Today I’m excited to introduce you to Stacey Nelson, a yoga teacher with over 10 years experience teaching kids and teens through her own programs, in schools, working as a yoga therapist in a hospital, creating video content for Food Matters TV and running a kids and teens yoga teacher training that’s perfect for people like you and me, who may not be yoga teachers, but who want to share some of the benefits of mindfulness and yoga with our students. She’s got 5 tips for us in this episode so we can get started right away – yay!

Stacey is a much-loved guest teacher in our Youth Mentor Training, who spent a few hours with us during an in-person training weekend to teach us how to share some yoga techniques with our students.  It was wonderful and I know that many of them still love to watch the video of Stacey as she guides us all through a class for teens.  She runs regular kids yoga teacher training workshops on the Sunshine Coast, QLD Australia and we can’t recommend her enough!

Some of my favourite parts of this interview include:

• Make sure you give your students something to do before you ask them to be still.  Simply asking them to squeeze and release each muscle so they can feel the contrast of using a muscle vs being still.
• How to guide young people through diaphragmatic breathing, deep down into the belly for instant calm.
• Teaching mindfulness to bring young people back to the present moment.
• Her experience of working in schools and how open they are to yoga techniques in the classroom.
• Being vulnerable with young people and dealing with ‘attitude’.
• Encouraging young people to embrace the positive side of technology.
• Remembering that we can keep it really simple for our students.

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I’d love to know from you – have you taught some of these techniques to teens before?  And if not, do you think you’ll give them a try?  Comment below to let me know!

And, if you’d like to work with teens yourself, come on over and download our free quiz – Have You Got What It Takes to be a Youth Mentor?