Plugging into Family Relationships, Not Just Devices
"Grandpa, this is much more fun than playing on the tablet!" My 6-year old granddaughter's observation seemed so obvious and true. We had spent the afternoon together, building a ladder for her new treehouse. We used a tape measure and her budding math skills to...
Transforming Teachers, Revitalizing Teachers
One of the most gratifying things we hear from teachers who bring Yoga Calm into their classrooms is how it changes their own lives – personally and professionally – as well as their students’. They say they find it revitalizing their teaching and rekindling the fire...
The Gift of Reading Aloud to Your Kids
Storytelling, as we saw a couple weeks back, can fire the imagination and open up new worlds to children. It does this whether you make up stories on the fly, as you might with a guided relaxation, or simply read to children from books. It’s the exchange between...
How to Bring Yoga & Mindfulness to Your Classroom
Bringing Mindfulness to the K-5 Classroom “Imagine that your mind is a television,” I told the small group of students I was visiting at the rural Oregon school where I worked as a counselor. “And you have a remote.” I then asked them to change to a sad channel and...
Imagination: A Gateway to Literacy
Stories can do a lot of things – soothe, entertain, enchant, even teach. And it’s not just the content of the story itself that teaches. It’s what stories require of us: the use of our imagination. Imagination lays the groundwork for critical social skills such as...
How Mindfulness Can Help Your Kids Thrive
This post was originally published on Parent Herald. It’s a big developmental step when a child begins to realize that they can control their thoughts and feelings. They begin to understand how what we think affects how we feel and what we do. This is a skill I’ve...
Body-Based Therapies for Stress, Trauma and PTSD
Since the New York Times Magazine’s feature on noted trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk a couple years ago, somatic (body-based) approaches to stress and trauma have continued to move to the fore. In a world where exposure and cognitive therapies are still thought...
Join the “Yes” Generation
“No” has its merits, as we noted last week. But so does “yes.” “Yes” is an invitation to experience. One experience that continues to be embraced by more and more people is yoga. According to Yoga Alliance’s latest Yoga in America report, 36.7 million now practice it...
Join the “NO” Revolution
When I was a young teacher, I was given some good advice by a mentor: Start off the year firm. You can always loosen up. But if you start too loose, you will have a hard time getting the classroom under control later. It took some practice to become very precise and...
Creating Community in the Classroom
Great things can happen when people collaborate. We can develop dynamic solutions to seemingly intractable problems. We can uncover ingenious responses to our most pressing challenges. We can accomplish more together than any single one of us could possibly do alone....
Back to School Spells… STRESS! (But It Doesn’t Have To)
You know the feeling...you're floating along on a lazy late summer day, then suddenly hear the rumbling of rapids ahead. The frenzy and chaos that accompanies the beginning of the school year are dead ahead! But instead of just plowing bravely ahead, like every other...
“I Can Do That For Myself” – Empowering Girls Through Yoga Calm
When I was a counselor, I used to tell the young girls about the time I got suspended from school for a week. “I got in BIG trouble,” I’d say, then ask them to guess what I did. Usually they’d guess that I had skipped school. Or had said something really mean. Or had...