kids yoga

Yoga By The Dozen™ promotes a healthy lifestyle for kids through their highly acclaimed ‘Yoga By The Dozen’ DVD and their complete line of lifestyle products for yoga.  The top-selling DVD is a fun, interactive children’s yoga video, designed especially for kids ages 2-6.  JoAnna and her 12 friends demonstrate a ‘dozen’ fundamental poses that will introduce your children into the exciting world of Yoga.

Key Benefits:

• Increase Cognitive & Motor skills
• Confidence, Courage and Self-Esteem
• Balance & Coordination
• Memory Retention and Concentration
• Nurture Creativity and Self Expression
• Respect for themselve and each other
• Proven therapy for kids with ADHD and Autism

JoAnna Ross, founder of Yoga By The Dozen™ is a life long performer. Having danced on Broadway for years she found her natural charisma clicked with kids.

About Kids Meditation

Hello!  I’m Zemirah.  It is my absolute pleasure to share these resources, ideas and activities with all of you.  I have spent many years studying and practicing relaxation techniques.  As a parent, storyteller, musician and school psychologist, I marvel and am deeply inspired on a daily basis as I encounter so much wisdom within the minds of children.  When I was a little girl and really until young adulthood, I struggled with anxiety that took many forms.  At the age of 23 I was handed a prescription and told by a therapist that I would probably always need to use it.  That was the day I set out searching and experimenting with every relaxation method I could get my hands on.  Eventually, after a couple years of trial and error, I found a set of techniques that worked for me and have been using them ever since.  Although I am completedly supportive of the use of medication when necessary, I never needed to use the prescription.  When my daughter also experienced anxiety and required intervention,  I realized and deeply felt and understood that sharing and making this information accessible to others,particularly children, was one of my life passions and purposes.  

I have spent the last ten years in inner city schools collaborating and sharing this information with children of all ages.  I currently live in Boulder, Colorado where I continue my daily experiementation with various forms of relaxation techniques, mindfulness practice, the structuring of a positive mind, conscious dance and yoga.  I hope this site is helpful for you and the children in your world.

Meditation helps students

           

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 NEWYORK                                                                                                                                                                                     New research appears to be strengthening the case for teaching transcendental meditation in U.S. schools, showing it to be a means to improve the concentration of students and a way to enhance their physical and mental well-being.

Proponents say that students who meditate daily are calmer, less distracted and less stressed and less prone to violent behavior.

A study conducted at the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta, Georgia, which will be published in the April issue of the American Journal of Hypertension, found that transcendental meditation reduced high blood pressure in African-American teenagers. The study tracked 156 inner-city black adolescents in Augusta, Georgia, with elevated blood pressures. Those who practiced 15 minutes of transcendental meditation twice daily steadily lowered their daytime blood pressures over four months compared to non-meditating teens who participated in health education classes and experienced no significant change.

Thetechnique was developed 50 years ago by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and consists of silently repeating a mantra for about 20 minutes a day. Itfound its way into classrooms 30 years ago after Robert Keith Wallace, a medical researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, published the first study on its positive physiological effects.

Since then, studies at universities like Harvard, Stanford and UCLA have shown that transcendental meditation can ease stress and enhance both physical and mental health and behavior.

Bolstered by these studies, groups of educators, parents and physicians across the United States have turned to transcendental meditation as a possible antidote to rising anxiety, violence and depression among students.Committees for Stress-Free Schools were established last year in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Chicago and other cities. These committees serve as information resources about the potential benefits of meditation for students and teachers.

"Transcendental meditation is a simple mental technique that can have profound physiological effects," says Gary Kaplan, a neurologist and clinical associate professor of neurology at New York University School of Medicine and chairman of the New York Committee for Stress-Free Schools. "It produces a state of restful alertness that provides the body with deep, rejuvenating rest and allows the mind to reach higher levels of creativity, clarity and intelligence."

However, initial efforts to introduce theteaching of transcendental meditation in schools were controversial. Opponents criticized it as a religious practice and in the mid-1970s a group of citizens brought a lawsuit against several New Jersey high schools, forcing them to withdraw their programs. At the time, a New Jersey court ruled that transcendental meditation had religious overtones and therefore could not be offered in a public school.

"The challenge lies in educating people that although transcendental meditation is rooted in the Indian Vedic spiritual tradition, it is not a religious practice," says Kaplan.

At the Fletcher-Johnson School, an elementary and junior high school in a rough Washington neighborhood, meditation has been reported to help to improve student performance and reduce fighting.George Rutherford, the principal who introduced transcendental meditation 10 years ago, said, "We saw immediate results."

He added, "There was a lot of violent crime around the school. But after we trained our students in transcendental meditation, they were calmer. There was less fighting, and attendance increased. Students scored better on standardized tests. Transcendental meditation helped to remove a lot of their stress."

Now, as principal at Ideal Academy in Washington, Rutherford is training teachers in transcendental meditation to combat teacher burnout.

At the Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse in Detroit, an elementary and middle school, students and teachers have been practicing transcendental meditation twice daily for the past seven years. Carmen N'Namdi, co-founder and principal of the school, says that "given the enormous stresses of today's world, children, like adults, need to learn how to rest and relieve tension."

