Mindful Littles is continuously striving to make mindfulness and heartfulness fun and creative for children.  To help energize our team with more creativity, a couple of us from Mindful Littles went to a YogaKids training last weekend. YogaKids is focused on empowering children to love and learn through yoga.  The training provided wonderful perspective of all the different ways people are striving for more consciousness and love in our world. Our training included folks like the Canadian founder of Growing Roots Therapy to the owner of a yoga studio in Lake Tahoe to teachers who are starting their own health and wellness academy in Fairfield and many more.

During the training, we built our own yoga lesson plan, and the theme we chose as a class was “Peace and Love.”  Each of us took turns in pairs creating a yoga class based on this theme- picking different postures and exercises that helped the kids practice peace and love. We later had the opportunity to teach the entire sequence to children, which was very heartfelt.

I led the very end of the class to help relax kids through some quiet time.  I came up with a body scan to send some love to each body part.  I had the children visualize a “sparkly rainbow heart” floating above their head.  We pictured the sparkly heart traveling to each body part starting from the toes all the way up to the crown of the head.  As we traveled up each body part, I recited a positive affirmation of love for the kids to feel: “I love my toes. I love my ankles. I love my knees.  I love my thighs.”  We went all the way up to the top of the head- relaxing and loving each part of our body.

While I’ve led many body scans in the past, sending love explicitly to each body part felt new and different.   We spend most of our life being critical of our body parts or taking them for granted.   Upon hearing the positive affirmations out loud, I realized how little I, myself, have sent love to each of my body parts over the years. This heartful body scan is not only an easy way for kids to relax, but it’s also a wonderful reminder of gratitude and acceptance of all our physical parts that work together everyday to help us be alive and well.