Explaining OM to Children

In the beginning of all of my kid’s yoga classes, I lead the children in a warm up that I learned during my training at Karma Kids in NYC. We warm up our hands, warm up our feet, and chant Om three times. Afterwards I follow up with a question that often returns blank stares:

"What is Om? What does that sound mean?"

Whenever I ask a group of children what yoga is there is always a handful that folds their legs into half lotus, place their hands on their knees, close their eyes and through stifled laughter chant "Ommmmmmm." Clearly they have seen this done somewhere before, either on TV, a parent practicing yoga at home or in a yoga class they have taken before. While so many children will attest to having heard this sound somewhere and associate it with yoga, they don’t actually understand what Om is. How do we go about explaining this to a child? The first thing to do is make sure we understand the concept ourselves!

The best explanation I have found of what Om means comes from Cyndi Lee, founder of OM Yoga in NYC. She describes OM as "the sound of the universe breathing. It is the sound of the waves on the shore, the wind blowing through the trees, the inside of a shell, a bird's wings. It is the sound of the ebb and flow of the ocean, the change of seasons, and the movement of day to night. The entire universe expands and contracts constantly and this pulsation creates a hum, that for centuries, people have been vocalizing as Om. So when we chant Om we remind ourselves of how we are connected to one another and to all that is."

This is a beautiful explanation of what Om really is, however it is one that is a geared more towards adults than children. When explaining Om to children I try to make it as easy as possible to understand without straying too far from the actual meaning of it. There are several different ways I explain it and here are a few of them:

• “Om is the combination of all the sounds in the whole world, smashed together to make one sound.” I then invite the children into a stretch where we open up our arms to the side as wide as we can, trying to capture as many sounds as we can fit into our arms, and then we bring them all in and smash them in our hands as we make the sound, Ommmmmm….
  
• “Everything in the world makes a sound, and that sound is Om.”
  
• “We chant Om so that we can be like everything else in the world that vibrates in the atmosphere and makes the Om sound. Trees, clouds, the wind…” I then invite the kids to tell me what other things in the world makes sounds.
  

There are a number of creative ways we can explain what Om is to a child. I invite any parents, yogis, or yoga instructors out there to share their ideas & experiences in explaining and introducing the concept of Om to their children.

Namaste.

Pamela