Laughing yoga is a combination of deep controlled breathing, stretching and forced laughter
that engages your core and improves lung capacity, even in children. Madan Kataria, M.D.,
author of "Laugh for No Reason" and founder of Laughing Clubs International, claims that
laughing yoga helps build self-esteem and self-confidence. When children participate in
laughing yoga it teaches them how to freely express their emotions and stay in a positive
frame of mind. Teaching children laughing yoga should be simple and fun, with emphasis on
breath and intellectual engagement.
Step 1
Teach only three to five poses at a time. A laughing yoga session for a child should last no
more than 30 minutes. Keep children interested by stimulating them intellectually while
teaching the poses. If you are teaching the Lion Face pose, have them relate to you how they
would roar if they were a lion, how they would laugh if they were a lion. The key is to get
them to relate what their body is doing with a visual, adding a funny twist to help them laugh.
Step 2
Begin your laughing yoga class with ha-ha-ha mountain pose. The ha-ha-ha mountain pose
helps encourage children to participate in the laughing yoga class by breaking the silence in
the room. This pose is excellent to begin with because it requires no prior knowledge of the
pose and always causes an eruption of laughter. Have the children begin by standing with
their feet together, toes apart, shoulders up tall and hands on their bellies. Have them inhale
and feel their bellies expand; as they exhale, have them force out a ha-ha-ha. Repeat this four
to five times and the room is laughing.
Step 3
Incorporate stretch poses into laughing poses. Add deep belly laughter to standard stretching
yoga poses for children, such as rag-doll, frog and butterfly. A simple way to do this is to
teach different laughs with different poses. Have the kids help by letting them tell you how
the laugh should be for each stretch: for example, a butterfly laughs fast, a frog laughs deep, a
rag-doll laughs silly. Chose one child to assign a laugh to a pose and then have the class
follow, or give them a free-for-all, letting everyone incorporate their own laugh into the pose.
Step 4
Teach breathing control by varying the speed and depth of the laughter. Learning proper
breathing technique can be challenging for children. One way to ensure they improve their
breathing technique is to teach it through laughter speed and depth. Deep slow laughter helps
improve deep breathing, while quick light laughter helps improve inhalation through the
nose.
Step 5
Keep it fun. Hold their interest in the poses by keeping the class simple. One pose should
only be held for one to two minutes at a time, and there should be free, or down, time in
between poses. One good standard move to help children focus is to do wiggle-worms or get
the wiggles out in between poses. To do the wiggle-worms or get the wiggles out, have the
kids stand frozen like statues and then cue them to wiggle as fast as they can, then call freeze
for them to stop. Repeat the wiggle movement two or three times in between each pose.
Questions to help children know and
understand themselves:
1. What are your strengths?
2. If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Why?
3. What are your goals for this school year?
4. Who do you talk to when you have a problem? How do they help?
5. What do you like to do for fun?
6. What are you worried about?
7. What do you wish your parents knew about you? What do you wish
your friends or classmates knew about you?
8. If you could have one wish, what would it be?
9. What do you feel ashamed of?
10.Where do you feel safest?
11.If you weren’t afraid, what would you do?
12.What does failure mean to you? Have you ever felt like a failure? How
did you cope?
13.How can you tell that you’re getting angry? What does your body feel
like? What are you thinking?
14.How are you different?
15.What’s something that adults (parents, grandparents, teachers, etc.)
say to you that’s really stuck with you? Do you think they’re right?
16.What do you do when people don’t seem to like you?
17.What is your proudest accomplishment?
18.What things are in your control? What’s out of your control? How does
it feel to notice that some things are out of your control?
19.What do you like about your school? What do you dislike?
20.What do you do when you’re stressed out?
21.What’s something nice you could say to yourself?
22.What is your happiest memory?
23.What do you do when you’re feeling down? Do you think it’s OK to cry?
Do you think it’s OK to yell?
24.What is your favorite book? Movie? Band? Food? Color? Animal?
25.What are you grateful for?
26. What do you like about yourself?
