Dear TRENDS Diary,
I’m the Chief Financial Officer of Gaia in Louisville, a conscious media and community company that includes yoga instruction.
The need for children’s yoga came from my own personal experience. I have a 4-year-old and 6-year-old at home. I was seeing their stress and confusion, not being able to grasp what’s going on in the world or understand why they can’t go to school or be with friends. I knew based on a Harvard Medical School study from 2016 that yoga and mindfulness improve the physical and mental wellbeing of school children. It can help balance emotions and boost the immune system.
We also saw through the current stay-at-home orders, a lot of interest in people looking for kids yoga to practice at home.
So I talked to the team at Gaia and asked if we could stand up some kids content and put it out there as a free resource in this time of need. We got it together really quickly from our library.
The content is a group of kids on screen, and it feels like play to them. A lot of it is about getting them to interact with a physical movement that can allow their body to expend some of that energy that would normally be burned off playing with friends at school.
And some of the mechanics — the breathing, the mudras — are great cues to use with kids and parents even when not doing a practice. So, as the nerves in a family get a little bit frayed in the current environment, they have things to do rather than continue to escalate the situation. This is an opportunity to reset the dynamics within family units, help the kids get centered and grounded — and the adults, too.
– Paul Tarell, as told to Shay Castle
