Listening to Yourself, Listening to Others
Hearing is just a physiological happening: You perceive sound. But listening? Listening happens when your brain makes meaning out of sound. It involves your active participation, whether you’re listening to others, your environment, or yourself. Learning how to listen...
Does Knowing an ACE Score Help?
“Knowing just burdens my heart,” said my longtime friend, an elementary school teacher in eastern Oregon. “I have 26 other babies to take care of!” Over the years, I’ve heard many other teachers express the same sense of overwhelm. With all the demands placed on them...
Gratitude. It’s Not Just for Thanksgiving
Lynea had just finished helping a student lead her second grade peers through our Hoberman Sphere breathing process, followed by the Compliment Game. “What are three reasons why we give compliments to each other?” she asked the class. “It makes the other person feel...
How the Body Holds Trauma & Stress – & How to Release It
When you’re an adult who’s stressed, you can articulate it. You have the language and experience to do so. For kids, it often gets expressed only with behavior. Sometimes that looks like defiance, acting out, causing trouble; other times, as withdrawal or even...
Mindfulness Principles: Tips for Teaching Stillness
When I first met nine-year-old Barton, he talked nonstop. He explained that he never cried because once when he cried at his last school, even his best friend laughed at him. I could feel the sorrow in him. And the rage. I promised him that I would never laugh at him...
Guest Post: Mindfulness & Movement Can Translate into Any Culture
By Leah Shuyler, MA, NCC, LPC Yoga Calm Certification Instructor & Online Course Manager This post originally appeared on 1000 Petals' blog. After participating in a 1000 Petals retreat to Peru, I knew I needed to return. When I decided to set off for 6 months in...
5 Tips for Creating Empowering Structure & Routine in Your Classroom
A lot of folks seem to think that all kids have trouble shifting from unstructured summertime to the structure of the new academic year. Some do, of course. But when the first day of school rolled around here, my granddaughter Anna jumped out of bed, excited to get...
Move to Learn, Heal, & Thrive
Although summertime still means a lot of screen time for kids, a recent Pew Research Center survey delivered some great news: screen usage is down and physical activity is up. But it also points to a challenge most every teacher faces once the new school year begins:...
Supporting School Readiness & Building Community with Yoga Calm
Yoga Calm turns 20 this year, and for about half of those years, we’ve been blogging. Over that time, we’ve seen some posts stay extremely popular long after they first went online. These include posts on nurturing focus and self-control in kids with ADHD, teaching...
No Snowflakes: Youth Leadership in Action
Since Jim is an avid cycling fan, he’s spent the past month following the Tour de France – a race made even more challenging this year by a brutal heat wave, hazardous weather, and landslides that forced a change in course. With such conditions, you might think that...
Yoga Calm: 20 Years of Educating Heart, Mind, & Body
Twenty years can seem ages ago. It was a time of Pokemon fever, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? madness, and the dominance of boy bands, Britney Spears, and Ricky Martin. The US women’s soccer team won the World Cup in amazing fashion, much as this year’s team did. But...
SEL Is About More Than Just SELf: Community Benefits of Social-Emotional Learning
Since last week’s Democratic Debate, so much attention has been paid to “winners” and “losers” and moments such as Kamala Harris’ rebuttal to Joe Biden, a rather important moment has gone overlooked. It came on the first night, after the topic shifted to the matter of...