Being a Perfect Yoga Sloth & How It Can Help You Today

We have so much to learn from sloths… Seriously!

Our world is so fast and it’s getting really hard to be human (especially a human child) in a not (anymore) so human world.

We are always rushing, always trying to achieve something, get somewhere, do stuff… That’s why we are so stressed! This is also why it is so hard for us to be in quarantine.

We forgot the art of being a perfect sloth.

There is a body-mind connection here; we go so fast and our mind starts racing too. And at a certain point, we don’t even know how to slow down anymore. I’m definitely at this point.

 

Over the centuries, people have derided sloths (and teenagers) for being either stupid or lazy or a combination of both, but have you ever thought they might just be onto something? 

After all, they always kind of look like they’re smiling (not teenagers necessarily). 

Don’t you wish you could have that serene expression on your face every now and then? 

Everyone deserves to relax sometimes, be let off the hock and fully embrace and enjoy being as cool as a cucumber.

Learning to slow down can really help us enjoy the little things in life.

To be a proper sloth you should allow yourself to just let go and relax a lot more often. Make sure you get enough sleep, take a walk through the park or a long bubble bath, make a real dinner…

We humans should realize that although we may be (doubtfully) the most intelligent of the species, that does not mean there aren’t things we can’t learn from other species. And who could possibly teach a better lesson about how to relax than the sloth? Exactly!

Why slow down? In a world that often feels more fast-paced, busier & more hectic than ever, it’s easy to get swept up in the feeling of needing to do more, just to keep up.

But the trouble is, sometimes we spend so much time and energy trying to keep up and fit everything into our days that we can’t even enjoy any of it!

If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, frantic or like you’re always rushing from one thing to the next, learning how to be a sloth may be just what you need.

A sloth would have enjoyed this very different era of COVID-19 that mostly stopped our lives, and so can we if we really try (or try less).

When you intentionally slow down your days and your life, it helps you become more present and mindful in each moment. And even better, when you aren’t rushing from one thing to the next, struggling just to keep up, life can be a lot more enjoyable!

But learning how to slow down isn’t always easy. It takes intentional effort to resist the societal norm that “busy is better”, or that being busy equals productivity and importance, and choose to be a proper sloth.

Maybe you’re ready to slow down, but don’t know exactly how to do it. How do you get out of the fast lane and embrace a slower pace of life?

The answer is in this little sloth yoga class below for your enjoyment, and we recommend that you do it as a whole family of truly royal sloths! 

Sloth Time & Sloth Speeding Tickets

The goal of this exercise is to help all of us slow down and practice observing what’s going on around them. 

And any of you can bring in at any time of the class simply by saying “Sloth Time”! 

So whenever anyone calls “Sloth Time”, everyone needs to stop and look around like a sloth in a VERY slow, exaggerated fashion. 

Take turns sharing details about what you see and notice around you that maybe you haven’t before. It can be objects that you notice, sounds, people or even behaviours.

You can even make it more multi-sensory, grounding yourself through the senses and taking a moment to name:

  • 5 things you can see

  • 4 things you can feel

  • 3 things you can hear

  • 2 things you can smell

  • 1 thing you can taste

A great mindfulness exercise!

ANY TIME you notice anyone going a bit too fast or faster than a sloth would give each other “speeding tickets” just to be super helpful in making sure that everyone is taking in real easy.

Sloth Breath

Deep breathing is another great way to slow down when you find yourself feeling rushed, busy or overwhelmed.

Try taking 3 deep breaths, inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth to help release some of the stress and busyness so you can find more calmness and slow down.

Now that we are sloths, let’s try this slow and deep breathing in all kids of sloth situations…

  • Sitting

  • Lying on your back

  • Lying on your belly

  • Lying on your side

  • The other side

  • In Child Pose

  • In your favourite Yoga Pose

  • In Tree Pose

  • In Mountain Pose

The Slowest Sloth Sun Salutation EVER!

The whole family (you can do it just by yourself, of course, too) can follow a designated leader in a very slow Sun Salutation. No instructions are necessary. After a couple of rounds, challenge yourself (or everyone) to do it slower… And next round slower… And slower…

Eventually, do it so slow you barely move and it takes you ages to transition from one pose to another.

There is no “too slow” here. Go as slow as you can!

And it is good for you too! Besides helping to slow the mind, in some poses, you may find that going slow will challenge your core strength as well.

SLOW ________

What else can we do SUPER SLOW in a sloth-like manner?

  • How about the slowest pillow fight in the universe?

  • Slowest race - Race each other across the room - The slowest one wins of course!

  • Slowest dancing

  • Slowest eating

  • Slowest smiling

  • Slowest yawning

  • Slowest breathing - Measure it!

Let everyone come up with more ideas of anything we can do super slow.

It’s fun!

Sloth Poses

Choose a few of these Yin poses to stay in for a while, up to 3 minutes in each. You want poses that will help you become still in body and mind, poses they can relax into.

