Mindfulness in Children: An Overview

“Your children have important lessons to learn, but even more important ones to teach. What can they teach? How to pay complete attention. How to play all day without tiring. How to let one thing go, and move on to another with no backward glances.”

-       Shakta Kaur Khalsa

 

The wooden lotus flower glows with cinnamon warmth in a sunbeam spotlight descending through the skylight. My eye traces the contours, petal after petal, breath after breath, and around again, for minutes, for hours as I sit at Cambridge Insight Meditation Center. There is a memory here, too, and my mind traces around its edges as I witness. Sitting in a church distant in time and miles from where I am now: were they the same eyes that traced the contours of the crucified wooden Jesus, bloodied brow, open wound at the ribs, emaciated, hungry, face a frozen grimace forever and always? Around and around his outline, every Sunday for years and years.

Today, my adult self realizes that, as a child in that church, I was meditating. I did not understand much of the ritual going on around me, but I knew that I was expected to pay attention, or at least look as if I were paying attention, and so I fixed my eyes on Jesus and breathed. I did not understand the words of the scriptures or the chants. But I knew that this stillness felt good, peaceful, and that I could lose myself in the finest details of Jesus on the cross while the adults attended to adult things all around me.

            I had a similar focus somewhere near the teacher during years of elementary school. The lessons were boring and monotonous, but if I focused my thoughts on a spot on the chalkboard, I could find the same peaceful stillness that I found in church. And on the ball fields during gym class, where we were expected to run and run and run, in my chunky little body that was not in any way built for speed, I could find the same stillness, even in movement, if I paid very close attention to my breath. This in breath, this out breath, and now this in breath, this out breath.

            And now, as an adult who teaches yoga and mindfulness to children, I have found that many children hold a surprising amount of insight into and interest in sitting and being here in the present moment. Somehow I had forgotten how close to the present moment I was as a child, how effortlessly I could fall into awareness then. I began formally teaching mindfulness to children with the assumption that I would be bringing all of my years of practice and wisdom to the children with whom I work. Instead, I have found the roles reversed more often than not: I am the student, and the children are the gurus.

            I began teaching mindfulness to children on my birthday in 2013. My children, then aged 8, 8, and 6, decided to begin sitting with me daily as my birthday gift. They asked my spouse to join us. We began sitting together nightly as a family, at first only five minutes a night, due to the age of my youngest child, but soon the children were begging me to let them sit for longer and longer periods of time. We built up to fifteen minutes per meditation session, always in the evening before bedtime. This practice was easily built into the bedtime routine, which at our house has always been very set, bathing, brushing teeth, and my partner and I taking turns tucking in each child.  

            I found that the practice of meditating as a family was deeply quieting and settling and comforting for all of us after what were often very hectic school and work days spent largely apart. Sometimes the sitting itself was not easy for us individually or as a group, but always, when it was over, there was a greater sense of calm and ease in each of us individually and collectively. We tried a variety of different styles of meditating, from seated, traditional sitting to chanting to guided relaxation to mindfulness in restorative yoga postures. The children wanted to guide the meditations, so each child began taking a night to lead. They were learning meditation at school, and sometimes their guidance sounded familiar - their take on words I recognized as my own. Sometimes their guidance was completely new, either borrowed from a teacher at school or something completely new and original.

            I once paraphrased Jon Kabat-Zinn’s (p. 260-261) metaphor of being up in a tall building looking down at the traffic on the street below, the thoughts being the cars flowing past. My youngest son, C*,  added, “Your mind will start on the car, the thought, in front of the traffic, and then it will travel from car to car until it gets to the biggest or newest fear or worry or sadness or joy or excitement, whatever is pulling on it most. And then your mind will fall into that car and get driven away by it until you catch your mind again.”

            C once guided meditation by saying that the breath is an anchor, and the anchor drops down to keep the boat of your thoughts from drifting away. He added that the waves are also your thoughts, because your mind is like the ocean, and sometimes the waves of thoughts keep pulling at the boat even though the anchor of the breath is dropping down and rooting you to the stable ocean floor. C practiced “listening meditation” at school one day and was so excited to share that experience with us that he could hardly wait until practice time. He pointed out that you can hear so many things during listening meditation when everything is silent. C says meditation “focuses my body on my thoughts. It focuses my body on my emotions. It gets me really calm.”

After we practiced C's “listening meditation” together, A shared that he heard a buzzing sound in his ears. I asked him what he thought that was. He said, “It’s my body working. It is the electricity that runs my brain and my muscles, just like how you can hear the electricity in the big power cables above the street.” A says meditation is “sitting still for a long time and not letting your thoughts run away. I like just sitting still.”

