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Hi! I'm Alicia Cesar, I'm a certified Child Life Specialist at Penn State
Children's Hospital and I'm also a certified instructor of yoga and
mindfulness. It's important to teach yoga and mindfulness to children experiencing
stress to give their bodies both a mental and physical exercise. Today, I'm
going to teach you about some of the techniques we use in the hospital to
decrease stress. Let's get started. This is an exercise called, breathing
buddies. So what we do is we start laying down on our back nice and relaxed and
we're gonna pick an animal, this could be a stuffed animal, an action figure, today
we're gonna use a bath toy. Whyatt has picked an elephant. So we put our stuffed
animal or our elephant on our belly and what we're gonna do is we're gonna take
our animal for a ride. So when we breathe in take a nice big deep breath, our
animal rises. And when we exhale out our animal falls. So this is a really great
way to introduce the breath, how to take a deep breath to young children and how
to control your breath as well. So Whyatt could make the ride really really fast
for his elephant if he wants to, or we can slow it down and let him climb up to
the top of his belly slowly and out down to the bottom of his belly slowly.
This exercise is called, Mouse Cat Dog and it's a little story to invite
some of our younger kids to participate in stretching. There are four poses
associated with this story and I'm going to explain them first before we get
started. The first pose is called, Child's Pose and we're gonna start kneeling on
our mat or a towel if you don't have a mat at home and sitting back on our
heels for this pose we're gonna bend our bodies forward with our head touching
our mat and our arms outstretched either behind us with our palms up to the
ceiling or in front of us on our mat to get a good back stretch. It will look
like this. [Music]
Our second and third pose is commonly known as cat cow but we are going to
call it, happy cat and scared cat. For a happy cat, we're gonna start on our hands
and knees and lift our head upward and our chest outward . For our scared cat,
we're going to move hands and knees to curl our spine in an upward motion.
They'll look like these. [Music]
Our last pose is called, downward dog. So we're also gonna start on hands and
knees and curl our toes underneath X pushing our weight into our heels and
our hips up to the ceiling . That will look like this. [Music]
Let's get our friends and get started! Once there was a tiny mouse. He was a
happy little mouse but along came a cat. The cat was very happy to see the mouse
as cats love to chase mice. Suddenly, though, the cat got very scared because
OH NO, here comes the dog . [Woof] And he wagged his tail with excitement as dogs love to
chase cats. This exercise is going to be some breathing techniques that we can
help give our kids control when they don't feel like they have much. Breath is
a great way to control whatever you have in whatever situation you're in. For our
first breath I'm going to be using this expanding ball to help visualize what a
big deep breath in looks like and what that exhale looks like as well, So, Carrie
here is going to be breathing along and we are going to start with a flower
breath . So she has her pinwheel here but you can also imagine anything, just hold
your imaginary flower and you're just going to imagine that you've picked a
very fresh flower. And we're going to take a deep breath in and sniff that
flower and exhale and let it out. And on your next deep breath in imagine what
your favorite flower would look like, what color it would be and let your
breath go. And one more time, smell that great floral fragrance. Again, and let it out.
The next breath we're going to do is called, a candle breath. So you can
imagine that you have a candle using your pointer finger and we're going to
take a deep breath in and blow out your candle similar to when you blow out
candles on a birthday cake. So you breath in and out, blow out your candle. Now the
next step is going to be more of a controlled breath, so this time, we want
you to take a deep breath in and let your candle flame flicker,
don't let it blow out. So it's a nice slow breath, you're gonna breathe in
and out, just letting your candle flame flicker. The third breath we're going to
do is up high in the face breath. So we're going to imagine that we have a
plate or a pipe and we're going to fill it up with whipped cream, so you shake
your whipped cream can, shake it up, take a deep breath in and exhale. Filling your
pie Shhhhhh [noise] Take another deep breath in and hold
your pie and throw your pie on your exhale. That's all we have for this time
thanks and hope you had fun with it. This last exercise is a series of poses
called the warrior series. It helps to promote strength and power. Our friend
Tiff is going to demonstrate for us. To begin the warrior series, you will start
with your feet planted shoulder width apart towards the top of your mat. Stretch
your arms upwards towards the sky and take a deep step backwards with one foot
like a lunge. This is warrior one. For warrior two,
turn your hips outward stretching your arms, take a big deep breath in and
exhale. For warrior two, you're gonna turn your hips forward again, lifting your
back leg with all of your weight on your right foot or a forward foot similar to
an airplane. This is warrior three. That completes our warrior series.
Thanks for watching this video. We hope you learned some useful yoga and mindfulness
techniques. For more information, please visit our website.
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