By Lara Hocheiser, Flow and Grow Kids Yoga Founder, Director, and Teacher Trainer and Kathryn Boland, Flow and Grow Kids Yoga Blog Manager and 95-Hour Training Graduate
Through late 2020, I worked hard on writing Mindfulness for Beginners in 10 Minutes a Day: Mindful Moments to Bring Clarity and Calm to Your Morning, Day and Night. It just released on pre-order, and I’m so excited to share it with you.
My main goal with this book is to help people learn and maintain a mindfulness practice with no barrier to entry. No prerequisite practice is needed. Yet if you have been practicing, you can still do these meditations to come back to yourself. For example, I wrote this book through the grief of losing my best friend. It reconnected me to the path that she and I walked together for some time.
Additionally, my writing process had an intriguing parallel to mindfulness practice itself — the hardest part can just be showing up, but if you show up magic can happen. The writing itself was quite easy, but — you might be interested to know — the hardest part was getting up the energy to write. It would sometimes take hours to write for just thirty minutes, but in that thirty minutes I would perhaps write five to seven exercises.
Once you show up and get started, taking that short amount of time, you might very well find yourself sticking around, so to speak; the great thing about these practices is that once you get started you tend to want to keep going. For instance, for me personally, while writing this book and after that process my personal practice went from extremely sporadic to much more consistent and nearly daily.
Beyond me, these practices are accessible to a broad range of people. I created the book with real-life limitations on time, energy, and mental space in mind. All of the exercises are shared with straightforward language, require no prior knowledge, and can be accomplished in under ten minutes.
This book’s offerings can also resonate with people of all ages. The Self-Care for Children course, within Flow and Grow Kids Yoga’s 95-hour Kids Yoga Teacher Training, focuses on these types of activities. They’re tools to help kids find more clarity, focus, calm, and joy through their days. And nearly everything we do in Flow and Grow Kids Yoga — for children, tweens, teens, parents, educators and caregivers — weaves together these types of activities with mindful movement and yoga.
These practices cultivate healthy discipline and consistency (tapas); the ability to focus on one task, thought, idea, or stimulus; and non-harming (ahimsa) through the values of kindness and compassion. These are essential values for living a healthy, harmonious, and fulfilling life — and the earlier they’re created, within each of us, the better.
Lara with Kids Yoga Teacher Trainees
This book is my offering to all people looking to step into personal practice, power, and responsibility. You don’t have to like every activity in the book to find something that will shape your life in a positive way; creating a practice that supports you, and you can realistically sustain, is the most important thing. I hope that you accept my offering and take that step — coming as you are and enjoying the journey more than striving for the outcome. I’m here for you!
Love,
Lara
Editor’s Note:
You can pre-order the book here! Interested in learning more about the Flow and Grow Kids Yoga 95-hour Teacher Training? It includes mindfulness practices similar to those in this book and much, much more. Our next training begins on June 22nd! Questions? Email Lara at lara@flowandgrowkidsyoga.com or book a call with her here! We hope to flow, grow, learn and thrive with you soon!
