Katie Klatt-Bowen

Katie Klatt-Bowen is founder and teacher of Storybook Yoga™, certified in Radiant Child Yoga™. She is a former elementary school teacher with a Masters in Education from National-Louis University.

Storybook Yoga™ really evolved out of a couple things.

One contributing factor involved around my interactions with my youngest son, Charlie. At the time, Charlie was a toddler who was not able to verbalize his thoughts or needs, past saying a few words, here and there. We were doing yoga for a few months together at Heaven Meets Earth. He would run back and forth in class, not really joining in any of the poses, until we arrived at the last pose of class, shivasana, or resting pose, and held hands under the blanket or snuggled.

Then, one day, yoga materialized at home while I was off in my room doing my personal practice of meditation and yoga. Charlie peeked in a few times, bringing with him a little Lego™ guy. He would look at me and bend Little Lego man into downward dog. Then, one day Charlie pulled out his own perfect downward dog like he had been doing it forever. It became his, "Look what I can do Mom and Dad!"

Meanwhile, Charlie started shaking things up a bit, by pulling me out of the daily minutiae and into the living room or peace room, bringing a book we normally read at bedtime. We started doing yoga animal poses to match the animals on the page. Yoga became our shared language.

At the same time, I was assisting and teaching Mommy and Me yoga at HME and started carting a huge stack of books to class. Honestly, it created a great framework for my teaching. As a former elementary school teacher, my fondest memories were teaching the curriculum through storybooks.

And so that is how Storybook Yoga™ began...