V, my older daughter, at times, struggles to figure out ways to calm herself down in the face of whatever it is (usually not getting what she wants). each evening, we take deep breaths together and recently we started connecting motion with our breath. we take 5 deep breaths in and 5 deep breaths out. we breath in when our arms go up and out as our arms come back to our sides. for the last one, we bring our hands to pray position before hopping into bed for books.
this is great for evening, but i wondered if the yoga instructor for the class i attended tonight had any suggestions. she has a little girl who will be 3 in a couple of months. she was very thoughtful with me and suggested doing many things that we already do- use my breath as a model, use the abc yoga deck, intersperse activity with periods of rest. she also suggested bringing her to family yoga. it might be a good way to give her more tools to put in her toolbox for when she's on her own. having the muscle memory could really help.
the only trouble is that it's offered once a month. good luck remembering when that is...
after our chat, class got started and we mainly focused on moving our shoulders away from our ears. each pose and each series of motions had a component of drawing away and back with the intention of relaxing instead of gripping or forcing.
somewhere in the middle, we did a series over and over, each of us following our own breath, moving between warrior 2, reverse warrior, triangle, side angle and back to warrior 2. it was kind of amazing. more like dancing than yoga.
i'm going to try it with V one of these days. i think she'll really like the rhythm of the flow.
No comments:
Post a Comment