Yoga Calm Fundamentals: The Many Ways of Mindfulness
It was a lovely, sunny, summer day, and there I was beating myself up a bit for slacking on my meditation practice. Then my 7-year old granddaughter Anna rushed up and tugged at my arm. “Come on, Grandma. Come out and play with me!” So I followed her as she ran across...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: Emotions Are Central to Learning
There are those who think bringing social-emotional learning into the classroom is some sort of fad. Not so, asserts a national commission report from the Aspen Institute. “The promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning…is the substance of education...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: 6 Tips for Nurturing Hope
Some people seem to think of hope as kind of a feeling that comes and goes. Others understand it more as part of a person’s very constitution - you’re either an optimist or a pessimist, and once the thought pattern is set, that’s that. But in fact, hope is something...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: Bringing Mindful Movement to the Classroom
It's a challenge most every teacher faces once the new school year begins: Guiding students through the annual shift from more active leisure time to being expected to sit still at a desk for 6 or more hours a day. That's a pretty significant expectation. Why Movement...
Yoga Is Not Mindfulness. Mindfulness Arises Through Yoga
Yoga Calm users know from experience how it can help kids with ADHD. Still, it’s always good to see and know that scientific evidence supports this, too. Such evidence was on full display in a new systematic review that dropped earlier this month, echoing a similar...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: Bullying & the Language of the Body
A wonderful anecdote from senior yoga teacher Patricia Walden has stuck with me since I first read it some years ago in a post at Yoga Journal. She recalled a statement BKS Iyengar made to her when she struggled with depression: "If you open your armpits, you'll never...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: Where Physical Yoga & Principles Meet
One of the most indelible and defining moments in my training to become a yoga teacher began with a loud POP! At first, I thought it was my classmate’s back adjusting as our instructor led her into an advanced pose, but the look on her face said, “This is serious.”...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: How Trauma Changes the Brain, How Strength Transforms Trauma
By Lynea Gillen It was clear that the young men in the psychiatric unit weren’t much interested in yoga. Struggling with addiction and mental health, they appeared cautious, wounded, apathetic. Lounging in their hospital scrubs, they shot us suspicious glances. “We...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: The Positive Impact of Yoga Calm in the Classroom
When we were first designing Yoga Calm, there wasn’t a lot of research supporting what we were seeing work so well with kids in the rural Oregon elementary school where Lynea was a counselor. Over 20 years later, there’s a significant body of literature showing that...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: A More Holistic Approach to Physical Education
Physical education is a crucial part of a child’s overall education. It presents limitless opportunities for instilling healthy habits while supporting their growth and cognitive development. Yet ask a random group of adults what they remember about PE class, and...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: An Empowering Approach to Teaching Kids about Climate Change & the Environment
Talking about climate change is difficult. And it’s even harder to talk about it with children. While we are responsible for helping them learn about it, we don’t want to leave them with a sense of fear and apathy akin to the freeze response to stress. Nor do we want...
Yoga Calm Fundamentals: Identifying & Working with Feelings
It’s a familiar idiom on social media: I feel some feels. I’ve got all the feels. This hits me right in the feels. Shorthand for the word “feelings,” Know Your Meme describes “feels” as a word used to describe an intense emotional response, such as sadness, excitement...