Be More Resilient With Yoga

 

Stuff happens.

Oh, so much stuff is happening now with COVID.

Too much stuff.

Sometimes bad stuff happens too.

 

We all have tough times in life.

Tough times, like now, require finding your courage and getting tougher but staying soft at the same time as well.

 

 

Being resilient is getting back up after you fall.

And being better for it despite and because of it all somehow.

All children are capable of extraordinary things. There is no happiness gene, no success gene, and no ‘doer of extraordinary things’ gene. 

The potential for happiness and greatness lies in all of them and will mean different things to different kids. 

We can’t change the fact that children will face challenges along the way. What we can do is give them the skills so these challenges are never able to break them. We can build their resilience.

Resilience is being able to bounce back from stress, challenge, tragedy, trauma or adversity. 

When children are resilient, they are braver, more curious, more adaptable, and more able to extend their reach into the world. 

Building small humans into healthy, thriving big ones isn’t about clearing adversity out of their way. 

Of course, if we could scoop them up and lift them over the things that would cause them to stumble, that would be a wonderful thing, but it wouldn’t necessarily be doing them any favours. 

A little bit of stress is life-giving and helps them to develop the skills they need to flourish. Strengthening them towards healthy living is about nurturing within them the strategies to deal with that adversity. 

 

Put simply, resilience is the ability to adapt.

Resilience is not the absence of distress or difficulty. Resilience is the ability to adapt and grow following adversity.

“Bounce Back!” is a fun acronym for some of the foundational principles of resilience, specifically:

 B  – Bad times don’t last, and things get better.

 O  – Other people can only help if you share with them.

 U  – Unhelpful thinking only makes you feel worse.

 N  – Nobody is perfect – not you, not your friends, not your family, not anybody!

 C  – Concentrate on the good things in life, no matter how small.

 E  – Everybody suffers, everybody feels pain and experiences setbacks; they are a normal part of life.

 B  – Blame fairly – negative events are often a combination of things you did, things others did, and plain bad luck.

 A  – Accept what you can’t change and try to change what you can.

 C  – Catastrophizing makes things worse – don’t fall prey to believing in the worst interpretation.

 K  – Keep things in perspective. Even the worst moment is but one moment in life.

You can do it! You just need to believe and trust that you can! And it does get easier with practice!

Here is a class plan to help your family build resilience...

Bring: Printed Mandal and colouring markers (if teaching online you can ask students to pre-print them at home)

Discussion

So our topic today is resilience!

Being resilient is getting back up after you fall.

Resilience is being able to bounce back from stress, challenge, tragedy, trauma or adversity.

I know that things have not been the easiest with all of the changes in the world…

Let’s all answer, one at a time, this question:

“What’s the most difficult thing that I have experienced recently? AND what did I do about it?”

5 Minutes

Follow My Body Sun Dance

In this awesome warm-up, inspired by the cool music I’m going to put on, please follow my moves to the best of your ability, sinking your movements with mine.

I’m going to make it a bit challenging today to test your resilience with lots of power poses and balancing poses…

It is ok if you can’t do it all perfectly! Just give it your best shot and if you fall, simply GET UP!

(Put loads of balancing poses into the sequence such as Tree, Warrior  3, Half Moon, Half Squat (Shiva Squat), Dancer Pose etc. Some push-ups and jumps are also great!)

5-10 Minutes

The Yoga Shopping Game

Here let’s see how long we can keep with it, this is a sign of resilience… We’ll continue even if it gets challenging training our memory, our bodies and our resilience!

Each one of us in our turn is going to add an item to the "shopping list" after repeating all of the items before.

Make a yoga pose for each item. ALL of the kids can do ALL of the poses with you EVERY time that the shopping list is being retold by one of the kids in their turn.

‘I went to a yoga class and I brought a [Yoga Mat]’

‘I went to a yoga class and I brought a [Yoga Mat and a banana]’

‘I went to a yoga class and I brought a [Yoga Mat, banana and a bike]’

‘I went to a yoga class and I brought a [Yoga Mat, banana and a bike for my t-rex]’

‘I went to a yoga class and I brought a [Yoga Mat, banana, a bike for my t-rex and a hot air balloon] 

Wrap the game up when most kids can’t remember all the things on the long long shopping list any more!

10-15 Minutes

How Long Can You Stick It Out For?

Resilience is sticking through it even when things get tough. Let’s see how long you can stay for in the next 3 poses!

