Heart Yoga
PAW Patrol Pups, Bubble Guppies, Bot, and other Noggin friends love to practice yoga moves with kids and their grown-ups.
When kids do yoga and breathing exercises, they’re practicing skills that can help with self-regulation — taking a pause between having a feeling and acting on it.
Parents and caregivers can help their children learn to self-regulate by co-regulating. Co-regulating is when adults provide warm, responsive interactions that give children the support and modeling they need to learn to regulate their own thoughts, feelings and behaviors (Murray et al. 2015, 14). In other words: you help your child learn by showing them how it’s done!
Practice Heart Yoga together and talk about how your body, mind, and heart feel. Visualize sending love to one another!
Parent/Caregiver Tip: This heart-opener yoga pose is great for adults and children alike! Cuddling, hugging, feeding, and caring for young children (in addition to many other daily tasks) put adults in a hunched position, causing tension in our necks, backs, and shoulders. Heart-openers help to relieve this tension. Taking care of your body will help you relax, so that you can take better care of yourself and the other people in your life.
Heart Yoga
Discussion Questions
- Let’s practice heart yoga together!
- Let’s lie on our stomachs with our heads close to each other’s and our feet pointing in opposite directions. Let’s bend our elbows and put our hands, palms down, near our shoulders.
- Now, let’s lift our heads, shoulders, and bellies off of the floor by pressing down on our hands. Let’s rest on our elbows and aim our hearts at one another. This is called “Sphinx pose!”
- Let’s imagine that our hearts have tiny lights inside that represent our love. Let’s send love to one another like beams of light shining from our hearts. Now let’s lower ourselves back down to the ground.
- Next time, let’s press up even higher, supporting our heads, shoulders, and bellies on our hands — this is called “Cobra” pose! Let’s beam our heart lights even brighter this time, and then lower ourselves to the ground again.
- If we’ve learned Sphinx and Cobra, we can try the King Cobra pose by moving through Cobra, then bending our knees to bring our feet close to our heads. Remember to shine your heart light!
