Happy Birthday to Mini Me Yoga… I love you! 

Happy Birthday to Mini Me Yoga, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday Mini Me Yoga … I love you !

Mini Me Yoga has it’s 4th birthday this week and it’s all thanks to the founder Kate Bartram-Brown. Not only are we celebrating the past 4 years of bringing kids yoga, mindfulness and meditation to children, parents and educators but also all the hard work, dedication and the journey so far with so much more yet to come.

This week’s blog has come from the amazing and magickal lady and founder, Dr Kate Bartram-Brown.

Mini Me Yoga saved my adult life in so many ways, I had lost the joy and the love that children experience many years previously. I lived in a world where fun was something that was created on the outside, from things or other people. As life went on I found those things weren’t fun and in fact stressful to keep up the pretence that i was having fun.

One day after attending a class of what I call magick I had the idea that I wanted to write a kids self help book, something to help children have tools from an early age.  I had no idea what would be in store but I knew this was a life mission; something that didn’t matter whether I would get paid or not, more like i had to do it for the children of the world. For me that little girl still locked away inside that wanted to be happy.

By ‘chance’ or what i call magick,  I found what i was looking for, I would train as a kids yoga teacher to get some experience working with children. I loved yoga and wanted a new direction in my life so why not?

 

I was nervous and felt sick the first time I shared kids yoga with other grownups in the class, what if they didn’t like what i did ? What if they thought I wasn’t any good? All my adult fears started to come up, but some how I pushed through. (I actually think I was sick by the way and taught two other ladies, yes just 2 for a whole 5 minutes!) Looking back, I can’t believe that was me, but suffering from anxiety and depression from my early teenage years, now in my 30’s my self esteem was at an all time low.

After my training I decided to teach right away, my two friends owned pre schools which both had children with special needs in them. The morning of my first class was here, I was probably sick again, but something washed over me, a huge wave of emotion that made me feel so happy,  this continued for hours after like a natural high, yes I had found JOY.

It was so new to me, I thought it was the excitement of teaching and getting through the class, but day by day, each class I taught, the children got to know me and I them and we bonded. We worked on having fun, helping each other, exploring emotions, being in our body, using our voices and being silly. Things started to change, not only of the children but also for me, I was growing and so were they.

I taught 25 hours of kids yoga a week, I was exhausted but loved every minute of it. The highs and the lows, the special cases of children who need help, and I was armed and ready to help them. It became my mission that no child should be without simple tools to help them beat anxiety, stress or sadness.

I ended up creating, with my many children, a self help program that would do just that, not just using the yoga poses but also positive thinking techniques, meditation and water science.  We worked many hours over a good few years to get the receipe exactly right and the little ones showed me every step of the way. They showed me how to prevent children having mental illness from such a young age, how to find joy and in doing so, they saved me 100 times over.

You see Mini Me Yoga isn’t just for kids, its for us all, we all need that fun time, to find our joy, the little children inside each one of us needs it.

It was 3 years after my first yoga class that we launched globally, helping parents and teachers share that program with the children in their life.

Fast forward 4 years later and we are in 29 countries around the world and our materials have been translated into Spanish. French, Welsh, Irish and in the process is Japanese, Hebrew and Chinese.

And now as we celebrate 4 years of being global, we enter into a new era of working with schools on a much larger scale here in the UK, leading the way of improving mental and emotional well being in young children by training teachers and staff members to take the journey that I once did.

In this celebration, i want to thank all the grownups that have answered the call to their inner child, their own children or those that care for children. You are the real life heroes in this story, the celebrities that children look up to each day. I know its not always easy but being willing to do something different and be that child, we together, can make a difference in children’s life’s.

 

Such as the little boy of 8 that had anxiety and uses dragon breathe or the boy that had a violent father who learned to care for his friends in a loving way when showing emotions or the child that is on the spectrum and couldn’t stop screaming. I remember all of you, each one of you showed me how to be a better grownup and how to help other children. I want to thank you, all of you and let you know we did it, we are doing it, and will continue to do this for all those to come.

Happy Birthday to all of us and lets celebrate by practicing the magick of having fun together!