Yoga for Children
We generally feel that children are living a life that is not at all stressful. But, if we observe children in our family and the neighborhood, we would find they are living a very busy life. They are rushing around from school, lessons, sports and many other extra-curricular activities.
Such a life style makes them live under considerable amount of stress. Such stress could produce negative effect in their life. Yoga can help children to tackle these pressures properly and enables them to learn different techniques that would be required to face life’s challenges in the future.
Yoga is an excellent way for children to exercise. But, it must be taken into consideration that children’s bodies are still growing and strenuous exercises or difficult asanas might not be suitable for them.
But, a suitable yoga program could be developed for the benefit of children that would include more gentle poses and breathing exercises from a number of different types of yoga.
A child practicing yoga is benefited in different ways. The physical benefits include improved flexibility, increased strength and coordination. They become more calm and relaxed and their concentration improves.
The Instructors have found out that a multi disciplinary and interactive approach works quite well for teaching yoga to children. Different yoga asanas could be taught by imitating various plants and animals in a very playful way. This could be farther extended to include storytelling, games, drawing pictures and playing various musical instruments.
The natural tendency of these children towards creativity and curiosity makes these fun and quite effective for them. It has been found that this multi disciplinary approach of teaching yoga is an excellent way of learning. Kids are able to explore their innate ability across various fields like linguistic, logical, visual, musical and many others.
Different postures used in yoga asanas involve in stretching and bending that help in relaxing tense or contracted body muscles. These posses when carried out in slow and rhythmic repetitious movements are found to be extremely beneficial in toning the body and massaging the internal organs. Such exercise helps in improving the overall immunity by restoring circulatory, respiratory and digestive vitality.
Yoga is a very gentle form of physical exercise and there is very little chance of getting injured even if is overdone. But, the postures involved in yoga asanas are to be done very precisely and to be synchronized with proper breathing. Therefore, children under the guidance of an expert yoga teacher should practice yoga
Children could start learning yoga from the age of five. Initially, it could be a session of fifteen to twenty minutes that could be gradually increased to thirty minutes for older children. This training would help them establish connection amongst their body mind and spirit and would enable them sail through life smoothly in their future life.