Here are some of my favourites:

  • Standing forward bend (and you can even lean with your bum against the wall)

  • Seated Forward Bend (can be with legs together or with feet apart)

  • Turtle Pose

  • Sphinx Pose

  • Butterfly Pose

  • Reclined Pigeon

  • Child Pose

  • Happy Baby

  • Reclining Twist (do both sides)

Cloud Watching

Perfect for bringing more calm on a partly cloudy day!

Lie down on your back and look up, or look out of your window, or spread out a blanket in a shady spot (so you don’t have to squint so much but can still see up into the sky) and watch the clouds pass by.

You can even play the alphabet game, looking for clouds shaped like something that starts with each letter.

Connecting to nature always helps. Watch and see for yourself.

If there are no clouds, you can watch trees.

If you are indoors and there are no windows :-( you can imagine clouds in your mind.

None of this should feel like an effort or an achievement... Simply let it all go and embrace your inner sloth.

Receive weekly class plans and a lot more to support your teaching practice to children, teens and families with the Rainbow Yoga Inner Circle here

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MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE WITH YOGA AND MINDFULNESS

Rainbow Yoga trained more than 30,000 Kids Yoga Teachers since 2007. We make yoga fun for children and young people of all age groups and for the whole family too! Our yoga consists of many poses and stretches that have different physical benefits for our health and well-being, breathing, relaxation, meditation and mindfulness exercises for our minds, and social interaction, playfulness, meaning, deep life lessons and fun for our spirit.

Thinking about the impact of all those amazing certified yoga teachers, educators, parents and therapists we have trained to teach yoga to children and yoga for teens; we are making a huge difference for the next generation bringing peace, love, kindness and resilience into their lives. Education departments, schools, health programs and individuals in many countries have adopted yoga as a form of exercise and a method to decrees stress and increase wellbeing. We are the biggest and most-loved kid’s yoga teacher training in the world and we are here tp provide you with everything you will need to teach successful, exciting, meaningful, engaging and fun yoga to children, teenagers and families.

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Rainbow Kids Yoga offers the most comprehensive, practical, and engaging children yoga teacher training certification in the world! Our course will enable you to deliver children yoga classes that will connects your students to themselves, each other, and the environment. Through unique and engaging practices of mindfulness and yoga your students and community will be able to find connections, enhance well-being and thrive as grounded, integrated and well balanced individuals.

At our training, all while having fun, you will become a children yoga instructor through a lot of experiential practice, insightful theory, yoga poses and sequences, mindfulness practices and relaxation. You will learn how to build fun, engaging, and fitness-level-appropriate children yoga classes for all ages, from toddlers to teenagers. At our kid’s yoga teacher training you will find over 300 videos presenting how to make yoga poses accessible and fun! Believe it or not, yoga can be extremely boring for children and for adults too… In Rainbow Yoga, we make yoga in a fun so that children learn easily and want to do more of it. Yoga is so good for you, but for children to want to want to do yoga you will need to learn to spice it all up and this is what our kid’s yoga online teacher training is for!

This is the perfect resource for yoga teachers, parents, educators and therapists to find and discover hundreds of yoga poses, yoga games and mindfulness practices for children in a way that makes it is easy to learn and easy to enjoy.

Yoga poses for kids: Yoga encourages a positive and healthy lifestyle for the physical, mental, and emotional well-being of children as it helps in the development of strength, stamina, and endurance, high levels of positive energy, resilience, focus, self-awareness, and awareness of our environment.

Yoga for children empowers them with increased concentration, calm, peace, and contentment at a mental level leading to inner and outer peace and harmony. The Rainbow Kids Yoga Teacher Training includes a digital manual (a hard copy that can be purchased) as part of the course. This is specialized online yoga teacher training. Here we will focus on how to teach yoga to children and teens, and how to help them release stress, relax, stretch, energize – All in creative and fun ways while taking into consideration their unique needs, whether they are physical, social, mental, or emotional. 

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AFFORDABLE LEARNING AT YOUR FINGERTIPS

Join our Yoga Revolution and become a kids’ yoga teacher today through our online yoga teacher training or in-person yoga certification courses. You will be left with a smile on your face, a wealth of knowledge and an ignited spirit to spread the love and joy of yoga.

For our online training, you can allow 24 hours to receive your access and for physical products such as the Rainbow Kids Yoga Book, you can allow 2-4 weeks to receive it by mail. The books are printed on demand before being shipped, but it is worth the wait 😊

HISTORY OF RAINBOW YOGA

Rainbow Yoga is a fun and constantly evolving family mission and lovingly born in 2007, to give people the tools to teach fun, engaging, and creative in=person and online yoga classes for kids, teens, families, partners, and communities. Rainbow Yoga is interactive and social and all about connection; we touch, hug, move, breathe and co-create together our yoga magically and playfully.

Rainbow Yoga offers a variety of unique and comprehensive teacher training certification courses all over the world offering a well-rounded, in-depth learning experience through a combination of play, practical theory, and fun.The Rainbow Yoga Teacher training is renowned for being captivating, dynamic, loving, and life changing. It is condensed with a lifetime of knowledge and hands-on experience from the Founders of Rainbow Yoga, Gopala, and Angel Yaffa. Delivered by world-class faculty around the world.