Read an Excerpt
Itsy Bitsy Yoga
Poses to Help Your Baby Sleep Longer, Digest Better, and Grow Stronger
By Helen Garabedian Fireside
Copyright © 2004 Helen Garabedian
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0743243552
Introduction
A baby's most natural state is bliss. Open, curious, and content, babies are designed to give and receive love. However, sometimes a baby's true state falls a little off kilter and needs help to rebalance. Since babies do not come with instruction manuals, I teach parents and caregivers simple yoga-based movements and techniques to help free babies from suffering from digestion troubles and liberate their restlessness into peaceful sleep and happiness. You, as the caregiver, don't need any yoga experience to calm your baby and help him or her grow strong. All you need to do is breathe, love, and move!
What Is Yoga?
The word yoga has acquired many translations over the centuries. According to The Heart of Yoga, by T. K. V. Desikachar, meanings of the word include "to unite," "to come together," "to tie the strands of the mind together," and "acting in such a way that all of our attention is directed toward the activity in which we are currently engaged." Yoga gives us insight. The practice of yoga with a baby can help parents and caregivers bond with the baby more deeply, and understand how best to care for them. When parents come to my yoga studio, they are not distracted by the outside world. Yoga can bring moms and dads closer to understanding and supporting their child's intentions, needs, and desires. Through yoga, babies sense their parents' trust and deep commitment to understanding and responsiveness as they move forward in developing their physical, social, intellectual, and emotional skills in the way that is aligned with each child's highest destiny.
What Is Itsy Bitsy Yoga®?
Itsy Bitsy Yoga is a unique blend of yoga postures, infant developmental movement, and parent/child bonding. In this book, you will find nearly seventy easy-to-learn and practical poses and techniques that benefit your child from birth to twenty-four months old. I have intertwined the cross-cultural jewels from the wisdom of an infant's moving body, yoga, and the latest research in the field of infant development to deliver a developmentally nutritious movement program for a parent and baby to enjoy together.
In teaching yoga to facilitators and thousands of babies, toddlers, and parents, I have seen firsthand the benefits of yoga for babies: better sleep, improved digestion, relief from gas pains and mild colic, a stronger immune system, and an increase in body awareness and self-confidence.
The Birth of Itsy Bitsy Yoga
As a certified yoga teacher and infant developmental movement educator, I examine Hatha Yoga postures with the intention of adapting them for the nonverbal baby to do with or without a parent's help. The culmination of my professional background, twenty years of yoga and meditation practice, and a lifetime of study and experience in caring for babies and toddlers, is evident in Itsy Bitsy Yoga. Itsy Bitsy Yoga teaches parents how to support their baby's physical development and movement as nature intended. As much as possible I will tell you the role yoga plays in your child's development so that the experience and rewards are richer for you.
Not everything in this book is yoga in a traditional sense. I also translate the movements of an infant's natural developmental progression into playful practices. Many of my students are especially impressed that my poses and techniques are able to calm their babies so well.
I will show you how certain positions play a necessary role in your baby's physical development. I'll help you support your baby's physical development and the natural flow of unfolding gross motor skills. Lack of awareness in positioning, holding, or moving an infant can result in future lower back problems, reading difficulties, and challenges in focus.
The History of Baby Yoga
It is my belief that over thousands of years ago when yoga was first developing, yoga masters studied the movements of babies to create postures, or asanas. Through the practice of yoga, adults are returning to the unrestricted innocence and bliss of infancy. In a sense, yoga for babies has always existed. It is part of what babies do naturally. However, the natural movement babies need to experience is being reduced with the overuse of confining baby-holding devices such as infant car seats, walkers, seated activity centers, and strollers.
Yoga Is Natural for Babies
This photograph illustrates how an infant's development mirrors Classical Hatha Yoga postures developed more than five thousand years ago. For example, a baby coming up to a walking stance reflects the Downward Facing Dog Pose in Yoga.
Babies who are new to walking move into Downward Facing Dog repeatedly to transition from the floor into standing. Down Dog (as I like to call it in Itsy Bitsy Yoga) also occurs earlier in development when a baby is almost crawling. Throughout the book, I will explain what role Down Dog and other traditional Hatha Yoga postures play in your baby's development.
Top Five Reasons Why Babies Are Natural Yogis (yoga students)
1. Like yogis, babies prefer to breathe through the nose.2. Like yogis, babies are only concerned with the present moment.
3. Like yogis, babies love unconditionally.
4. Like yogis, babies practice nonviolence.
5. Like yogis, babies practice yoga postures naturally as part of development.
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