By incorporating yoga into your child's night-time routine it will help them move their focus from everyday stressors to mindful movement and breathing. It will help calm your little one’s central nervous system and move it from the 'fight-or-flight' to the 'rest-and-renew' state, helping to soothe and prepare them for a restful sleep.
1. Cat & Cow pose
Alternating between Cat and Cow pose creates movement in the spine and in turn helps release tension in the shoulders, neck & spine.
2. Tree pose
This balancing pose helps bring about stillness to the body and concentration of the mind, this technique can help to relax a busy mind.
3. Happy Baby pose
This is a relaxing and restorative pose that focuses on stretching and releasing tension from the inner thighs, hips, groin, and hamstrings. This pose is a movement we see babies do naturally on their own when they discover their feet so and practicing Happy Baby can relieve stress while inviting feelings of joy and playfulness.
4. Child’s pose
This restorative yoga pose stretches the lower back and hips, calming the central nervous system. Child's pose brings our attention inward, we can then explore our internal landscape, releasing stress and finding stillness and calm.
5. Corpse pose
Pair this final relaxation pose with a body scan or any other guided meditation to allow the body to fully rest and relax. A body scan meditation is used as a way to tune into how your body is feeling at a moment in time. One way to do this would be to first ask them to activate and squeeze all their muscles tightly as they take a big breath in and then on their breath out to relax everything down. Then starting with their toes, tell them to relax that body part before you continue to move through every body part.