching TV to coloring
5.) When something doesn’t make sense, ask questions. Lots of questions.
6.) When you’re tired, sleep. When you’re hungry, eat. Let the emotions flow, whatever they are.
7.) Be curious.

The photo above is Lorelei, my best yoga teacher.