When did you learn that you could control your thoughts?

You may know already that I have four daughters. Three of them are tweens.

What is a tween, anyway?  From my perspective, a tween is someone who identifies as a teen (or an 18-year old), but is still just a kid. So… there is a lot going on in their young inner worlds. 

My girls have BIG feelings.  One is quiet about them and writes them all down in her top-secret diary (or diaries, she’s filled a few). One keeps them all inside and explodes every couple of months. One explodes daily.

We do all the “things.”  Sleep and diet are a priority. We are super-light with device time and keep their schedules reasonable.

One of the most important things we do is teach them that they are not their thoughts and they are not their feelings. Thoughts and feelings are like waves that move through them. The more they get caught up in them, the more painful their experience is.

One of my daughters, Lily, is learning this now. She is in a phase where she sees things through a negative lens.  If one friend doesn’t want to play with her, this means NO ONE wants to play with her. If I ask her to do a chore, this means she has to do EVERYTHING.

When she sees things through this negative lens, the behavior that she exhibits is often negative as well.  She is eight. She gets caught in this loop of negative thinking leading to painful emotions, which leads to negative behaviors, which leads to more negative thinking and so on.

You get it. You’ve been there. We all have.

I started catching onto this loop in my 20s. When I was a kid, nobody taught me that I could control my inner experiences of emotions and my outer experience of behaviors by becoming aware of and controlling my thinking.

No one ever taught me I could control my thoughts.  

It wasn’t until I started practicing yoga that I began to make the connections between my automatic thinking and my emotional landscape. It wasn’t until much later that I made the connection between my inner world and my outer world.

I don’t want my girls to have to wait as long as I did.  

We used to offer kids yoga during the week at my studio, MindBodySoul Yoga + Wellness.  We had it on the schedule for a long time and classes were small and inconsistent, so we canceled the program.

I’m inspired to bring it back at MindBodySoulYoga + Wellness for a specific age group.  But this is not kids yoga. We aren’t going to be barking in Downward Dog or hissing in Cobra. We will be teaching the true tools and tenets of yoga to kids ages 8-13.

We will teach students to observe what they are thinking and feeling in the moment. We will teach them how to use yoga poses to connect with their physical body in the present moment. We will teach them how to connect the movement of their bodies with their breath.

There will be breathwork, movement, meditation, relaxation, and even journaling.

One of our amazing teachers, Liz Livingston, will lead this class. She and I have been talking about this class for a long time, and now is the time to offer it.

If you have a child this age or know someone who does, please consider having them join to learn the tools that most of us learned in adulthood.

Class will be held Mondays and Wednesdays from 4 - 5pm, $15 drop-in per class.

Here’s to changing the world by changing our minds!