Pick 3 poses and see who stays standing last… Here are some I played with:

  • Planking on the forearms - Like plank pose but instead of the palms on the floe, place your forearms
  • Warrior 2 - See for how long you can keep your arms up
  • Tree Pose - How long can you balance for
  • Chaturanga
  • Wheel Pose

And it doesn’t matter if you can’t stay there as long as me… The fact that you did it as long as YOU can show that you have resilience!

5-10 Minutes

Take A Risk

Challenge yourself and try a pose you never tried before!

Show them a few and let them choose one.

Then guide them step by step how to do it.

Remind them again and again… If you fall, you get up!

It’s not about achieving the pose, it is about working towards it without dispersing and even if it is difficult.

Depending on the age of the children, you may choose very different poses.

I gave options between Crow Pose, Side Crow, Peacock, Headstand and Handstand.

5-10 Minutes

Mandala Colouring

See attached below.

The goal of this today is to help students to explore their feelings through colour. 

To guide students through this, explain that the Mandala is split into four sections:

  • Self
  • Friends
  • School
  • Home

The instructions are simple: have the students colour in each area of the Mandala in a way that represents how they feel about that area of their life.

They can use a variety of colours or just one colour, however best represents their feelings.

After they have coloured each section in, discuss the colour (s) with them. Use active listening to learn about why they chose the colour or colours they used.

This can help students discover and express their own feelings, as well as help parents or teachers, learn about how the student or child is doing with each area of their life. 

Part of resilience is not shying away from our challenges (yes, the emotional ones too) and addressing and learning from them too

Discussing our issues with others can help a lot in building our resilience by increasing awareness to what is happening and also learning from each other different perspectives and strategies.

15 Minutes

Rainbow Kids Yoga Class Plan

Put Things in Perspective. 

In this practice, ask the children to sit tall and close their eyes remembering again the most challenging moment that they shared at the beginning of the class.

Ask them to try and remember what the faced and how it felt, and guide them through the next mindful observations:

Obviously, things won’t always go your way. 

When things go wrong you can use the power of mindfulness to release some of the negative emotions that you may be feeling due to the failure or setback that you just experienced.

After a negative event put things in perspective by remembering that every difficulty carries within it the seeds of an equal or greater benefit. When faced with adversity, ask yourself the following questions:

  • “What’s good about this?”
  • “What can I learn from this?”
  • “How can I benefit from this?”
  • “Is there something about this situation that I can be grateful for?”
  • “Can this somehow make the world a better place?” 

Mindfulness creates structural and functional changes in the brain that support a healthy response to stress. It strengthens the calming, rational prefrontal cortex and reduces activity in the instinctive, impulsive amygdala. 

It also strengthens the connections between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. When this connection is strong, the calming prefrontal cortex will have more of a hand in decisions and behaviour. 

This is resilience.

5 Minutes

Homework -  “Hard Thing Rule”

This homework has three parts:

  1. Each member of the family has to do something hard, something that requires practice, something where you're going to get feedback telling you how you can get better, and you're going to get right back in there and try again and again. Maybe it’s a yoga pose, a dance move, cooking or anything else.
  2. You must finish what you start by our next class. Let’s say in 1 weeks time.
  3. No one gets to pick the “hard thing” for anyone else, so each child and other family members, if they join in, gets to choose their own challenge.

Maybe hours at home... But anytime!

Have fun with it!

Gopala

 

 

Yoga is a wonderful tool to teach children to be resilient and many other life lessons.

With yoga, we can pass on our values and our life’s wisdom in a way that actually works. And together we can make the world a better place for us and for the generations to come, one child at a time.

Join our Rainbow Yoga Inner Circle today and receive weekly class plans and music playlists to match and loads of inspiration on your yoga journey from our thriving community!
It's only $19 a month, and all the class plans are current to teaching in todays world, with social distancing or online.

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MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE WITH YOGA AND MINDFULNESS

Rainbow Yoga trained more than 30,000 Kids Yoga Teachers since 2007. We make yoga fun for children and young people of all age groups and for the whole family too! Our yoga consists of many poses and stretches that have different physical benefits for our health and well-being, breathing, relaxation, meditation and mindfulness exercises for our minds, and social interaction, playfulness, meaning, deep life lessons and fun for our spirit.

