What is Children’s Yoga Therapy?

Yoga therapy is the therapeutic use of body movement (sometimes known as asana), breath (sometimes known as pranayama), deep restful practices (sometimes known as yoga nidra), yogic philosophy, story and song to support holistic wellbeing. 

Yoga therapy can provide a platform to explore and bring together our body and mind experiences. It aims to help children and young people work towards embodied awareness that can help them to regulate and feel confident and knowledgeable about their intuitive responses. It can be particularly useful for children and young who struggle to access talking therapies or who are impacted by neurodevelopmental conditions.

I completed my 350-hour Children’s Yoga Therapy Teacher Training course with Creative Calm in December 2020. This course is accredited by the Independent Yoga Network and the British Psychological Society. I practice post-linage yoga and have had a personal practice for over 10 years.

Please note, I am only able to offer this approach to children and young people. If you are an adult seeking support for yourself from an embodied perspective, we can look to work from an embodied approach.

What are Embodied Approaches?

We live in a world that often asks us to override our embodied responses, especially when we are in less powerful positions, such as at school, in work, or dependent on others in our lives. Embodied approaches acknowledge the histories that bodies can hold and how these histories can cause us problems. Embodied approaches aim to give you the gift of agency over your own body. There is no map of how our embodied responses should or shouldn’t look. By creating a safe space to explore the territory of our bodies and get behind our intuitive responses, embodied relational approaches provide a framework to support body awareness and agency. By connecting to our bodies, we can gather information about what is going on, and think about how we want to use this information.

Sessions are tailored to fit the needs and preferences of individuals. They can include conversation, movement, breath, story, songs and rest.