Barbara Neiman - Mindfulness & Yoga Skills for Children and Adolescents: 115 Activities for Trauma, Self-Regulation, Special Needs & Anxiety

Copyright 2015 by Barbara Neiman, OTR

Published by

PESI Publishing & Media

PESI, Inc

3839 White Ave

Eau Claire, WI 54703

Cover Design: Amy Rubenzer

Layout Design: Bookmasters

Edited By: Marietta Whittlesey

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-55957-012-1

All rights reserved.

Barbara Neiman is an Integrative Occupational Therapist, Yoga Teacher 200RYT in Embodyoga, a coach for professionals seeking a holistic practice and a National Seminar Presenter. She teaches courses on Yoga and Mindfulness around the country. She created her company, Health Discovery, in 1988, to provide services for infants through school age children. As a Certified Practitioner of Body Mind Centering since 1989, Barbara has taught experiential hands on, movement, and meditation classes to thousands. Find her blogs on her website at www.wakeuptowhoyouare.com.

We as humans are a connection of body systems, starting with the cells of an embryo emerging into patterns of cellular connection. As the physical structure develops, we see that support precedes movement, and the developing brain. We bundle our experiences emotionally, spiritually, anatomically and physiologically as we develop and grow, that layer into our tissues, accumulating layers of knowledge, and awareness, over- lapping, and interconnecting to become who we are. Drawing on these patterns, in the exploration of embodiment, we can find new teaching tools, new paths of learning about the body and brain. We can learn how to empower children and families with new tools and structures that they need in these complex times.

As we help children to notice a simple awareness of what they resonate with and want to move toward or away from, we are teaching a skill felt in the body that is a lifelong tool in making choices. While practicing the explorations here, we begin, unraveling, knowing, discovering, unknowing, embodying. Whether we stand still in mountain pose taking support of a yield of the skeletal system, extend our arms in a warrior 2 pose with organ awareness, or sit quietly watching our breath noticing the lungs, we have entered a new playing field. This embodied experience illuminates us as we live our daily lives, move, communicate, sense and feel to make connection with others and ourselves.

As we explore the mind of the body systems, such as the fluids, we experience the peace of meditation. Exploring basic neuro-cellular patterns of early development that underlie yoga poses, gives us information about psychological patterns. The studying of anatomy flows into a dance. The lack of support or overuse of a body system can teach us about our own somatic psychology.

Brain Body Tools are strategies that have evolved from my own somatic, experiential study of the relationship of the mind, body, and spirit. The study grew out of my good fortune to have met and trained with teachers who paved the way for my exploration giving me a framework to live by.

The journey to understand myself and thereby help others has become my lifes work. Meditation and the study of the body-mind connection dramatically impacted my skills and ability to help my clients. More profoundly, it taught me how to heal myself and gave me the wisdom to raise my child. My deepest desire is for you to do the same and to pass on tools of healing and self-discovery to those you love, work, know and live with.

I was introduced to the interconnectedness of the brain and the body at several critical junctures in my development. When I was 21, I was a modern dance student of Judith Komoreske in Palo Alto, California. Standing in front of a mirror in a garage, I had made a commitment to become a dancer. Every day, I practiced modern dance in the garage until I felt I was ready to try out for the advanced level classes.

Something powerful took place in those garage sessions. I began to connect to myself on another level. It was the beginnings of mindfulness although the word was not yet created. I stopped judging myself and approached my task patiently and open-heartedly. I redefined my identification of myself as a non-dancer to accepting myself in the present moment in my body. Instead of identifying with ideas that my body wasnt perfect, I began to ease into a space of the witness, watching myself act the role of the dancer. I explored movement principles, and worked with my muscles and brain on a deeper level. I surrendered to an emerging flow from within. To get the results I wanted, I had to live within my body and mind from that place of flow. It was shortly after this that I attended my first hatha yoga class and met my meditation teacher.

Practicing meditation has been my lifeline, helping me through junctures and crises and opening me up to an unfathomable depth of experience of my inner world. I have turned to meditation for answers through loss and deep despair. I never gave up my religion. I learned the power of going within. My experience was resolute and unwavering. No one could take it away from me, because I connected with my own self when I meditated. My family was not always supportive of my choices. Despite this, I trusted my yearning to go within for answers. I struggled with anxiety, anger and depression, but I found that as I quieted my mind, my rich wise inner self, full of light, and a sense of humor, welled up from inside to guide me. One doctor told me you can either do medication or meditation. I chose meditation.

After a year and a half as a volunteer on a rural hospital bus working side by side with doctors, nurses and holistic practitioners, the seeds were planted for my holistic journey and passion for integrative medicine.

In 1973, when I studied occupational therapy there was little discussion about the relationship of the mind and body. Dr. Jane Ayres, a neuroscientist and occupational therapist (OT) was breaking new ground in her work on sensory integration (the study of how we take in information through our senses and process it). The psychology field still believed the brain was fixed. She believed in neural plasticity and that the brain could change itself as we now have evidence of this. Although in 2013 there were many neuroscientists and neurobiologists writing about how the brain, emotions and stress are inter-related, few existed in the 70s. Frustrated, I was looking for the course that would delve more deeply into a body-mind connection. I enrolled in The School for Body Mind Centering founded by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, an OT, dancer, somatic therapist, teacher and author of Sensing, Feeling and Action.

I can remember my first day at the School for Body Mind Centering. One hundred of us all sat in a huge circle, each morning, and shared our life stories and reason for coming to study. It was a profound experience to enter into a community of healers, dancers, physical therapists, psychologists, and somatic educators. We studied anatomy every day by looking at a skeleton, did body work, movement, and discussion. This was the beginning of a four-summer exploration of Body Mind Centering, and later to be the central axis of my yoga study of Embodyoga.

Bonnies work resonated with the late Candace Pert, author of