Family Yoga
Family yoga is a great excuse to be a bit silly. We adults generally take ourselves far too seriously. Especially as parents. We are mostly preoccupied with ensuring our cherished offspring maximise their lifetime experiences and hit high on the funometer. Often we ‘grown ups’ forget to actually have fun ourselves.
Ok, so I’ve heard a few parents say they just want to drop the kids off at a yoga class and savour an hour of peace for themselves. As a mum of a beautiful bouncy four year old i can totally relate. However, I can safely say it’s the parents that are most often surprised with how much they enjoy the classes and how relaxed they feel afterwards. I see more glowing smiles at the end of the session than at the beginning.
We usually start our class with a simple breathing technique and a gentle ‘salute the sun’ warm-up. We then go through the yoga poses that are relevant to our weekly story, a few new poses each week. There is also a sequence of yoga poses we repeat each week for familiarity and to build self-confidence.
As well as a huge helping of fun, the focus of family yoga classes is working within our own abilities alongside others. It takes a certain degree of self-confidence to allow for differences. This is the kind of self-confidence we are trying to build. Not the ever present urge to compare we humans are prone to, placing ourselves higher or lower than others.
Children can witness their parents working ever so slightly out of their comfort zone and learn that this is OK, and actually quite fun, in the process.
Warning: Family yoga classes may contain a number of animal poses and animal noises.
