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...
From the Archives: Creating a Culture of Movement: Fun Activities for Family Fitness
Though things have improved a bit, inactivity continues to be as much of a problem today as it was in 2016 when we first posted the article below - which says something about the sheer scope of the problem. The last US Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and...
Exploring New Worlds with Our Digital Natives
We’ve noticed that our granddaughter has reached the age where friendship skills are very important. She’s been asking us questions about friendships, conflicts, boys and girls, and other things that come along with developing a social self. As many parents know,...
Help for Those Who Are Born into Trauma
Though the US has only 5% of the world’s population, it accounts for 80% of global opioid use. Over 11 million Americans abuse these drugs, and more than 130 die every day. Yet it’s not just the users who suffer damage. Many of those users are pregnant women. Once the...
How Technology Is (Re)Shaping Us
One of the problems with screen time is that it comes at the expense of activities kids need to be engaging in for healthy physical, cognitive, and emotional development – most vitally free play (physical and imaginative alike), face-to-face communication, and sleep....
Using Brain Breaks to Direct Energy Toward Learning
We’ve long said that Yoga Calm is more than just a curriculum; it’s a community. We see it in the ways that teachers, counselors, therapists, nurses, and other helping professionals connect with each other at events like our annual Oregon Summer Intensive. We see it...
Plan Some You-Time This Summer with Yoga Calm
With the promise of summer break is in sight, you may find yourself already thinking of ways you can rejuvenate yourself, while also developing new skills and strategies for managing your stress once the next academic year begins. It’s one reason we often hear people...
Do You Use Your Smartphone or Does It Use You? Addressing Digital Addiction through Mindfulness
Where were you during the Great Facebook Outage of 2019? Thanks to a server configuration change, Facebook – and Instagram and WhatsApp – went down for much of the world one day earlier this month. While some people welcomed the 12-hour outage as “a nice short...
Teens Speak Out About Why They Don’t Speak of Their Trauma & Its Effects
Silence isn’t singular. There are lots of different kinds. There’s the positive silence you experience in mindful meditation, for instance, or defiant silence, where the withholding of information becomes a form of power. And then there’s the silence that comes from...