Squirrel Yoga?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 15 years of yoga experience (10 of serious practice), it’s that I’ve come to have a loose definition of yoga.

I use the word yoga to describe movements practiced with mindful attention to the shape of the body and the breath.

Language can be a funny thing, can’t it? As a writer and teacher, I know it takes a heavy dose of intention to accurately describe a thing (especially a thing that has the potential to be both simple and complex at the same time). Then, no matter how much care one takes in choosing one’s words, the listener or reader may still walk away with a completely different idea than intended.

When I tell my kids, “I’m going to do some yoga,” I simply mean that I’m going to get on my mat and move and breathe—I might do actual yoga poses and I might move in other ways too. But if I say to them, “I’m going to get on my mat and move and breathe,” they’ll say, “Okay mom, we want to do yoga too.” So I guess they too have kind of a loose definition of what it means to “do yoga”—they don’t know any different.

I have the privilege of sometimes teaching yoga at my daughter’s preschool. When I taught in her friend’s class last year, her friend reported to her mom (who is also my friend) that “We didn’t really do yoga. We just did fun things.”

So when I returned to the school to teach last week, I shared my definition of yoga with them. It was something along the lines of, “It might not look like what your mom or dad does if they go to a yoga class but what we’re doing counts as yoga because we’re paying attention to the shapes we’re making with our bodies and to the way we’re breathing.”

I wanted to share yoga related to Fall and that made me think of squirrels. A Pinterest search turned up several funny pictures of squirrels in what looked like yoga poses. I printed off a handful of the pictures and brought them with me to class. We discussed if the squirrels were really doing yoga or not or just moving their bodies in natural ways.

As I showed the children each picture, we made the shape of our bodies match the shape of the squirrels (to the best of our ability) and we made sure to take at least one breath with full attention. We stretched up for acorns. We did upward facing squirrel. We imagined what position a squirrel would sleep in and we put our bodies in those shapes. It was so much fun.

And at the end, we felt our hearts beating and allowed ourselves to feel the happiness and calm we created. We found a hand position (like a squirrel holding a nut) to help us return to the happy and calm if we needed it later in the day.

At one time in my life, I was a “yoga purist.” I was pretty serious about what was or was not “yoga.” Now, I’m more concerned with helping folks (and kiddos) find ways to add more movement to their daily lives because I know that it creates happiness and calm (and other things!). Sometimes it looks like yoga, and sometimes it looks like being a squirrel.