"Meditation empowers us to find the happiness..". - Sarah Wood Vallely
Much of our human life revolves around the need for true happiness. For various reasons we have been conditioned to detach from our true self and the experience of present moment which awakens our true inner happiness. Happiness really lies within and never has to be something we wait for. As adults of today, many of us are learning how to detach and open up to awareness of the present moment. In the process we also discover that happiness lies within us. What about our children then?
Shall we lead them down the same road we followed, or can we provide them with some tools to maintain and develop the connections with their inner selves? I believe that teaching meditation to our children is one of excellent ways to provide them with tools that will empower them to grow up into happy, aware, joyful, alive and creative beings. Giving the gift of meditation is a wonderful way to enrich lives of our children for many years to come. They are naturally good at it and through their imagination manage to enjoy it right from the start.
Meditation skills are also a great way to positively foster and nurture children's imagination and creativity. Children appear to love and enjoy meditation very much because it also serves as a channel for them to exercise their creative imagination without any limits. In settings outside of meditation, children are often faced with limits imposed by their environments, socializing processes, worries, parent or sibling influence, media, etc. Meditation allows them a safe and nurturing space to use their imagination without any of those limitations.
Meditation with children is a very fun experience. Children do not need to meditate in dark and completely quiet spaces like adults. They find it rather easy to jump in and out of meditative state and enjoy completing their experience through movement and / or art before and after their meditations. It is very interesting to see how they integrate their physical body through movement, their mental body through imaginative art projects, and their emotional and spirit bodies through the meditation exercise.
Instead of placing a label on children's experience of meditation we shall be wise and learn from working with them and observing them to engage in a similar way and reconnect with our imaginative nature, our inner, and our outer senses. That reconnection in itself will not only greatly improve our experience of our own meditations but will also allow us to nurture our own inner child while creating a special way to interact and connect with children in our lives.
By engaging in our feelings and fully experiencing them we allow ourselves to release them with love. Imagination and creativity are great assets in that process and enhance meditation in tremendous ways.
Meditation with children truly has many rewards for both children and us adults.
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