Why is family yoga so powerful? Everything works better with alignment and integration, including families. Yoga provides a space for family members to re-pattern energy flow to feel more grounded, centered and elevated as individuals and more connected as a family. Physically creating different shapes while maintaining breath and body awareness can lead to skillfully navigating and re-shaping stuck or misaligned family dynamics. Learning to recognize the light within oneself is paramount to seeing the goodness in others. When strength and flexibility are encouraged in the body, they show up in the mind and in relationships as well. Here are 11 tips to inspire and support you in teaching family yoga.

1. Invite kids and their “significant Grown-Up” as opposed to parent/mom/dad.
2. Allow one adult to bring more than one child or vice versa.
3. Offer a Family Yoga workshop to create excitement before launching a scheduled class or series.
4. Consider charging one rate for two people, $15 – $25 and only increasing it slightly, $5 or less, for any additional family members.
5. Communicate your expectations of the adult and child in advance of the class. For example, the adult does not need to repeat pose instructions or direct the child in any way and vice versa.
6. Include partner poses not just for the two who arrived together but also for the whole group, adult-to-adult, and child-to-child.
7. Plan a pose or two where a manual adjustment or assist is highly beneficial and then teach/demo what to do and give them time to play and help one another.
8. Use music selectively. There is already so much going on that music could distract.
9. Consider talking for a few minutes before or after Savasana in regards to how the practice can carry over into family life. How will their participation in class make a difference after they leave?
10. Get sensitive to the energy of the class and teach your students, not your plan. Be open to changing your pose sequences based on the dynamics of who shows up to class and remember chanting & mudras work for everyone.
11. Dual themes are great for classes where the age range is huge. For example, Listening & Being Heard,  Standing for what you believe in while still having the ability to be moved by others, The value in seeing the big picture and the details, and Balance with the specific two qualities like strength/flexibility, reflection/outward expression, certainty/doubt or giving/receiving.

Amy Haysman, E-RYT, RCYT, M.Ed and Co-Founder of Grounded

www.gogrounded.com