Thank you Tim & Annette.

Clearly if professionals want to use this approach with clients then each professional has to make a decision as to whether that is safe and ethical without specific training. In this respect the resources here are like many other self-help type resources that a professional has to judge whether it is appropriate to integrate into their work.

We are planning to take the approach through pilot studies next academic year but it is important to note that these approaches do not yet have an established evidence base. This may also have a bearing for some professionals working practices.

We will be offering training in this – but are still working on dates etc. and due to other commitments it will probably be October when the first training weekend is available. We expect this to be a 2 day training for professionals with a professional body and/or work to a code of ethics. Person experience of using these approaches will be a key preparation prior to the training workshop.

Regards
Tim Duerden

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