Namaste_Heather

I have been a yoga teacher since 2007, receiving certification in Integrative Yoga Therapy. At the end of 2008 I left a full-time career to pursue teaching yoga as a primary source of income. I love teaching to adults, but felt the need to expand my teaching repertoire. I wanted to add classes for children, but didn’t know where to start. I began doing internet research. I checked out library books about teaching yoga to kids. All of it was great, but something was missing, for me.  Wanting to do more than teach kids poses, I kept searching.  Like everything in my life, synchronicities happened, the stars lined up, and things just fell into place. I read a brief article in Yoga Journal and found Storytime Yoga.

Excitement!

Stories!

Awesomeness!

Yoga!

Literacy promotion.

Character education.

Peace.

Love.

Yes, this made sense to me. I immediately browsed through the website and knew I was about to embark on an exciting adventure.  Developed and taught by Sydney Solis, who has an interesting story herself, Storytime Yoga is an online training program in three parts; Awakening the Storyteller, Stories from the Heart and Mythic Yoga. Bonus! I could do it all from home! I enrolled in January of 2009 and completed it within six months.

Teaching yoga to kids is very different from teaching to adults. Kids like to laugh and play in practice. Yes, you can introduce more serious stuff like centering and meditation as time goes on (and as kids mature) but yoga for kids is more about imagination and connecting with their bodies in a joyful, playful way.

For each Storytime Yoga class, a story is told orally, without a book. This is the central theme of the class. The stories can be adapted from stories you’ve read, or stories you’ve created, if you’re feeling brave.  Folk tales, fairy tales, creation tales and other such stories work wonderfully. I like to pick stories that have yogic themes and messages . . . kindness, compassion, acceptance, honoring self.

Sydney’s technique is very open to individual personality and interpretation. Her books outline the method:

• Group rules, often given by your puppet of choice
• Centering
• Warm ups
• Story
• Acting out story through yoga
• Student re-tell of main parts to story
• Savasana/Meditation

Other components can be added such as games, dancing, guided imagery.  The sky is the limit.  Much of the training is not so much about memorizing stories, but listening to our own stories – those that emerge from within.  In the online classes we paid attention to our dreams.  We identified symbols.  We noticed synchronicities among participants.  We saw group stories emerge.  It was a rewarding experience that I will not forget.  I found myself lucid dreaming a lot, which was very powerful!

I taught some classes last year, but haven’t been doing so for a while.  My dreams recently told me to start again.  I wrote two other articles on Associated Content, Storytime Yoga and The League of Yogic Storytellers, which details each and provides links to Sydney and Storytime Yoga.  Check them out.

We all have stories.  We all tell ourselves and other stories.  It is how we define self.

Nothing in life is linear.  All is cyclical.  It’s my time.  I think I have some pretty good stories to tell.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 4th, 2010 at 6:24 pm and is filed under yoga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.