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Why
should children do yoga?
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In today’s modern lives, starting from small
ages children are facing life’s difficulties,
stresses caused by competitive environment, peer
pressure and expectations of their families.
These factors accumulate negative energy within
children and lead to an unhealthy, unbalanced
life, mentally, physically and most importantly
spiritually.
In our school systems, unfortunately,
children are forced to sit for a long time and
learn subjects, without using any imagination
and most of the time, memorizing information.
This is why yOgaMini Project aims to introduce
yoga to children and it targets schools,
children development centers and kid’s clubs.
Yoga channels children’s energy to a positive
direction and improve their learning abilities
by using their creativity. Yoga enhances
flexibility, strength, concentration and
relaxation while having fun! Yoga can be a lot
of fun because it enables children to imitate
nature, animals and objects while at the same
time, through the tools that yoga offers, they
will learn new things in new ways.
By practicing yoga regularly, most of the
modern stress ailment illnesses can be prevented
starting from small ages and positive health is
promoted. Early practice of yoga can be
preventive for certain illnesses such as asthma,
insomnia, digestive problems, attention deficit
disorder (ADD) and learning disabilities.
At school, starting or at the end of each
day, practicing yoga for even half an hour
regularly can make an important difference and
improvement in a child’s behavior, because yoga
offers tools for handling stress, advocates
non-violence, truthfulness, empathy and sharing.
Yoga helps children become totally healthy
and balanced individuals, setting a lifelong
foundation for well-being. Yoga gives children a
chance to begin by themselves:
Exploring. Accepting.
Sharing. Loving. Respecting.
And then, expanding all these qualities to
their surroundings.
Then, spreading positive energy, love and
peace to the whole world!
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Benefits
of Yoga for Kids
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The benefits of children’s yoga are countless…
Let’s look at the 4 main objectives and benefits
of children’s yoga with a fresh point of view:
The four main objectives that we want to reach
with children’s yoga is creating awareness on
physical, emotional, mental and social levels;
reaching physical, emotional, mental, and social
‘equilibrium’; teaching correct breathing and
relaxation techniques to overcome the daily stress,
problems or illnesses that we might face during
in our lives. On a more complex level, yoga teaches
us to understand and accept the fact that we are
actually ‘one’ and at the same time, parts of a whole.
Yoga offers us tools for;
understanding ourselves,
looking after ourselves well,
self-development,
leading healthy lives,
knowing that we are responsible of our own lives,
doing the best we can by the capabilities and
circumstances we are given at this moment thanks
to a higher level of awareness
knowing that there is always room for learning and improvement.
| Correct Breathing |
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Equilibrium |
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Physical |
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Emotional |
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Mental |
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Social |
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Awareness |
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Physical |
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Emotional |
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Mental |
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Environmental and social |
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Relaxation |
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Awareness:
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| Physical Awareness: |
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Being aware of all physical benefits of yoga. |
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Understanding how body parts and mechanism works. |
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Aligning the body and awareness of a correct posture. |
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Learning the skills to stretch and doing steady yoga poses. |
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Learning to move in grace. |
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Bringing health to all body systems such as cardiovascular and circulatory systems. |
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Balancing and relaxing the nervous system. |
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Helping the body –same as it teaches the mind- to be flexible. |
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Strength, flexibility, coordination skills, preventing injury while doing sport or other physical activities. |
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Stimulation of all glands and internal organs. |
Yoga as part of a balanced exercise program
(Yoga with Kids, Jodi B. Komitor):
| If
a child’s sport is; |
yoga balances with; |
| Intense |
Tranquility |
| Highly competitive |
A noncompetitive oasis |
| Full-contact |
Personal space |
| Teamwork-oriented |
Self-direction |
| Strength-building |
Flexibility |
| Rough |
Gentleness |
| Tiring |
Invigoration |
| High-energy |
Relaxation |
| Emotional Awareness: |
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Being aware of emotional development. |
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Having fun and succeeding through physical activity. |
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Helping them to express themselves by movement. |
| Mental Awareness: |
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Creating awareness and giving inspiration for being healthy–a lesson to remember all through their lives. |
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Learning to balance and use the two sides of the brain. |
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Helping to channel children’s energies in the right way and teaching many things in new and fun ways. |
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Offering ways for children to have good values and behavior all through their lives. |
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Teaching to be fair, honest, sharing and not to harm anything, to show empathy. |
Environmental and social awareness:
We are living in a society and connected to even a bigger
community. Everything we do makes a difference and affects
others. ‘Giving’ and creating awareness to give to the
society starting from the small ages, enabling them to
contribute in community projects. Carrying this sensible
awareness that yoga teaches us to outside the ‘yoga mat’! |
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Looking after our world and environment. |
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Learning team work, problem-solving,
making conscious decisions, observing the differences that yoga creates,
leadership skills, creative communication, freedom, identity and self-confidence. |
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Equilibrium:
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Physical equilibrium:
‘Balance’ increases with physical control.
Balancing poses in yoga increases coordination and attention.
Emotional equilibrium:
Being peaceful, finding equilibrium and peace within one’s self.
Mental equilibrium:
Self confidence, concentration and focusing for
learning, for reaching a goal and succeeding
in a given object, centering one’s self,
becoming a soul who established mental
equilibrium, peace and harmony within self.
Social equilibrium:
Establishing harmonized and healthy relationships.
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Correct Breathing:
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Learning to breathe in and out correctly through various
breathing techniques, learning the nature of breath
and regulation of breathing even under difficult
circumstances, synchronizing movement with breaths.
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Relaxation techniques:
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Helping to cope with stress, slowing down one’s pace of
life, connecting with self, learning to do deep
relaxation using visualizations, keeping imagination
alive and increasing creativity through various relaxation techniques.
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Children’s yoga lessons in Turkey
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Names of some of the teachers/centers that provide yoga classes in Turkey.
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