How to Teach Meditation to Children by David Fontana

Author:David Fontana
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: How to Teach Meditation to Children
ISBN: 9781786780874
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2017-08-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

FINDING A PEACEFUL PLACE

Many children, even in adolescence, are not fully in touch with their feelings. Sometimes this is because they don’t possess the language to explain things properly to themselves, but more often it is because they are caught up in confusion as to what they ‘ought’ to be feeling. Ask a class of eight-year-old children whether they have any worries, and hardly a hand will go up. Tell them instead that most children of their age have worries, and that you would like to hear about them, and nearly every child in the class will be eager to disclose something. Most of the things disclosed will be genuine, and not merely invented in order to please their teacher.

Children’s Anxieties

Children worry about what their parents and teachers think of them, about their friends or their lack of friends, about their possessions, about their own safety and the safety of the people they love, about being bullied, about their pets, about dying, about where they came from, about God, and even about the state of their health.

In some ways children worry as much as, if not more than, most adults. As the foundations of our mature personalities are largely laid down during childhood, the way in which children deal with their worries can influence much of their coping behaviour throughout life. Children who are helped to keep their anxieties in perspective, and to develop a serenity of mind that prevents them from being overwhelmed by them, are thus advantaged not only in the present but in the years to come.

Meditation helps children deal with anxieties both mentally and physically. The body and the mind are closely linked. If the body is relaxed, it helps the mind to relax. If the body is tense, the mind becomes tense, and a vicious circle develops. If the body is tense, it signals this tension to the mind; the mind tenses in response, which further tenses the body, and the body feeds back yet more anxious signals to the mind. So the process goes on, unless we break the circle by relaxing the body in meditation.

At the same time, meditation helps relieve anxiety by providing the mind with a point of focus. By concentrating upon this point of focus, the mind is less distracted by anxious thoughts. The thoughts may still be there, but the mind does not attend to them, or get caught up in the chain of associations that lead it from one anxiety to another. And as the mind relaxes, so it prompts relaxation in the body.

This can be brought home to children within the context of a general discussion about anxiety. Ask the children what it is like to be anxious. Encourage them to report the physical sensations involved – the pain in the pit of the stomach, the feelings of nausea, the tightness in the shoulders and the neck, the headache. With very young children, it is often helpful to ask them first to imagine a situation in which they feel anxious, and then to report the sensations involved.

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