Teaching Kids Yoga - in Thailand and the USA

I’ve been volunteering to teach yoga for kids this summer. Like, small kids. Really, really small. Seventeen 3-5 year olds.

The only previous time I taught kids was leading a class for orphans at Bandekee Orphanage in Thailand back in 2017. My friend and fellow yoga teacher Tammy Hayano was sponsoring the orphanage and invited me to co-teach a class.  That’s a photo of us doing “tree” pose with the kids.  They were beautiful, incredibly open-hearted and literally would not let us go when it was time to leave. In the van back to Chiang Mai, I was feeling grace and grief in the same instant. 

The American kids are not like the Thai kids.  Not at all. It takes more energy to engage them.  And I’m still not sure how to interpret the chaos: does the fact that a third of them are running around the gym screaming mean I have lost the room or that I have unleashed their inner Bodhisattva?

These kids have parents so there is no clinging when I leave.  But at the end of class last week, several of them insisted on telling me about their dead pets.  All of them: the dog, the cat, the snake. At this young age, they, like their Thai counterparts, already know loss. And I don’t dare tell them what lies ahead.

I am an unlikely yoga teacher. I can barely do half the poses. It was never a path I imagined myself on. But it was the door that opened at a time when others were slamming in my face.  And so I walked through. The woman that trained me, the brilliant @magipierce, says “the only way out is through.”  And so it is.

I am a good teacher. On the rare days when I am in the flow, a great one.  Doesn’t actually matter. Next Tuesday it will be time for kids yoga. Time to begin again.  Honestly, I don’t care if they learn a damn thing about yoga. I want them to have fun. And I hope, on some perhaps unconscious level, that they leave with an inner strength to face the unimaginable losses that lie ahead.  But, I remind myself, it’s just a “tree” pose!  And notice that the kids are undeniably cute.