93: Teaching Kids Yoga Has Lessons For Us All with Crystal McCreary

The Mentor Sessions

Teaching yoga to kids has the potential to be incredibly impactful for kids and their communities, but there are many challenges that arise when we try to take the deep and meaningful teachings of yoga and make them developmentally appropriate without losing the heart of the teachings!

Lucky for us, today we have Crystal McCreary on the podcast to talk about how to model and teach yogic practices that are empowering and transformative for kids, ourselves, and our world.

And even if you don’t teach kids yoga, I think you will get SO MUCH out of listening to this conversation. It turns out that learning to teach children well holds many lessons for teaching adults skillfully also.

Crystal McCreary (she/her) is a yoga, mindfulness, and health educator, actor, speaker, and writer. Crystal’s programs emphasize self-care as the gateway to social justice and community healing and she works full-time as a health educator at an independent K-12 school in New York City.

In this episode we’ll answer questions like:

• What are the biggest differences between kids facilitation and adult facilitation?
• How do you bring in the philosophy and dharma elements of the practice in a way that is developmentally appropriate?
• How do you teach yoga to kids in a way that helps them cultivate empathy, curiosity, kindness, emotional balance, and compassionate action?
• Where do you stand on whether or not yoga can be considered secular?
• Does kids yoga belong in schools?