Family Bonding with Family Yoga
Do you believe that family bonding is an important key for success and happiness at all levels?
Many people go through life not knowing where they belong and this can affect their self esteem which plays a major role in a person’s ability to succeed in life. Through consistent effort to communicate with family members, we can strengthen family love, respect for each other and the sense of belonging. Isn’t the best feeling in the world being able to go to a place where you call home where your loved ones are?
One of the best advices to cultivate healthy family relations is to participate in activities where the whole family can bond together and spend special moments together where everyone can feel close, experience acceptance and unconditional love from the people who mean the most in their lives. Such activities would ideally provide spontaneous opportunities for all members of the family to express affection towards each other, recognise positively in each other the special qualities (including the quirkiness), praise or encourage each other, share ideas and listen to each other with full attention. This kind of environment can bring about a lot of healing for the whole family. And even as families grow and change over time, they would have nurtured the skills to keep family relationships happy and healthy.
A parent, Sheila Devi shares with Yoga Mail readers her experience in Family Bonding with Family Yoga.
Meet Sheila’s boys: Arjun Kumaran (9 yrs), Kishin Kumar Kumaran (7 yrs), Praveein Kumaran (4yrs)
Sheila: “It made good sense to enrol in Family Yoga at Super Yoga Kids (SYK) since Arjun was already attending the Super Yoga Kids regular class and his younger brothers wanted to join in too. As for me, it’s the best of both worlds as I get to learn yoga while spending meaningful time together with my children. This is especially advantageous for me as a working parent and time is precious.
During the Family Yoga sessions parents and children are fully involved and help us to develop our relationship. Usually when parents send their children for extra-curricular classes, parents are not involved and they may only observe on the side line. Or during typical Malaysian family time like watching movies together, we are not having any interactions with each other until after the movie.
But in Family Yoga this is not the case. Parents get an opportunity to be role models for the kids. Like when I attempt to do a yoga pose, my children will say “Hey, look! Mum is doing it.” (Maybe they think, “Mum’s cool…”) and they feel even more motivated to follow and learn. This gives children another perspective of their parents as they are really taking an interest in learning and doing what they are learning too.”
Sheila’s favourite part of Family Yoga: “We especially love the blanket massage game as it has fostered so much better relations for all of us especially between Arjun and Kishen (somehow they tend to have more disagreements with each other). I would also play with them this game when we are at home together and it really brings us all closer to each other in terms of expressing our affections unconditionally. It’s a lot of fun. There are also many other games that we have learned which we now include in our family play time at home.”
Sheila’s observation of positive changes: “Arjun is rather timid by nature and the Family Yoga sessions really give him a chance to come out of his shell, unlike other classes where other children are involved and he tends to retreat. He has learned to speak up more and can open up better during activities.”
Fringe benefits: “We are all more aware of our health and how to take care of it from the yoga perspective. Recently I even participated in the yogic full intestinal cleansing here at Yoga Franchise which has helped improve my sinus condition, and I have not suffered any gastric pains since. Even my husband commented that my immune system has improved greatly as I am usually the first in the family to succumb to a bug if there is one. He has even encouraged me to do the cleansing again in the future.”
Family Yoga sessions at Super Yoga Kids are conducted by certified instructors!
This article was featured in YogaMail Oct-Dec 2011 issue.
