Wise man said: “But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
„Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: „we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
„How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
„You must be,” said the Cat, „or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The day started with a very serious subject – yoga philosophy and the Chakras system. The 8 Limbs of Yoga, especially Yama and Niyama (the yogi equivalent of the Ten Commandments) aren’t easy to understand even by adults, let alone to be followed. How to explain the meaning of concept as abstract as Bramacharya or Tapas to children? How do we teach them terms and yogi rules without focusing on feeding kids with gluten-free, vegan snacks and making them send love and light to everyone without any logical reason? (Logical for them). How to prize their individuality and focus their attention on the right direction? You have to gone mad.
So today, we had to come up with some ideas on how to incorporate yoga philosophy to children’s worlds and set them on the right path to become little yogis. To make it interesting for kids, we have to make it all crazy, colorful and fun, by choosing the right activities for children of different ages, incorporate age-appropriate poses, games, visualizations, meditation, breathing and art which for us adults, make no sense at all. It took a lot of talking and even more homemade chocolate bars to find the entrance to Wonderland. But I can feel in my guts, that we are doing a good job here.
Especially after an afternoon session with Sharikay, which gave us a taste on what happens when you enter the world of three year olds. This world is completely crazy! You start to see things that don’t exist, take their forms and produce silly sounds. You, yourself, are becoming a flying pig; a rolled mat; a branch of the tree and your favorite cushion; a rock falling down from a mountain straight to dirt. Can you imagine all of that? Kids can.