Mindfulness + Yoga offer essential life skills that allow kids to access inner resources like their breath, body and mindset in times of stress. When kids can activate their inner resources, they can meet challenges with a sense of personal power, and thrive in a wide variety of circumstances.
Why Mindfulness and Yoga
About LFY and Our Team
We have 31 incredible team members teaching kids, training adults, supporting operations, and more. Come get to know us.
How Yoga and Mindfulness Help Kids Thrive
Explore the benefits of embodied mindfulness practices and learn how they help build resilience, support learning and cultivate healthy communities.
Hear from the Kids
Hear directly from students about what mindfulness and yoga mean to them in daily life.
The School Wellness Project
Classes for Students
Virtual programming available nationwide (livestreaming or recorded content). In-person programming in select locations.
Chair and mat-based yoga and mindfulness classes for youth ages 3-18 right in the classroom.
School Wellness Program
Professional Development workshops for school staff + video resources for students, to help build yoga and mindfulness in-house culture and capacity.
Staff Wellness
Support for the physical, social, emotional, and professional well-being of all school employees, teachers, paraprofessionals, clinicians, and administrators.
Hear From Our Schools
Hear directly from schools we’ve worked with to better understand how yoga and mindfulness can support your students, teachers, and larger community.
Certification
Certification Overview
LFY Training is a comprehensive certification in yoga and mindfulness practices for youth 3 to 18. Registered with Yoga Alliance, and offering up to 6 graduate level credits (through our accredited partner University of the Pacific) training focuses on the physical, mental, emotional and social well-being of students.
Course Requirements
Certification includes our Core Curriculum consisting of Level 1, Level 2, Level 3; Three Online Courses (6 content hours each) addressing trauma, chair yoga, and neurodiversity; Two Integration + Implementation offerings that include practicums (practice teaching clinics) and a mentorship program matching you with a teacher for personalized feedback.
Upcoming Training Dates
Our certification is offered as an online cohort based course, which opens for registration twice a year. We also offer an annual training in person at the Omega Institute.
Frequently Asked Questions
Check out a quick list of our most frequently asked questions about training and certification.
More Learning
Online Learning
Join us for a wide variety of ways to learn from home, gaining skills and insight to support your students, clients, and your own children. Many courses are eligible for CE hours.
We offer a library of self-paced course, ranging from 75 minutes to 6 hours, as well as a series of livestream workshops with incredible guest teachers.
Upcoming Events
Join us for a variety of live-streaming and in-person events including workshops, conference presentations, livestream Q&A sessions and more.
Resources
For Families
Tools to Help Families Raise Resilient Kids, including practice videos, books and card decks, workshops, and articles.
For Training Graduates
We all need ongoing coaching and support to integrate our learning, continuing growing as educators, and to chat with likeminded folks about the many challenging (and funny) scenarios that arise during teaching. The LFY Coaching Membership is open to our training participants and graduates at any level, and is designed to offer you tangible resources to support your career, on-going coaching, and a built in group of colleagues.
Book and Card Decks
Easy to use resources for families, educators, clinicans and children + teens themselves.
Articles and Practices
Explore searchable content from our teaching and learning community, including activities and practices.
Contact
Join Our Email Newsletter
Understanding the Need
The Challenges Children and
Teens are Facing Today
We live in a changing and challenging world, filled with an increasing amount of input and a decreasing amount of personal and community connection. Children and teens, just like adults, are impacted in physical, emotional and social ways by the challenges of modern life. A wide variety of outcomes, ranging from behavior challenges to learning difficulties and more, predictably follow. Within the larger social dynamic children are also grappling with pervasive levels of trauma, and rising adult stress and anxiety. Their mental and physical health often suffer as a result, and interventions that address this complex meeting of the inner and outer worlds of our kids are essential.
Anxiety in Children The lifetime prevalence of adolescents 13-18 having an anxiety disorder is 31.9%
Suicide Risk 16% of HS students considered suicide, and 8% attempted to take their own life.
ADHD 6.1 million children have been diagnosed with ADHD.
Childhood Trauma
Effects 2 out of 3 children in the United States
1 in 5 are bullied at school
Trauma is a risk factor for nearly all behavioral health and substance use disorders.
School Related Stress
3 in 10 teens feel overwhelmed by stress on a daily basis
Depression
An estimated 3.1 million adolescents aged 12 to 17 in the United States had at least one major depressive episode.
How do Yoga and Mindfulness Work Together?
“Mindfulness is paying attention to your life here and now, with kindness and curiosity.”
AMY SALTZMAN
Kids need to move, and connecting with sensation in the body is a particularly effective way to explore mindfulness. When yoga + mindfulness are taught together, both become more powerful. Yoga offers a pathway to mindfulness, grounded in practice and accessible to all. It cultivates inner resources that maximize resilience and support healthy navigation of challenges. When kids connect with their inner resources, when they identify their own capacity for agency and embrace their personal power, they can thrive regardless of their circumstances, and during their greatest challenges.
Building Essential Skills
How Does Mindfulness Support Social Emotional Learning
At LFY we teach embodied mindfulness practices with the express goal of building social and emotional competencies. By orienting our students, with kindness and curiosity, towards their own inner experience and the experiences of others we lay the foundation for healthy and respectful relationships both internally and externally.
As our curriculum builds, we explore navigating challenges and making decisions in ways that meet our own needs while also considering and caring for the needs of others. Students have the opportunity to both give and receive support, learn how to reflect on their actions and impact, and find intrinsic motivation for good decision making.
What Does Resilience Look Like?
Early Childhood
- Developing sense of autonomy
- Frustration tolerance and ability to begin managing actions when strong emotions are present
- Ability to seek and elicit support
Middle Childhood
- Self perceived sense of efficacy and competence
- Belief in ones capacity to influence the world
- Positive social relationships and access to humor
Adolescence
- Sense of personal responsibility
- Internalized set of values
- Capacity for perspective taking and empathy