Why I Teach Kids Yoga

Where It Started

My journey teaching yoga to children began in 2008, with a curriculum someone else had handed me. I followed it faithfully at first — poses, sequences, structure — and it fell flat. Kids drifted, lost interest, and by the second or third class the very format that was supposed to hold their attention couldn't keep it at all. Just moving through poses, no matter how correctly, wasn't enough.

Finding What Actually Works

It took time and a lot of trial and error to understand why. Eventually I realized that what actually held kids in the room wasn't the poses themselves — it was music and story. When a pose became part of a story, or when I explained what that pose was actually doing for their bodies — how it was making them stronger, steadier, more coordinated — something shifted. Kids leaned in. That discovery reshaped how I teach to this day: every class now blends breath-work, postures, chanting, storytelling, and gazing exercises, because none of those pieces alone does what they do together.

"What actually held kids in the room wasn't the poses themselves — it was music and story."

The Breath Behind It All

What fascinates me most, even now, is watching a child's focus. In a single class, their attention can drift entirely away and then snap back in an instant — and that shift, the ability to wander and still find their way back to one breath, one voice, is something I've built my teaching around. Breath is the center of it: I use pranayama in every class because it's the one tool a child can carry into any moment that asks too much of them — a hard test, a fall on the playground, a flash of anger, a friendship gone sideways. For the youngest kids, breath is more about sensation and play than focus; for older kids, it becomes something they can reach for on their own.

Before Brightroots

My own relationship with yoga started in childhood too, alongside dance, in a family where discipline was foundational — my father served in the army, and that structure shaped how I think about practice: not as a single class that changes anything, but as something built session by session.

Eighteen Years Later

Eighteen years and countless classes later, I finally built a program around everything I'd learned: Brightroots Yoga. It's new this year, but the belief behind it isn't — that yoga is something every child deserves to grow up with, not just something we discover later in life trying to undo our own stress.

What Stays With Them

I've watched what a class can shift, but it's what happens after class that tells me the most. Parents often tell me their kids come home and re-teach them the poses they just learned — for a few minutes, the living room floor becomes a yoga studio and the child is the instructor. One mother told me her son didn't want to go to any other class; he'd become more focused and more confident, in ways she could see well outside the yoga room. And one boy, years after taking my classes, started his own YouTube channel — and to this day, he still practices what he learned there. That's the moment I understood what I'm actually doing here: not just teaching poses, but giving kids something that stays with them long after the class ends.

"A little more emotionally aware, a little more grounded, and, always, having had a lot of fun getting there."

— Suchitra Agrawal, Founder of Brightroots Yoga