            Sometimes it is hard for one of the children, B, to sit still. This is something that he works on at school and at home as well, and sitting in meditation does not make it miraculously disappear. It is as if his body is constantly moving - big, bold body movements. Sitting on a chair, he might be curling up into a ball and twisting around and around, spinning on his bottom. Standing, he might be twirling and twirling or flopping as if his bones and joints suddenly cannot support his weight. Even sleeping, he prefers to be weighted down with the sand bags and other props I use when I teach restorative yoga. So for him, approaching seated meditation in the supported postures of restorative yoga is useful. He lies on the floor with his legs up on the seat of a chair, and I place a bolster on his belly to weight it, a sandbag on each shoulder, and an eye pillow on his brow. Sometimes, B prefers that I wrap him up tightly in a blanket, a “burrito”, so that he feels arms and legs pulled in and still. The stillness is difficult for him to accomplish on his own, but so supported, he finds the stillness comforting and quieting. He does best at meditations with open eyes where we focus on a candle flame, so sometimes we practice those in addition to mindfulness meditation. B says that meditation is “the relaxation of the body through mental focus – the focusing of the mind on a single thought at a time, not letting your thoughts stray all over the place.”

            For B, a perfectionist who can be terribly hard on himself, self-compassion work has become important. Sometimes we repeat the mantras of lovingkindness as described by many of my teachers: “May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live with ease. May I accept myself as I am.” Sometimes we simply say, "I love myself dearly." This can be done silently or aloud and can be done for the entire course of the practice time or for only a part of it. We all find this useful at times, in addition to the quietness and the stillness.

            I also teach meditation moments to children in my children’s yoga classes four times a week and longer mindfulness meditation sessions with my adult classes twice a week. I believe that many children have a more direct route to the present moment than most adults. Perhaps this is because children, having less memory, experience, and learning to draw from, spend more of their time in direct experience and less of their time in storytelling mode. With roots placed firmly in direct experience, children are not unlike Hansel and Gretel in the forest; they have breadcrumbs marking the path through the underbrush of storytelling into the direct experience of the present moment. Adults have lost the trail in years of meaning-making. Jon Kabat-Zinn (p. 78) says, “That knowing of things as they are is called wisdom. It comes from trusting your original mind, which is nothing other than a stable, infinite, open awareness. It is a field of knowing that apprehends instantly when something appears or disappears within its vastness. Like the field of the sun’s radiance, it is always present, but it is often obscured by cloud cover, in this case, the self-generated cloudiness of the mind’s habits of distraction, its endless proliferating of images, thoughts, stories, and feelings, many of them not quite accurate.”

Since my first moments teaching formal sitting practice to children, I have been working on understanding the very apparent differences in how children and adults approach the present moment. I addressed this idea in a journal entry on September 11, 2014:

Have you ever walked on a familiar trail or path with a young child? You have walked this path a thousand times before, and maybe you saw this path, felt this path, experienced this path the first time or the first few times you walked it, but I bet you have never fully known this path until you walked it again with a young child. With a young child, you stop to explore every crack in the sidewalk, every rock on the trail, every bug that flits by or gently spreads its wings out in the dappled sunlight. When the sun comes through the leaves overhead just so, illuminating the forest with a dramatic shaft of light, the child will let a gasp of wonder escape her lips and will point and run gleefully towards the light until she, too, is illuminated. We adults feel that we have so much to teach children, but how much can we learn from them about being fully present? … Lying in bed with one of my sons just three nights ago, I was remembering to him how much fun we had during the day and thinking at him what we had to do to get ready in the morning, and he interrupted me and said, “Yes, but mom? Let’s just think about what we are doing right now. Isn’t that better?” and he snuggled in closer and pressed his face into the crook of my neck, warm and soft, and squeezed me tightly.

Jon Kabat-Zinn (p. 119) also speaks of how easy it is for adults to move out of direct experience and into story-telling mode:

Much of what we actually know, we know in a non-conceptual way. Thinking and memory come in a bit later, but very quickly, on the heels of an initial moment of pure sense contact. Thinking and memory can easily color our original experience in ways that distort or detract from the bare experience itself … Bare perception is raw, elemental, vital, and thus, creative, imaginative, revealing. With our senses intact and by way of awareness itself, we can attend in such ways. To do so is to be more alive.

When my oldest son found out that I like to go to Cambridge Insight Meditation Center for four hour mini-retreats when I get the chance, he said, “I could never sit still for that long.” My youngest son said, “Our school day lasts six hours; we sit for most of that. Meditating is much easier than sitting still at school!” We spoke about what was different between sitting at school and sitting in meditation. The children felt that school would be much more interesting if they could sit in awareness rather than sitting and paying attention. My oldest son said that paying attention feels like it takes a lot of force and control, but awareness just happens. Our experiment together, now, is for the children to try sitting in “awareness” at school rather than “paying attention”. We have not gathered any results from this research yet, but we all are looking forward to the process.

*I changed the children's names here, in honor of their privacy.

References

Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York, NY: Hyperion.

Kaur Khalsa, S. (2008). Radiant Child Yoga Level 3: Heart and Soul Work with Children. Herndon, VA: Shakta Khalsa.