Playing with Yoga – How to Help Children Love Yoga

An Article from March 2009 Aquarian Times

by Karan Khalsa

Playing with Yoga –  How to Help Children Love Yoga

 Until I tried to get my son to do yoga, it hadn’t occurred to me that it would be so challenging.  At ten, he is far more interested in Transformers and his Wii than stretch pose or long deep breathing.  So I took it upon myself to get some tips from the experts.

 

“Teaching yoga is very different depending on a child’s age,” says Shakta Kaur.  “With older kids, I try to engage their interest by talking about real life – exercises that help with shoulder pain from a heavy backpack or breathing techniques to help with concentration before a test.  But telling stories is the most sure fire way of keeping children engaged up to age 8 or 9.   Children play at yoga.  The posture is important, but it is more important at that age to be fun and engaging.” 

Yoga Warrior Card

 

First I talked to Shakta Kaur, author of a wide range of yoga books, DVDs and CD for adults and children.  I was really excited to hear that she is about to release a series of playing cards called Yoga Warrior Cards. “Most yoga products for kids are more focused on girls than boys,” she said.  “I worked with two boys to create these cards.  Their imaginations really brought this project to life.”   The cards each have a bio-mechanical robotic character doing a different yoga posture with names like Power Bud and MaxiMorph.  The postures have been given cool boy-friendly names (for example, shoulder stand is called Rocket Launch).  I can’t wait for the cards to arrive!  Hopefully they will find a home beside the Yu-Gi-Oh cards that fill my house.

 

 

Snatam Kaur is a strong believer in combining yoga and story-telling.  In her DVD, “Shanti the Yogi: Mountain Adventure” she weaves a story and singing into a fun-filled yoga class.  Snatam says “From Yogi Bhajan, I learned to engage children’s imaginations and use stories.  Growing up, we always had stories with yoga at home and at the 3HO Children’s Camp.  It made it really fun for me.  In my children’s workshops, we use music to support the stories and exercises.  It creates the whole environment and mood – ominous  music and snake  sounds when we go into cobra pose really enhances the imagination.  And children love to sing and love the celestial communications (mantras with movements).”

 

“A little 4-year-old boy came to one of our workshops.  He was really shy, sitting on the side with his mom.  Months later, his mom wrote me to say her son didn’t participate in the class, but every day he sings Yogi Bhajan’s words ‘I am happy, I am good’ from my ‘Feeling Good Today’ CD.

 

Gurudass Kaur, who teaches Childplay Yoga workshops all over the world, said, “In order to work with children, you have to be able to embrace chaos, be very active, and go with the rhythm of children. Children play at yoga, they don’t practice yoga.  I use so many techniques in my program.  Using mantras with movement is a very powerful practice for children because they love music by nature.   You want to involve as many senses as you can when you are working with children. And let them play!

 

Every child is unique, and there’s no end to the tools we can try to employ to get our kids interested in yoga.  But it seemed the universal message from the experts  is to make sure the kids have fun doing it.

 

For more information about the products and teacher’s in this article:

 

Shakta Kaur:       Radiant Child Yoga Training: www.childrensyoga.com

                                Books, DVDs and Warrior Yoga Cards: www.SpiritVoyage.com

 

Snatam Kaur:     Children’s Products: www.ShantitheYogi.com

                                Workshop Schedule: www.SpiritVoyage.com

 

Gurudass Kaur: Childplay Yoga Training: www.ChildplayYoga.com

                                DVDs and Music: www.SpiritVoyage.com

 

You can view and download the pdf of this recent issue of Aquarian Times here:  Click to View and Download

 

Karan Khalsa is a child of the 3HO community.  After spending 16 years living in India, between school and work, she joined Spirit Voyage to connect her business life with her inner spirit.  Now her career is dedicated to sharing the healing sound current of music and the healing technology of yoga with the planet through Spirit Voyage.

Snatam Kaur shares her DVD filming experience

Snatam Kaur filming 'Feeling Good' with little yogis

Source: Snatam’s Blog: http://www.snatamkaur.com/web8.html
Here’s a good combination. Pregnant, and making a children’s yoga DVD. And yes, that was me a few weeks ago. Every time I wanted to complain I just had to look at the Director of the film, Alessandra, who is about two days more pregnant then I! We weren’t quite at the waddling stage… but close enough. I still can’t believe there is a point when you can’t see your feet when you are walking. Anyway… back to the DVD….

