The Pressroom

Yoga for Kids at Birchwood Center

by Kim A. Steffgen

Nyack, NY (May 1, 2005) - Like a gentle hum, the sound of Ohm permeates the air during Betsy Ceva's Yoga for Kids classes at Birchwood Center in Nyack. But, usually, only kids hear it. "Ironically, this is one area where teenagers listen better than do adults", Ceva explains. With yoga's inner focus, kids "really do hear it."

Yoga has been gaining great popularity among the pre-teen and adolescent set. You might call it a self-esteem workshop, a body-image seminar or life coaching for teens. All would aptly describe the benefits students derive from Ceva's classes.

Sure, it gives them something to do, a place to belong, but Ceva, Birchwood Center's co-director, senses something more. Embarking on a career teaching dance to children in the '70's, Ceva initially saw yoga as a mere warm-up practice. But she soon noticed deep changes within herself that gave her profound respect for the mind-body relationship to movement. She wanted to share its magic with her kids, have them experience the same physical strengthening and spiritual empowerment.

"Children are busy, living almost as frenetically as adults," Ceva says. "Yoga gives them an opportunity to have moments of 'not doing'. Yes, we have lot of fun, but yoga is the journey they take to ultimately find stillness and quiet."

Akin to beginning yoga classes, kids' yoga slowly builds a repertoire of poses based on repetition of postures. Ceva helps kids arrive at the essential yoga with creative play. Exercises like the balance enhancing "Flying Warrior", or "Lump of Clay" -- one person is the lump, the other the artist who sculpts him into a yoga pose -- inform their body's potential.

Classes begin with a Talking Stick circle, continue with pranyama (breathwork), then move into brief meditation. Afterwards the children share what they 'heard'. "It is quite easy for kids to go into meditation, in contrast to the struggle adults often experience," Ceva notes.

In an era of diminishing funding for the arts in schools, Birchwood makes some of it available again to the region. Students are getting real benefits they are using in their daily lives, at school and at home.

One student, 11-year old Lyndon, has a mom who told him if he wasn't going to home school he had to choose one special thing. Lyndon chose to be Ceva's assistant. "Lyndon is going to be my guru some day," Ceva muses.

Another yogini has developmental challenges. "She's a big girl," Ceva says compassionately. "Yoga has given her self-control over her body. She loves to meditate and she loves me," she says with pride.

Nearing the end of class, the kids pick out a crystal, to lay on their heart chakras, and find an eye pillow before moving into Sivasana (Corpse Pose). In closing Ceva tells a story and rewards each child with grapes.

"My role," Ceva sums up, "is to remind my kids that they are beautiful and true just as they are…there is nothing wrong."

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