Why I love teaching YogaBellies Kidz

Why I love teaching Yogabellies Kidz Yoga

by Lisa Logan

Certified YogaBellies Teacher, YogaBellies Kidz Teacher & Trainer

I was teaching a Yogabellies Kidz class recently when I had a lovely flashback. It must have been the smell of the gym hall i was teaching in (the smell of plimsoles and a freshly varnished floor) but it came to me as real and vivid as if I was there.

I was 7, lying on a gym hall floor, pretending to be a tree. After a very active class we’d been asked to lie quietly and imagine our bodies rooting to the ground, safe & secure like a tree, with the wind on our branches and the soft rustling of the leaves blowing in the cool air. It’s my first memory of “yoga” and it’s a happy one.

Fast forward 35 years and I’m talking some 7 year olds down from space. We’ve been spacemen throwing some yoga poses on the moon. We’ve met an alien and made up some crazy alien poses of our own. On the way up we saw stars & planets, passing airplanes and kites on our descent. For each of these things we saw and experienced we made a shape based on a traditional yoga pose and ran around with warrior 2 arms pretending to be jumbo jets. When it was time to lie down in savasana (in our spaceship beds), every child in the room had giggled, breathed, stretched and imagined their way through that yoga adventure.

 Sitting watching every little 7 year old in that room, chests rising and falling, sinking into their spaceship beds I am reminded why I love teaching children so much. Their imaginations know no bounds. They’re not cynical and their hearts and minds are open to new ideas. They trust in their bodies and this crazy woman who’s just taken them on a space adventure. And I hope that at that moment I have passed on my love of yoga to at least one of those children and that class is their happy memory in years to come.