To give you a little background, this DVD is a combination of a yoga class, a story, and songs set to celestial communication. For those of you who haven’t heard of celestial communication, this is a kind of dance to bring emphasis to the words of a song, and incorporate the energy into the body, and in this way “communicate” with God, the angels, and divine energy. In a way, this combination of story, yoga, and movement is how I grew up doing yoga. My spiritual teacher once said that children’s yoga should be first and foremost fun. As you’ll see in the DVD we have some pretty ridiculous moments.

As we toured around the country these past seven years, children kept coming to our concerts. We would invite them up on stage to sing with us at times, because they just were so cute and beautiful. I admit it, I couldn’t resist. Pretty soon, I began to realize how much the kids were connecting with the spirit in the music, so we developed a whole children’s yoga program to give them a more direct experience of that spirit. We delivered this program all over the world, and so we decided to make a DVD out of it for kids that couldn’t make it to our programs.

We looked around our home town of Espanola and neighboring Santa Fe to find children to be in our DVD. Fortunately, the kids who came to do the video were in top form on the day of filming. A few days before the filming, we had a set of rehearsals with the kids. Mind you, I believe (in my haven’t really experienced being a mom sort of way) that we had very good children. But, it was the combination of probably our adult nerves, and the sheer fun of being kids, that created a slightly unruly rehearsal situation. We quickly realized that the sheepskins for the yoga class would become airborne on the day of the filming if we didn’t tape them down. Already, one boy had a dirt mark on his nice white yoga pants after only wearing them for 5 minutes for our fitting. My niece Siri Atma was doing the Def Leppard hand symbol (we think it came from her father) during the celestial communication for the song “I am Happy, I am Good”. At one point I told myself “At least the kids were bonding and having a good time”… as all of the children were on the floor in a massive wrestling pile completely ignoring my adult implorations to have them come sitting up to do more yoga.

The night before the filming, I earnestly looked at my husband over dinner and said, “We should probably reschedule everything, give a few more weeks to practice with the children.” I know, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this… you probably would just like to see the finished DVD and just see it as a yoga class. But, hey, I thought I’d take you behind the scenes… get a little personal with it.

Anyway, my husband looked at me with his big blue eyes, and said with all of the confidence that I wish I had, “the kids will be fine, you’ll see.”

On the day of the filming, the crew showed up, and set up the lights and cameras. The kids arrived at 8:30 in the morning, and let me just say it was a new day. They walked in with all of the confidence and calm that I had imagined that they would have all of these months in preparation, and we began filming. We went through each posture, and celestial communication movement, sometimes more then once, and the children were beautiful. I couldn’t believe it… that’s why in the video I’m smiling so much… it really was because of the children… and maybe because I’m pregnant. Alessandra, in her very cheerful yet authoritative voice led us through the whole day. We finally let the children go that evening, after awarding them with special crystals.

Currently, our music producer, Krishan, is working in LA to create the final music mixes. We have some very talented children singers that came into his studio to sing. We also have an illustrator working on some amazing illustrations for the story. I can’t really tell you any more then this… top secret stuff. No just kidding. But, look out for our new DVD which plan to release this October.

Sat Nam!

Feeling Good! with Snatam Kaur

“Feeling Good” is the working title for an exciting new project of Snatam Kaur’s which has its roots in work she has been doing for years – connecting with children in communities around the world, teaching meditation and yoga through story and song.

For the past 8 months Snatam Kaur has been working with GuruGanesha Singh and producers Krishan and Thomas Barquee to record a complete album of the songs that she sings in her workshops with children. She is also working with filmmaker Alessandra Dobrin Khalsa to create a special children’s hour on DVD featuring the stories, yoga, meditation and celestial communications from the workshops.

The following are some photographs from the filming of the DVD…I hope to be able to post some actual video clips in the coming weeks. Both the CD and DVD are scheduled for release in October 2008.