Posted October 20, 2003

Yoga puts children in touch

By Daniel de Vise

Some disciples in Elizabeth Bonet’s morning yoga class stretch-stretch-stretched their hands down toward their feet, following her lead as best they could.

But one inattentive pupil inflated a balloon. Another shook a maraca. A third switched the classroom lights on and off at random.

This is yoga for the Elmo generation.

South Florida society is coming to view yoga as a meaningful -- not to mention cute -- activity for children as young as 2. Mothers are returning to yoga classes with newborns as soon as six weeks after delivery. And while such classes may lack the pin-drop om tranquility of classic adult yoga, they certainly hew as close to the true spirit of yoga as, say, your typical South Beach “hot yoga” sweat-a-thon.

“This is a gentle parenting space,” Bonet announced at the start of a recent class at the Jim Ward Community Center in Plantation. “So please don’t force your child to do yoga. They will participate if they want to.”

There was little danger of such harsh measures among these eight doting mothers and 13 children, who ranged in age from a few months to 4 years.

But yoga per se was not on everyone’s agenda. One young student chased a tennis ball around the room. Two drank from sippy cups, one breast-fed, one laughed as his mother tickled him with her hair. One older boy in a Spiderman shirt attempted an arching “downward dog” stretch on all fours alongside his mother.

Toward the end of the one-hour session, Bonet reserved some time to focus on the children. She read From Head to Toe by children’s author Eric Carle, one of several dozen books that adapt well to children’s yoga.

“I am a cat and I arch my back,” Bonet read aloud. “Can you arch your back?”

And, just like that, a half-dozen toddlers assumed the cat pose. After several more animal poses, Bonet and her students relaxed. She turned to the mothers.

“Take a moment,” she said, “just to feel how wonderful it is to have children.”

Laughter.

The class is not always calm, but the mothers say it is irreplaceable. Where else will they find time to exercise without interruption while their children play happily in a child-proofed room?

“For me, it’s really my only vehicle for stress reduction. When you’re home full time with two children, you need a vehicle for stress reduction,” said Julie Davis of Hollywood, attending the class with children Amanda, 3, and Cristian, 6 months.

“I have some yoga videos. I have all the best intentions of doing it at home,” Davis said. “But it’s very, very difficult.”

Marsha Wenig of Michigan City, Ind., is widely regarded as the guru of children’s yoga. She has been honing her techniques for 20 years, reworking traditional yoga poses to make them more kid-friendly, recording YogaKids videotapes, amassing a list of books with themes that lend themselves to yoga lessons.

“Yoga for children is very, very different than yoga for adults,” she said in a telephone interview. “You have to be completely creative. You have to hold that sense of authority in the class without being a dictator. And that takes a very delicate balance. You either have a knack with children or you do not.”

At the Mailman Segal Institute for Early Childhood Studies in Davie on a recent afternoon, eight children ages 3 and 4 put Wenig’s method through its paces.

“We’re going to take a deep breath in. Ahhhh,” said instructor Ally Peer Ben-Ezzer, who studied under Wenig. Here was a breathing exercise just like that used in adult yoga, but with an extra prop: tiny silk flowers clasped between tiny palms, a reward for the deep breaths.

Later, imitating the movements of an elephant’s trunk, the children swung their arms high over their heads. A series of seated leg stretches became an imaginary exercise in kneading pizza dough. For the “child’s pose,” a seated posture with the forehead touching the floor, the students pretended to be kernels of corn about to pop.

The children in this Nova Southeastern University class are considered old enough to do yoga on their own, with no parents present. Most of them joined in during this afternoon class, their mats forming a circle around the teacher. Ben-Ezzer adopted the role of stern teacher only when necessary, as when an attempt to imitate stomping elephants got a bit out of hand.

“Especially when you talk about children this young, they have their impulses,” Ben-Ezzer said. “And you can fight them, you can tell them to stop, or you can go with the flow. I choose to go with the flow.”

Teaching yoga to children so young is not easy, and yoga instructors say they have seen colleagues driven out of the field for the comparative simplicity of traditional adult yoga.

“Most of the teachers that I know that have started out teaching kids have quit, and that’s because it’s a hard group to teach,” said Debra Geymayr, who teaches children of all ages at Prenatal Plus Yoga in Coral Gables.

Geymayr prides herself on continuity: she teaches yoga for pregnant women, then invites them back to baby yoga classes that begin six weeks after delivery. The children can continue studying as long as they wish.

“We do infant massage, we do poses with the babies, we do poses with mom to help her regain her abdominal center,” Geymayr said. “And we sing and we dance. We just have a great time.”

December 26, 2002

No stretch: Yoga is a hit with kids, too

By Howard Cohen

FLEX FOLKS: Sophia Cicalese, 8, bends with ease during yoga class at Coral Springs Medical Center. Photos by Joshua Prezant

When Claudia Morrison asked her son David what he wanted to do for physical activity, he didn’t say soccer or football or baseball. He said “yoga.”

“He’s not very much into sports like some kids are crazy about whatever sport is out there,” David’s mom said. “And I thought it would be nice to get him to do something physical that he could enjoy. We were trying to find something different. I said, ‘Give me three things, in order of priority’ and he said he wanted something to help him relax.”

