Thousands of Fort Worth children learn yoga for exercise and mindfulness. Here’s how.

At the Fairmount Community Library among the fiction, nonfiction and biography bookshelves, yoga teacher Brooke Blankenship led a group of young, energetic yogis to their purple yoga mats.

They channeled their inner narwhal and diamond while mimicking animals and shapes in their poses. They voiced how they were feeling: happy and confused. They repeated an affirmation with their eyes closed: “Peace begins with me.”

The small group of 1- to 4-year-olds stretching and reciting on Tuesday are among thousands in the Fort Worth area practicing an ancient discipline — dating back about 5,000 years — that formally expanded to younger ages less than 15 years ago. The Yoga Alliance, the largest nonprofit organization representing the international yoga community, now has 826 certified children’s yoga teachers in the U.S., 50 of which are in Texas, according to the organization’s Director of Learning and Education Maria Barone.

Teachers and studios in Fort Worth spreading the mantra of mindfulness and exercise to children are part of a nationwide trend that’s aimed at teaching youth how to self-regulate while moving their body. Throughout the 12 months of 2022, 12.3% of children and adolescents ages 4 to 17 had practiced yoga, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Those who were 4 to 11 years old were more likely to have practiced yoga versus older teens, at 14.7% versus 9.2% respectively.

“For adults we’ll say, ‘Exhaust the physical body so that the mental body can start to find some stillness.’ For kids it’s usually, ‘You got to get your wiggles out so you can sit still for a little bit,’” Barone said.

At Tuesday’s class, Blankenship directed the children through downward dog and upward dog stretches, cat-cow pose and side plank while disguising them as animals and shapes featured in a book she was simultaneously reading to the class. She also used this tactic for breathing exercises.

“I want you to pretend like you’ve got big polar bear arms, and we’re going to bring them out wide. Then I want you to give yourself a big polar bear hug… now take a big breath in and let out a polar bear growl,” she instructed the yogis, vocalizing the accompanying sounds.

For 3-year-old Evvie, she enjoyed pretending to be a musk ox shaking off the snow from its fur, hands and knees wide on all fours shaking side to side in a cat-cow pose, she said.

“It’s great for helping them get in tune with their emotions and just regulating in general,” said Jessica Irvin, mom of Evvie and her twin brother Elias. “We do a lot of free play for sure, so it is good to have the structured setting.”

Blankenship, executive director and founder of Yogi Squad, started the Fort Worth-based nonprofit almost five years ago with the goal of bringing yoga to places it typically wouldn’t be offered, she said. A nomad who travels around the city to teach, Blankenship meets toddlers and teenagers where they are: child care centers, schools, parks, libraries and more.

Blankenship was a teacher and librarian in the Fort Worth Independent School District for 13 years where she combined movement with reading literacy for her students after earning her yoga teacher certification, which originally was intended for personal development only, she said.

“I was teaching yoga and books in the library with my kids, just basically choosing books that encouraged movement (and) that I could get creative and match yoga poses with. Kids loved it,” she said. “My pre-k kids actually thought the library was for yoga. It’s kind of funny.”

Among the schools Blankenship now visits are First United Methodist Church Day School, North Hi Mount Elementary School and Fort Worth ISD Collegiate High School at Tarrant County College’s south campus.

“A huge, exciting thing we’ve seen happen is that more schools are actually integrating yoga and mindfulness practices into their curriculum and education, so it’s not just the parents having to go out of their way to bring this in,” Barone, of Yoga Alliance, said.

Tens of thousands of student yogis

Blankenship served almost 11,000 students in 2023, she said. And she’s not the only one focusing on this specialty.

Kate Murphy, owner of Nanda Yoga, served almost 7,350 students with studio classes alone in 2023, she said. Over the past four years, she’s reached 41,000 students, even with a pause during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Murphy serves 24 schools and community spaces in the area with her staff, but her child-centered yoga studio on Montgomery Street is the home base of operations. Classes tailored to various age groups include sensory play yoga with hands-on projects that engage the senses; music, mindfulness and movement with a music teacher from Music Junkie Studios; and aerial yoga for 6- to 12-year-olds.

“We teach children to play yoga because play is the language of a child,” Murphy said. “I started the studio because I wanted it to be a gathering space for families of Fort Worth… a place where we could teach coping skills like mindfulness and movement and meditation to kids to help them be better equipped for life.”

Murphy is aware of seven other studios in the country similar to hers that specifically focus on children’s yoga and considers them a rarity.

“I think that ours is extremely unique and rare with how we have it set up for our play spaces and our yoga therapy room and our yoga studio,” she said.

Beyond her children’s yoga certification, Murphy has a degree in early childhood education and was a child life specialist for more than a decade at Cook Children’s Medical Center, where she normalized the hospital experience for patients and acted as liaison between medical staff and families, she said.

Nanda Yoga opened in February 2020, a month before COVID-19 put the world on pause, causing her to temporarily close before reopening in June 2020. Murphy was still working in healthcare until 2022 and saw up close the pandemic’s impacts on children, specifically in the pediatric emergency department, she said.

“It was overwhelmingly clear that there was a gap in our community that we’re not addressing. Mental health issues in children have been on the rise for years, and we have not been aggressive enough in finding ways to help children navigate and cope with the ever-changing world that we have around us,” Murphy said.

Although children’s yoga is relatively new, teachers and experts say it’s continuing to grow in accessibility and awareness.

Katherine Royar, a children’s yoga teacher at Soul Sweat Hot Yoga studio on Eighth Avenue, said her younger students and families also utilize YouTube videos when practicing yoga at home. Additionally, it seems that more parents are educating themselves on the benefits of yoga and introducing those tools to their children, she said.

Although Soul Sweat primarily offers adult classes in heated settings, it offers non-heated children’s classes for ages 4 to 12 every Saturday at noon.

“They don’t have to come into a business to get the benefits of yoga necessarily,” Royar said. “In general, having kids at the studio is super fun… just like adults, yoga is supposed to be a space for all to feel safe and to honor your body. It’s very similar for kids. Yoga is a place to have fun, and their worries and school and all of that is left at the door.”