Ethos

Yoga Bananas™ aims to offer parents, yoga teachers and school teachers an informed, practical and personal approach to teaching children’s yoga. The programme follows the universal yoga ethos of equipping you with the tools to create, inspire and cherish all the children that you teach. The training course aims to open in you an awareness of your own gifts and strengths and potentialities. It aims to help you grow as a person by guiding you to understand a deeper connection with your own inner child and the children that you come into contact with. Each course is attended by only 3 participants at a time to ensure that this deeper level of awareness and creativity can be brought to the foreground.

The Yoga Bananas™ ethos aims to help a child identify his place within his surroundings and offer him stability. This knowledge will enhance a child’s feeling of self-worth and can boost his levels of confidence in the early years. A well-rooted confidence stands much less chance of being lost later in life. It is important to regard the service that you have to offer a child as ‘yoga care’, where your aim is to lead a child to embrace the present moment as a life affirming fact and encourage self-assurance by praising a child whenever you can. A child who can be made to feel secure within himself whatever is going on around him can more fully enjoy the positive aspects of his existence within an ever changing and competitive world, where for much of the time his influence is limited.

The Yoga Bananas™ Teacher Training courses have been formatted to cover all aspects of teaching children’s yoga including breathing, meditation, story telling, relaxation, visualisation and discipline. But a manual can only ever offer you a foundational knowledge. Your own experience of teaching children will guide you to a deeper understanding of children’s needs and a more fulfilling concept of the equality and respect that children and their mentors/parents should exercise towards each other. Your commitment and willingness to view life through the eyes of a child will secure you this understanding. It will make parents, yoga teachers and schoolteachers aware of the wonderful benefits of yoga as they see how your approach allows a child self-exploration in a safe and nurturing environment, irrespective of age and experience.

Why be bound by another's system?

Yoga Bananas™ does not subscribe to franchising. Franchising has too many drawbacks that clash with the Yoga Bananas™ ethos. Our ethos is to offer prospective students inspiration and empower students to create and build upon the solid and profound foundations that the course can offer for the good of all children. Franchising stifles this creative process as almost every aspect of operating a franchise business is laid down in an operations manual. This means that instead of teaching with a mind open to possibility there is a chance that teaching can become dull and repetitive. Our young children require us to look beyond this. In the words of William Blake, 'no bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings'

In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice.

Charles Dickens