Introducing The Inside Squad: A Workbook to Build Inside Muscles for the Outside World
~ By Abbey Spiro and Stefanie Tocco
Inner Bliss teacher Abbey Spiro and her former college gymnastics teammate recently co-authored a workbook to help kids (and their adults!) build critical skills needed to adapt and respond to life's challenging ups and downs with awareness, empathy, and resilience. Inner Bliss is very excited and proud to share Abbey’s work that aligns closely with our mission to guide students in building a resilient inner landscape. This purposeful project was years in the making! Incredible!
The Inside Squad: A Workbook to Build Inside Muscles for the Outside World focuses on developing and strengthening the reader's “inside muscles” using 13 key skills:
Abbey Spiro
Mindfulness
Emotion
Intuition
Self-Kindness
Empathy
Curiosity
Collaboration
Speak Up
Adaptability
Perseverance
Courage
Decision Making
Stretch to Grow
With the help of the Inside Squad, kids and families can practice building their inside muscles in an approachable and easy-to-follow format. The action-based activities, prompts, games, and coloring pages help lift these skills from the pages and out into the real world. It feels like yoga off the mat for kids and families! Get ready to unleash the power from within!
At this meet & greet, the workbook will be on hand for you to check out and even purchase if you’re interested! It is also available on Amazonand Ingram Spark.
From the authors:
Stefanie Tocco
Our why:
The world right now is a busy place. Challenges abound for children and adults alike. In addition, thanks to social media and a 24-hour news cycle, most of us experience some level of information overload. Rather than teaching our children to Google their way out of their challenges, what if we gave them the skills to turn toward themselves and trust their own inner resources to help them move through challenges?
This was our ultimate motivation — to help contribute to the creation of a generation that learns these critical skills at a young age. We wanted to provide a book that gave adults a container for teaching these sometimes-elusive skills and provide kids with the knowledge and activities to gain these skills in a way that is fun and inviting.
Our how:
Writing and creating this book with a former teammate was such a special process. Because of our shared athletic experience in college, we could be completely honest and real with each other, which enabled us to move through the process a bit unconventionally. We created this project in a very organic way — we wrote when we were inspired and paused to let things marinate when we weren’t. We tested our work out in our families. We adjusted it. In every moment, we tried to stay focused on the next best step. We didn’t think too far ahead, except taking time here and there to dream about where we imagined the project going.
The result was a writing process that felt really sustainable, and we encourage readers to take the same approach as they read the book and put it into action in their families.
-Abbey and Stefanie