Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Before class, a little boy rolls into a safe burrito, his yoga mat the tortilla. So Melissa Dierker begins with some “strong shapes,” which she calls superhero shapes, and grounded stances, and stomping. When it’s time for the tree position, she tells the class, “You can play around with your branches if you want,” waving her arms. “Or you can be a cut-down tree,” she adds with a twinkle, glancing at a little girl who’s lying on her back. “She’s not feeling as rooted today.”
Some of these kids just like yoga. Others are a little anxious, scarred by past hurts, reliving a fire or flood, working through grief, figuring out identity. In some cases, persistent fear or profound crisis has taught their brains to expect danger at all times. The hypervigilance is exhausting, and it can lead to anger, withdrawal, or shutdown.
Dierker’s a social worker; she never expected to be running her own yoga studio. But studies were piling up that show trauma-informed yoga as a way to interrupt post-traumatic stress disorder, smooth frayed nerves, slow impulsivity, extinguish conditioned fear responses. She called the traditional poses “shapes” for her younger students, added art and play, and kept the classes small, because “if you crowd the class, they will not adequately be seen.” Soon she had a waiting list, so she opened her own studio, Complete Harmony, in Maplewood.
“What are we going to do next?” a little girl asks.
“Feathers,” Dierker says, handing out tall wavery peacock plumes for her students to balance wherever they like. One tries a feather on her nose; another tilts her head back and rests one on her forehead. The formal name of this balancing act is Mountains and Feathers, and what the kids are learning is drishti, a gazing technique that seeks a still point, concentrates on what is unmoving. In Sanskrit, the word can also mean wisdom.
“I have another question for the world,” the little girl blurts. “What if it breaks?”
Once Dierker reassures her, she tries a feather on her finger. “It’s slipping through me!” she exclaims. “I can’t balance it!” A few seconds more, and she quiets. The feather stays upright.
Another student sticks her feather between her toes and giggles: “I cheated.”
“There’s no such thing in yoga as cheating,” Dierker promises. She gathers the kids’ energy, shifts them into a new series of movements. “We need a word for today,” she tells them.
“I want…um…I want…um…I want courage,” a child says.
“OK, courage is our word.” They rub their hands together as they say it, feeling the friction’s warmth. The child nods: “I need to do lots of courage.”
Nothing’s an order here; all is invitation. In the absence of pushback, even kids who start out resisting a new activity soon join in. “If you’re not using inclusive language or invitational language, you’ve taken away choice,”
Dierker explains, “and individuals who’ve experienced a lot of trauma, their choice has already been taken away.”
Some have even lost connection to their bodies, forgotten or blocked what pain feels like. Dierker reminds her students during every class, “If we are doing something and it hurts, just stop. Do you remember what it feels like when it hurts? If it takes your breath away, that’s probably an indication that it hurts.”
What if the pain’s emotional? They don’t run away. They breathe into it. And it becomes a lot less scary.
“For a long, long time, we were told our behaviors and emotions were what we are,” remarks Grace Pettit, an apprentice who spent a decade in the corporate world as a fine-art communication strategist. “In reality, they’re just passing thoughts. For kids to learn that early provides a wider picture for them, makes it easier for them to show up in the world.”
The two women gather up pompoms and scarves. “We use a lot of props,” says Dierker. “A woman came in with an 18-month-old and said, ‘This is not what I thought yoga was.’ I said, ‘Yoga is union; it’s about breath, movement, community, social justice, mindfulness.’ We try to introduce as many of those elements as possible without making it overwhelming. And we need to make it age-appropriate. I can’t expect an 18-month-old to come in and do yoga poses, but I want him to explore his world.”
She’ll never forget a 7-year-old who’d lost a parent. “We gave her paper to create her own movement cards, and all four shapes revolved around death. When I learned the details of her parent’s death, the cards made a million times more sense. Sometimes we don’t have words to name what we are feeling, but we can use movement.”
Dierker often has students guess how somebody feels just by listening to the person’s breathing: “A lot of people don’t think about their breath when they think about emotion. They start to ID signals. And if they can identify their feelings earlier, maybe at school when the stress is skyrocketing,” they can stop them from spiraling out of control.
Kids leave with a repertoire of “ways to calm down, ways to make you brave enough to go talk to somebody,” Dierker says. “Superhero shapes make you feel brave; being grounded makes you feel powerful.” It gives you courage.
