A special Yogi friendship
Life is sweeter when you have someone to tell your secret to, share an inside joke, play a game, or listen to your story. For school-age children, friends are paramount. Establishing meaningful friendships is one of the major endeavors of this stage of life. Some children are naturally outgoing and make friends with ease. Others struggle to make and keep friends. Whether children are socially savvy or not, working out the rules of friendship is tricky business. There are several ways yoga can help.
Making friends in class
Yoga classes provide a fun environment where children can experiment with friendships. Classes include games, partner poses, sharing, and other turn-taking activities that provide opportunities to practice and negotiate friendship skills. The teacher can model communication skills and facilitate connection.
Inclusive ways of partnering
Inviting students to partner with someone can prevent children from feeling excluded. The best way to make everyone feel welcome, even the shy kids, is to have them pair with others they have not paired with previously, or group the children randomly. Count the students, divide them into two groups and have each group count up to the number of people in their group. Then the ones pair up, the twos pair up, etc. This system eliminates any awkwardness that shy kids might feel in trying to choose a partner and also eliminates the popularity factor.
Partner poses involve many aspects of initiating and maintaining friendships. First, you ask someone if they would like to partner with you, just like you would invite a friend to share in any activity. Then you tune into what the other needs in this shared pose while communicating your needs to another. Being able to say what you need and want is an important skill, as is listening and responding to what another needs. Kids get to practice this in a supportive environment with direction, and then try it in other areas of life with less oversight. The initial safe space interaction helps build confidence and allows kids to better enter into similar situations where the conditions are not as controlled.