This
fall the Durango Dharma Center started offering a monthly family
program. While parents within our sangha naturally see the benefits of
offering their children mindfulness training, its positive impact may
not be clear to the rest of us. We wanted to bring our entire
community’s attention to what we gain when we introduce children,
sometimes as young as three, to the path of self-inquiry. So, we asked
the founder of the Marin Mindfulness Cooperative, Lesley Grant, two
questions we hope will help us understand the positive effect of
including children in our mindfulness teachings.
DDC: Why should we support a mindfulness program for children?
LG:
Research in this area has shown how mindfulness practice increases
executive function, empathy, attunement to others, compassion and
impulse control. Whether we’re talking about families or nations,
these qualities of impulse control, fear recovery, attunement to others
and empathy are what we need for peace and well-being in our world. The
vice principal of an elementary school in inner city Oakland, where the
children practice mindfulness, says when whole schools learn
mindfulness, it has an impact in the community.
DDC: Can you describe a time when a child who received mindfulness training chose to act mindfully in a challenging situation?
LG:
When we teach mindfulness to children, we need to be aware of where
they are developmentally. At Marin Mindfulness, we modify a number of traditional Buddhist practices for the children including
mindfulness of breathing, sounds, and feelings, in consideration of
their developmental age. Teaching mindfulness to children seems
to lengthen the time between impulse and action so that the children are
more capable of making choices in any situation.
To
answer your question, as the children were practicing one day, the
teacher asked them to let their minds be like the ocean. “What’s the
ocean like?” she asked.
The children replied, “Really big!” “It has
waves.”
Then, the teacher asked, “What’s in your mind when it’s the
ocean?” Several children said, “Fish!”
The
teacher asked, “What do the fish feel? What color is the fish?”
“It’s
a red anger fish,” one child answered. The teacher enouraged the child
to move as the anger fish and she and all the children followed. Then
the teacher rang a bell and sat very still with all the children and
said quietly "See if you can let the anger fish swim through you.”
Later
that week, a four-year-old boy was playing with a three-year-old boy.
The three-year-old knocked down a toy tree the other child had been
playing with and then grabbed it from him. The four-year-old said to
me, “My anger fish is here. I want to hit him. I shouldn’t hit him.”
After he sat for a moment, he said, “Anger fish wants to drink up all
the water!”
“Yes, it feels like that,” I said. We sat for a while
feeling it. Then I asked, “But can the anger fish drink up the whole
ocean?”
“No!” he said. “I’m bigger than the anger fish!” He then
started to breathe more fully and cried a little. He sat up straight
and told me, “I know what I want to say to him.”
“Okay,”
I said. We walked over to the other child. The four-year-old said
calmly, “That’s the tree I was using. Please, give it back to me. You
can have this one.” He looked the other child right in the eye.
“Okay,”
said the other boy, “and here’s another tree for you.”
The next day, the boy told me, “I’ll let all the fish come except the anger fish.”
“And why is that?” I asked.
“Because
if you don’t know that you’re the water, the anger fish can hurt
somebody.”
I said, “But we’re learning that we are the water, so it’s
okay for all the fish to come.”
“Yeah!” he said. “I’m really big! I’m
bigger than the anger fish!” “We all are really. We just forget
sometimes.” I replied. “Actually,” he said, “I’m a love Buddha.”
