In recent
years, science has confirmed what meditators have known for centuries:
mindfulness is good for you, both physically and mentally. It’s especially helpful
in times of stress – like, say, a pandemic – but, as Maggie Seaver points out
in Real Simple, it’s habit you’ll want to cultivate regardless of good times or
bad, and one you can teach your children. In fact, the enforced isolation of
Covid could actually be a perfect time to introduce your impressionable kids to
helpful techniques that could serve them for the rest of their lives.
Perhaps
you get apprehensive when you think of “meditation” or “mindfulness” alongside
“my kid.” Seaver assures us “the techniques have nothing to do with forcing your
5-year-old twins to meditate in a dark room for two hours.” And there are no
religious trappings, either. Mindfulness is as much an exercise as doing word
puzzles for your mind or kettle balls for your muscles.
READ MORE: How to explain mindfulness to kids
Seaver
brings Susan Kaiser Greenland on board to elaborate. Greenland is a mindfulness
and meditation teacher, cofounder of the Inner Kids program and the author of
several books, including Mindful Games and The Mindful
Child. “At its root, mindfulness is about friendly awareness,” she
says. “It’s paying attention with kindness and curiosity to yourself, other
people, and the world around you. Awareness doesn't get rid of life's
challenges, but it does change our relationship to them. That, in and of
itself, is a huge deal.”
Among the
games Seaver and Greenland advise is The
Mind as a Sky Analogy. This is
comparing the mind to the sky. Like the sky,
awareness is with us all day, everyday, whether or not we notice it. But we
have the ability to stop and observe it. Sometimes there are clouds
(anger), sometimes storms (despair), and sometimes we can’t see the sky. But we
know it is beyond everything else that’s in front if it.
Two others are Smelling a Flower and Blowing Out a Candle. This helps a child connect with their
breathing. They inhale a pleasant smell – a flower, or anything nice – then
hold up an index finger and pretend it’s a candle, and blow it out.
In
teaching compassion, Greenland introduces Friendly Wishes. Children begin with
themselves, wishing good things, then gradually expand to others, from friends,
to neighbors, to folks they don’t know. Greenland strongly suggests teaching
kids to extend well wishes even to people they dislike. “We have to work with
kids on making a distinction between liking somebody and wishing them well,”
she points out. “It’s just fine not to like somebody, but we can still wish
them well.”