CAMAS — While a yoga class is often considered a place to pursue harmony between mind and body, an 11-year-old Vancouver girl is showing that age is no requirement.
Aderyn McLean, a sixth-grader at Wy’east Middle School, perched at the front of the room at Vancouver Elite Gymnastics Academy, 840 N.W. 10th Ave., Camas. If she’s not the youngest yoga instructor in the country she is one of the youngest, having recently completed training with the Portland-based school Yoga Calm. Next to her mother, a fellow yoga instructor, the pair led a class of adults on a recent Friday evening.
The two have their own rhythm. Her mother, Kelly McLean, teaches the stretches while Aderyn’s dominion is near the end of class, when the cool-down period begins. Practitioners typically close their eyes and focus on a meditation, led by the instructors. Aderyn’s young imagination helps her spin a story off the top of her head, a loose narrative that leaves space between the lines for the practitioners to color in themselves.
“They’re stories about finding a forest, and a red bridge. Just finding a small stream and putting your hands in the stream, finding different things around the bridge that have a special meaning to you,” Aderyn said. “Sometimes it will be like a note written somewhere that has some meaning.”
Until two years ago, Aderyn, like the vast majority of elementary school students, was unemployed. Kelly McLean embarked to get certification from Yoga Calm, and Aderyn, Kelly’s youngest daughter of two, hoped to tag along and build strength. The elder McLean brushed it off at first, but that didn’t appear to matter.
“I went through the training and Aderyn just kept hounding me, ‘I want to do this with you, I want to do this,’ so I just asked them if they ever have kids go through it,” Kelly McLean said. “They were totally on board.”
If teaching yoga was only a matter of want, though, there might be as many yoga studios as Starbucks. Yoga Calm co-founder Jim Gillen assigned Aderyn the hundreds of pages of reading, including case studies, which the pair completed. Gillen said it’s not uncommon to have younger people get involved with Yoga Calm, which has thousands of instructors worldwide. There are classes designed to help kids with attention or behavioral issues, but Aderyn took it further.
“She’s very keen and her mom is a yoga teacher so that’s something,” Gillen said. “I’m sure her gymnastics training didn’t hurt at all.”
Part of the certification required logging hours as an instructor. Aderyn found the time, she said, by teaching younger kids at school during recess, where she would go into their classes — recess times are staggered by grade — and lead the class in stretching and breathing exercises.
“By the end of fourth grade she was certified,” Kelly McLean said. “The teachers loved it. The kids loved it because they knew her from school.”
The mother-and-daughter duo teach classes that enroll as many as 10 students. Aderyn is a volunteer, though Kelly gives her a part of the money from the classes they teach together. Classes are infrequent right now, but they plan on holding regular classes starting in January.
It’s unclear what the future will hold for an 11-year-old with a jump start in the yoga world. Aderyn said she hopes to stay creative, perhaps pursuing a career in writing, and she has a plan to teach people about agriculture, yoga and sustainable living.