Recent research spearheaded by Rita Benn, director of education at the Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine at the University of Michigan, found that meditating students at Nataki Talibah Schoolhouse were happier, handled stress better, had higher self-esteem and got along better with their peers than non-meditating students at another Detroit school.

In addition to improving the emotional and social development of children, meditation can also be effective in treating brain disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, according to a study conducted in April 2004 at Chelsea School in Silver Spring, Maryland, a private school for children with learning disabilities.

"We compared students before and after they learned transcendental meditation," said the principal investigator, Sarina Grosswald, president of S J Grosswald & Associates, a consulting firm in medical education in Alexandria, Virginia. "Kids who practiced transcendental meditation for 10 minutes twice each day for three months reported being calmer, less distracted, less stressed, and better able to control their anger and frustration."

Breath Meditation For Everyone

Nearly every contemplative tradition makes use of the breath.  I’ve discovered that simple breath meditations can transform students’ fundamental relation to themselves and the world.  In one meditation, I ask students to simply focus on their breath.  Here are the instructions: Close your eyes and take several deep, slow breaths.  Now allow yourself to breath naturally, and begin to focus on your inbreaths and your outbreaths.  Be present with your breath in the region of body where you observe it most clearly and distinctly.  It can be the in and out at the nostrils, or the rising and falling of the chest or the belly.  Don’t look for anything in particular.  Just observe whatever sensations and feelings are actually occurring moment to moment.  The breath may be slow or quick, regular or irregular, deep or shallow, steady or unsteady, warm or cool, moist or dry.  And the pauses between breaths may be long or short, regular or irregular.  If your mind wanders, which it naturally will, simply bring your attention back to your breath.  Be gentle with yourself.  It is natural for the mind to wander and to chatter, so each time you notice it wandering or chattering, simply refocus your attention on your breath.

            This bare attention meditation, which can be conducted for as few as two minutes, helps to clarify and concentrate attention and relax the mindbody.  It is called a “bare attention” technique because it requires the practitioner to simply observe the breath as it is -- without imposing ideas, visualizing images, projecting wishes and aversions, or making judgments, assumptions, and evaluations.   Nearly all students become aware of the busyness of their own minds -- of the insistent mental chatter.  For some this is a surprise; for others, it is a fuller realization of a familiar phenomenon.  The first time the meditation is done, some students will notice that the chatter diminishes as the exercise proceeds.   Repeating and lengthening the meditation on subsequent occasions will deepen its effects, and more and more students will benefit.  The continual bringing back of the attention to the breath gradually builds concentration.  Students also discover powers of inner perception they didn’t know they had.  Many, for the first time, are able to experience subtle and complex bodily sensations, such as the movement of their nasal hairs, the blockage or free flow of air through their sinuses, the expansion and contraction of their chest muscles, the elasticity or tightness of their belly muscles, the changing rhythms of breathing.  This meditation is quite powerful when practiced for ten or more minutes.

Meditation for Beautiful Skin

Would you like wrinkle-free skin that makes you look 10 years younger? Would you like to know how to have skin that so magnetizes people that it draws out compliments from all whom you see?

That's the kind of glowing skin that results from the correct type of natural skin care and meditation. No, not from cosmetics and facials but from meditation and natural supplements!

Meditation is one of of the few stressless practices in the world that can truly rejuvenate your skin, transforming all your cells and tissues. The effect of meditation, when practiced properly and consistently, is like an anti-aging pill that cleanses your skin and physical rejuvenates your complexion.

Meditation is natural skin care par excellence.

Here's why...

Meditation, which teaches you how to rest your mind, thereby causes the vital energies within your body to become unleashed and blossom in full flower. These "chi" energies traverse all the cells and tissues of your skin and slowly flood them with vitality, bathing them with life essence.

The masters of various spiritual traditions and especially the Chinese Taoists since they've focused on creating techniques that youthen your physical body have come to the conclusion that meditation is the best way to heal disease, defeat aging and help you look your very best, including rejuvenating your skin to maximum beauty.

Over time, meditation helps you lose weight, get rid of stress and develop a more beautiful shape and complexion that exudes a fresh vitality that all long to capture. If you are thinking of natural skin care products or anti-aging skin care methods, here's something you can do for FREE that will make all these techniques two, three, four, ... even ten times more effective. The results are remarkable if you do things right.

As a meditation teacher and nutritionist, over the years I've seen countless women improve their complexions virtually overnight by using a few deftly chosen natural skin care products while starting to meditate just a few minutes each day. If you learn the secrets of meditating properly, you, too, can take years off your looks rather quickly, and I do mean rapidly compared to alternative beauty techniques.

Over time, because of the demand and great results I was getting, I set about experimenting to determine what total package of limited, natural skin care products worked best in creating an absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, beautiful, younger, head-turning complexion.

The result is "Meditation for Beautiful Skin," which contains a variety of meditation and anti-aging skin care techniques that help produce beautiful skin ... along with the best nutritional supplements I've ever found that help cut years off your appearance.

Flute Meditation

Angel meditation music