Thinking about the impact of all those amazing certified yoga teachers, educators, parents and therapists we have trained to teach yoga to children and yoga for teens; we are making a huge difference for the next generation bringing peace, love, kindness and resilience into their lives. Education departments, schools, health programs and individuals in many countries have adopted yoga as a form of exercise and a method to decrees stress and increase wellbeing. We are the biggest and most-loved kid’s yoga teacher training in the world and we are here tp provide you with everything you will need to teach successful, exciting, meaningful, engaging and fun yoga to children, teenagers and families.

THE BEST ONLINE YOGA TEACHER TRAINING – LEARN TOOLS TO HELP KIDS AND FAMILIES FIND CONNECTION, RELEASE STRESS, INCREASE RESILIENCE AND BRING ON A SENSE OF WELL BEING AND MENTAL BALANCE

Rainbow Kids Yoga offers the most comprehensive, practical, and engaging children yoga teacher training certification in the world! Our course will enable you to deliver children yoga classes that will connects your students to themselves, each other, and the environment. Through unique and engaging practices of mindfulness and yoga your students and community will be able to find connections, enhance well-being and thrive as grounded, integrated and well balanced individuals.

At our training, all while having fun, you will become a children yoga instructor through a lot of experiential practice, insightful theory, yoga poses and sequences, mindfulness practices and relaxation. You will learn how to build fun, engaging, and fitness-level-appropriate children yoga classes for all ages, from toddlers to teenagers. At our kid’s yoga teacher training you will find over 300 videos presenting how to make yoga poses accessible and fun! Believe it or not, yoga can be extremely boring for children and for adults too… In Rainbow Yoga, we make yoga in a fun so that children learn easily and want to do more of it. Yoga is so good for you, but for children to want to want to do yoga you will need to learn to spice it all up and this is what our kid’s yoga online teacher training is for!

This is the perfect resource for yoga teachers, parents, educators and therapists to find and discover hundreds of yoga poses, yoga games and mindfulness practices for children in a way that makes it is easy to learn and easy to enjoy.

Yoga poses for kids: Yoga encourages a positive and healthy lifestyle for the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of children as it helps in the development of strength, stamina, and endurance, high levels of positive energy, resilience, focus, self-awareness, and awareness of our environment.

Yoga for children empowers them with increased concentration, calm, peace, and contentment at a mental level leading to inner and outer peace and harmony. The Rainbow Kids Yoga Teacher Training includes a digital manual (a hard copy that can be purchased) as part of the course. This is specialized online yoga teacher training. Here we will focus on how to teach yoga to children and teens, and how to help them release stress, relax, stretch, energize – All in creative and fun ways while taking into consideration their unique needs, whether they are physical, social, mental, or emotional. 

You will learn to teach the youngest yogis and those with emotional and mental challenges techniques to assist them with impulse control and self-regulation. Our courses provide a platform and a foundation to promote the healthy development of the hearts, bodies, and minds of young individuals.

The Rainbow Kids Yoga Training is the largest and most well-regarded Kids Yoga Teacher Training in the world. Our graduates teach everywhere using our diploma including schools, kindergartens, daycare centers, early learning centers, Yoga studios, gyms, fitness centers, birthday parties, private and group classes and more.

 

AFFORDABLE LEARNING AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Join our Yoga Revolution and become a kids’ yoga teacher today through our online yoga teacher training or in-person yoga certification courses. You will be left with a smile on your face, a wealth of knowledge and an ignited spirit to spread the love and joy of yoga.

For our online training, you can allow 24 hours to receive your access and for physical products such as the Rainbow Kids Yoga Book, you can allow 2-4 weeks to receive it by mail. The books are printed on demand before being shipped, but it is worth the wait 😊

HISTORY OF RAINBOW YOGA

Rainbow Yoga is a fun and constantly evolving family mission and lovingly born in 2007, to give people the tools to teach fun, engaging, and creative in=person and online yoga classes for kids, teens, families, partners, and communities. Rainbow Yoga is interactive and social and all about connection; we touch, hug, move, breathe and co-create together our yoga magically and playfully.

Rainbow Yoga offers a variety of unique and comprehensive teacher training certification courses all over the world offering a well-rounded, in-depth learning experience through a combination of play, practical theory, and fun.The Rainbow Yoga Teacher training is renowned for being captivating, dynamic, loving, and life changing. It is condensed with a lifetime of knowledge and hands-on experience from the Founders of Rainbow Yoga, Gopala, and Angel Yaffa. Delivered by world-class faculty around the world.