Peace Begins With Me

At IJP we do yoga, but not just any kind of yoga... We practice Yoga Yeladim, a fusion of Jewish learning, body awareness and spiritual understanding all rolled up into a yoga mat! Through this practice, your children are becoming more mindful, spatially aware and are gaining physical and mental strength to be carried with him/her for a lifetime. 

So, what exactly do we do in class? First we place our shoes mindfully on our "shmat", the mat we decorated just for our shoes! 

We then do a series of om's, the universal sound.  This unites and grounds us as we begin our daily journey together.  Yoga is not all about movement and poses; meditation is a vital part of yoga and we teach it with mantra's and bells.  Our brains can be so cluttered with thoughts that we practice a few simple ways to keep those thoughts simple. Have you heard our mantra, "Peace begins with me,"? It's actually a meditation!  We can also meditate with sound which really helps us to stay present and focused on one thing: the here and now. See our yogis tuning into the frequencies of the singing bowl and  tingsha bells.

Now it's time for movement!  We generally go from seated to standing using a short story and incorporating traditional yoga poses (sometimes with traditional names, other times we just make the names up as we go!). 

Sun Salutations are a staple in our class as well.  This ensures that we are fully activating our entire bodies while moving from standing, to plank then to down dog, up dog, and back to standing in its most simple form.  Some days we mix it up and add all types of variations.  

What makes our yoga class the MOST FUN?! Our songs of course.  Most of our songs are from Kidding Around Yoga and can be found here. A few of the favorites are: Jogging Through The Jungle, Yoga Negila, Toe-ga, Every Little Cell, and Yummy Yoga. 

Here we are playing Toe-ga, yoga for our toes, an all-time favorite. Once we gather our pom-poms we use them to make a picture or to blow across our mat. 

After all the movement and songs, we make sure to go to our special gardens.  This is a place we can always visit whether we're happy, sad, angry, or feeling any other way, it's always there.

Namaste and Shal-om!