Kids need to relax? David Morrison is only 9. Actually, 9 ½, he points out in that amusing way the young have of adding, rather than subtracting, years, when asked their age.

“It’s just that I like relaxing,” David insists. “My favorite is yoga. I don’t really remember where I heard about it; I think in a book. It said something about yoga and it” seemed interesting.

So Morrison, who lives in Coral Springs, enrolled son David in Ally Peer Ben-Ezzer’s YogaKids class. It’s a hit with parents and children like David.

“I like the stretching and it’s fun and we do cool activities like animal stretches,” classmate Andrea Cicalese, 9, says of the Saturday morning sessions at Coral Springs Medical Center.

FOR GOODNESS SAKE

Adds mom Joanne Cicalese, “I joined the adult class and I find it beneficial to me. I’m very active and have done stretching and exercising and I can notice a difference in the few times I’ve been [to class]. If it’s good for me, it’s got to be good for them. To start them young feeling good about themselves and taking care of their bodies gives them self-esteem about who they are.”

The ancient practice of yoga, a melding of mind through meditation with body postures or poses, has experienced an uptick of interest among adults across the country over the last decade. Most gyms offer programs in yoga. Newsstands and bookstores swell with tomes devoted to the subject. Yoga Journal magazine estimates that 15 million Americans practice yoga, a number that is growing rapidly. What isn’t as well known is that yoga culture is starting to reach the Barney set.

Instructors say yoga works for the young for the same reason it does for adults.

EXPLORING SELF

“It begins with the breath and awareness and movement and expression of the self,” says Michelle Maniaci, a pediatric physical therapist and yoga instructor in Miami. “It’s about finding the inner personality and connecting to the inner child. . . . We never discover our spunk, what rocks our world.”

A student’s daily activities -- lugging books from classroom to classroom, for instance -- can lead to ailments yoga is designed to attack, Maniaci adds.

“There are 12- and 13-year-olds who have 30-pound backpacks and two or three hours of homework and sometimes physical education is not part of their curriculum,” she says. “Children are in need of finding that connection to themselves, to breath deeply . . . [and] improve their posture and lower stress levels. As therapists we’re trying to fix and correct and make [things] better. Yoga is allowing [people] to be more aware of themselves and they come up with their own answers. That’s very empowering for children.”

The YogaKids program was developed in the early ’90s by creative writing teacher Marsha Wenig in Indiana and has started to catch on as attention has centered on obesity among American children. Organized sports aren’t always the answer since some children balk at competition and most physicians would not recommend lifting weights for those younger than 11 or so. Wenig’s first book on the subject, YogaKids: Teaching the Whole Child Through Yoga, is scheduled for release next fall.

“It’s definitely something that I think is important in children’s lives,” says Parkland resident Ben-Ezzer, 39, who has been practicing yoga for 10 years and who has enrolled her two children, Oren, 3, and Tirza, 6, in YogaKids. “It’s noncompetitive and they learn so much about themselves and their own bodies. They both have great self-esteem and I definitely attribute that to yoga.”

In a typical YogaKids class, where students can range in age from 3 to 17, instructors pair the traditional yoga poses, or asanas, with actions found in books or nature that the children could be studying at the time.

In one example, Ben-Ezzer leads her students in a breathing exercise. “I explain why breathing is going to relax them,” she says. Yoga traditionally imitates movements found in nature. “When we stand still, we call it Standing Mountain because we stand like a mountain.”

Stretching and posing like a languorous cat could result in lions’ roars from the young charges in Maniaci’s Inner Me Adventures YogaKids class in Miami.

“It’s fun,” Maniaci, 29, says. “Yoga shouldn’t be serious and boring. To get 3- and 4-year olds into yoga poses like The Cobra or The Downward Dog we make dog sounds; we even have a Barney pose. We use our imagination. Children can move around like a snake on the floor. Animals naturally do yoga and children want to imitate animals.”

Learning while you pose is part of it. “We talk if it’s little kids,” Ben-Ezzer says. “We’ll say, ‘Toes, how many toes do we have?’ With the older kids, it’s more challenging. ‘Which bones do we have here? What are the muscles?’ We talk about whatever comes up. It’s a great opportunity to teach them, so sometimes we’ll design a class around a subject. We’re just having fun. They don’t know they have studied.“

Maniaci thinks yoga can even counter pop culture’s powerful sway over impressionable children.

“They tune into TV and radio and everyone wants to be Justin [Timberlake] and Britney [Spears], but they don’t realize that they are their own celebrity,” Maniaci says. “Yoga teaches you how to create your own rhythm and song and dance. It’s about loving yourself and being at peace about who you are. A deep breath makes you think you have something inside yourself.”

HUMOR HELPS

When all else fails, humor helps in YogaKids class, too. Especially with tiny tots. A forward bend could be called something silly such as peanut butter and jelly.

“We go over all the parts of our body and we put peanut butter and then jelly on them,” Ben-Ezzer says. Of course, they don’t really smear the goop on themselves. It’s merely figurative.

This gets David thinking about his favorite part of yoga class.

“Maybe the snack time, because I like eating,” he says.