“Y” is for Yoga for Young Children

When it’s teatime for the 4- to 5-year-olds in Teresa Power’s yoga class, it could be in Alice’s Wonderland. Tea tables materialize as each child morphs into a perfect plane, arms and legs as straight as pillars. An experienced yogini, Power started practicing yoga in 1984, when she and husband Trip moved to Pacific Palisades. For the past seven years, she has been conducting half-hour yoga sessions for preschoolers and kindergartens at St. Matthew’s. With the insights she accumulated, she decided to publish ‘The ABCs of Yoga for Kids,’ which offers the basic asanas (poses) illustrated by Kathleen Rietz, along with simple, rhymed instructions, such as: ‘A’ pose is the Airplane. ‘I am an airplane/Heading for the sky. Lifting my chest, arms, and legs, I begin to fly.’ Power and Rietz will host Kids Pajama Story Time at Village Books on Friday, March 27 at 6:30 p.m. The day I observed Power’s session in Barbara Ingram and Rosie Strickland’s Preschool II class, the children were sitting comfortably in ‘Easy Pose,’ taking deep breaths in and out through their noses, legs crossed and backs straight. ‘We always come back to ‘Easy Pose,” Power says. The children then glided through the poses with ease: ‘Dog Pose’ for a count of 12; ‘Mouse Pose,’ which yoga practitioners will recognize as ‘Child’s Pose;’ and as the children arched into cobra, they were eager to add the ‘hisses.’ Power keeps a quiet dignity when leading the children. She performs the poses along with them, knows the children’s names’this is this class’s second year of yoga’and allows them an unexpected freedom. They play Simon Says, and ‘New Pose,’ which allows one child to create a new pose’any movement they want, which the class performs. ‘It was hard to match a pose to each letter of the alphabet,’ says Power, ‘so N became ‘New Pose.’ The ‘Do Nothing Pose,’ a mini shavasana or relaxing pose, is often used to begin and end a yoga session. So akin to cozy naptime, some children snuggled right in with thumbs firmly secured in their mouth. ‘I notice a difference with these kids,’ Power says. ‘Last year, some of them had difficulty staying tuned. But as with any discipline, the more you do it, the better you get at it. I see a difference especially with the boys. ‘If you start younger, they think it’s normal. Teachers say they love doing it and use some of the techniques in their classes.’ Power herself was originally drawn to Bikram’s Yoga’a challenging style of yoga practiced in a heated room and guided by specific number of poses’but has since modified her practice, although she still uses some Bikram poses, such as the ‘Tree pose.’ Her yoga sessions at St. Matthew’s were originally part of the after- school program, where her own children started yoga. Her daughter Kaitlyn is now 16 and attends Harvard-Westlake. She still practices and enjoys going with her father to Maha Yoga in Brentwood. Emmet, 14, is an eighth grader at St. Matthew’s.