Yoga for Adoptive Families: Let's Breathe (Part Three)
- Barbara L. Ley
- Jun 17, 2015
- 3 min read
Welcome to part three of my Let's Breathe post! In part one, I discussed fun ways to encourage your child to connect with their breathing. In part two, I provided tips and strategies for helping your child learn relaxed breathing. In this third part, I will discuss strategies for breathing while doing yoga poses. Certainly, practicing yoga poses without explicit attention to one's breath can have physical, mental, and emotional benefits, adding conscious breathing to them can increase these benefits. There are numerous ways to link poses and breathing, and I will discuss two basic approaches here.
The first way is to practice poses that have a "built in" breathing component. In the context of kids yoga,
such poses often consist of animal poses done while making the respective animal sound. For example, you and your child can hiss during snake pose (see photo), roar during lion pose, and bark during dog pose. For most kids, making animal sounds during these basic poses will be relatively easy, as they are not necessarily focused on breathing in a particular way while doing the poses. The breathing aspect of the pose is a byproduct of making the animal sound.
The second way to link poses and breath is to practice "relaxed breathing" while doing them. Practicing relaxed breathing while doing yoga poses may help your child pay attention to how her body feels and moves while doing the poses. This form of embodied awareness, which David Emerson calls interoception, can be especially empowering for individuals who have been disconnected from their bodies due to trauma or other factors (see more about introception in the context of practicing trauma-sensitive yoga with your child in this post). Breathing in this way can also help to relax one's muscles and body more generally, making it easier to go deeper into poses and/or hold them for longer periods of time. Finally, breathing during yoga poses provides a temporal framework for your family's practice, meaning that you and your child can "time" your poses by holding them for a certain number of breaths.
If your child is very young, new to yoga poses or relaxed breathing, and/or new to your family, however, you may want to integrate relaxed breathing into your asana practice gradually. You don't want to overwhelm her by asking her to do too many new things at the same time. Instead, she can just practice them separately and start to integrate them she is ready. A good way to start integrating them is to encourage her to hold relatively easy poses (e.g., mountain pose, seated forward bend, seated criss-cross pose) for one or two slow relaxed breaths. Once she can do this, you can gradually expand the practice by encouraging her to hold the easy poses for a greater number of breaths and/or take one or two slow relaxed breaths while holding more complex poses. There's really no right or wrong way to practice the linking of breath and poses, though, so experiment and see what works for your child. And if she finds it too difficult to hold poses for more breath or two, don't force it. Continue to do the poses and relaxed breathing as separate activities, and maybe practice some of the yoga poses with built in breathing elements (e.g., snake and lion poses). You can always try to integrate the two at a later time.
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