While more about relaxation you could explore adapting some of Relax Kids ideas.

I think it is interesting to explore how mindfulness offers opportunities to counter the dominant trend in how children get socialised in the West. In particular is the way children are encouraged to meet their experience through thinking. While this is clearly important what can be lacking is the encouragement to also explore the embodied feeling – so if there is happiness, where in the body is that happiness felt? Can you put your hands on the place? Does it have a colour a shape? If you held it your hands what would it feel like? What would it weigh? [Perhaps not strictly abount being mindful but there are possibilities here to link to Martin Seligman's of pausing with pleasant experience and feeling where it is in the body, letting it spread round and and soak in - doing this as a family]. The point here is to explore being aware of embodied positive feelings – as this becomes familiar there can be a move to exploring unpleasant feelings in the same way.

To explore the child’s experience without imposing your own metaphors you might be interested in the Clean Language ideas. These can be made into a fun game where you allow the child to develop their own unique way of constructing their stories about what they are experiencing.

I also think it is helpful to know that children take time to develop executive control over their attention – so their experience of mindfulness practice will be very different to an adult’s. The book Sleights of Mind explores this in an interesting way amongst other discussions of attention.

I am sure you are exploring different of ways for the parents to engage in here and now experience. The ideas in ACT around values can be really useful to complement these mindful approaches. See Russ Harris’s website for free resources.

Finally, have you seen Walter Mischel’s marschmallow experiement videos on Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EjJsPylEOY) : these give a sense of how cultivating a child’s abiity to not immediately act on impulses can have such far reaching effects. Mischel’s follow up studies showed that those children able to not eat the marshmallow tended to be much more successful in later life. The BBC radio documentary here is excellent.

I hope some of these ideas trigger possibilities.

It will be interesting to hear how your course goes.

Best of luck with it.

Tim

Thank you
Shirley

Message for you Tim. How do I upload a photograph on this site. Karen.
See you Thursday.

Thank You

Debbie Krantz

Hope to come thursday. I wondered if you could talk us through the landing practice a bit as obviusly not on any audio. I usually do a kind of exteneded 3 mintue Breathing space with some general instructions (eg you can’t do it wrong, something about judgmeent /looking after your self etc. ) In your intro on saturday you seemed to get right into thoughts and it really resonated with the people there judging by the feedback in the enquiry . Somehow for me thoughts is something to build up to but clearly done in the right way you can hit them with thoughts etc at the outset. Have no idea what you said but would be nice to talk through the structure and intention of the landing practice