INTRODUCTION

This book is for adults, and explains how to introduce children to meditation. The idea of teaching meditation to children is relatively new to the Western world, but in the East meditation has long been accepted as an essential part of early education, laying down skills which are of lifelong benefit.

The book is intended for all adults who wish to teach meditation to children. That includes parents, schoolteachers, youth leaders, social workers, psychologists, church workers, grandparents, uncles and aunts, and anyone who has contact with children in an official capacity and who wishes to help them make the best use of their extraordinary minds. This book is based upon our own experience as psychologists who have worked extensively with children, and who have written about and taught meditation to all age groups.

Children are impressionable human beings, and very much open to direction and influence by adults. Thus any attempt to introduce them to meditation must be done sensitively and wisely (we have more to say about this in Chapter 2), and must empower them not only to meditate, but also to judge the usefulness of meditation for themselves. This ability to judge will allow them to decide whether or not meditation is right for them. Of all activities, meditation is perhaps the one where success most depends upon voluntary participation. In addition, as meditation involves working with one’s own mind, children should be given the right to accept or reject the practice as they think fit.

This book is intended to help you to introduce children to meditation easily and effectively, and in the right spirit. It is not intended to be prescriptive; it provides a range of techniques and skills from which you are free to choose the ones most appropriate to your own children and your own circumstances.

In most cases in the following pages we talk about children as a group, but most of what we say applies equally well to parents and others who may be working with only one child. As already indicated, the book is intended just as much for parents – either both or just one – as it is for teachers working with larger numbers.

There are three overall objectives which we have kept firmly in mind throughout our writing. Essentially, we hope the book will explain the value of teaching meditation to children, provide the background knowledge necessary to work with children from around five years of age through to the late teens, and give a range of practical exercises from which the reader can select in order to carry out this teaching. Not all the exercises are suitable for all situations. What works well with a small group of children may not be practical with a large class. You are the best judge of when to use the exercises as they stand, and when to adapt them in one way or another to suit the context within which you are working. The age of your children is another important variable, and we have more to say about this shortly.

We discuss the qualities needed by a meditation teacher in Chapter 2, but the one we must mention right at the outset is an interest in and a caring and sympathetic liking for children. No one who lacks these qualities can successfully teach children, whether the subject is meditation or mathematics or anything else. A good teacher works with children rather than dictates to them, and knows that a helpful and sensitive awareness of their needs and of their vulnerabilities brings success where hard words and grim authority all too often fail. The good teacher also knows that it is not enough merely to teach a child something. The child should be allowed to love what is being learned. In this way, lifelong interest can be built up, and the child helped to understand and appreciate the value of what is being learned.

We hope that nowhere do we make it seem that teaching meditation requires a great effort from the teacher. In fact, meditation is one of the most delightful of all subjects to teach. Whether working with children or adults, it is very rewarding to see a group of people find stillness and peace within themselves, and return to the challenges, difficulties and joys of life with renewed energy and enthusiasm. We hope you enjoy teaching meditation to children. If you do, there is every chance that your children will enjoy learning from you.

A Word of Warning

In view of children’s impressionable nature, an understandable concern among parents and teachers is that they should not be ‘indoctrinated’ with anything. Indoctrination involves convincing people to believe something without giving them the tools to appraise it for themselves, and reject it if they think fit. Meditation isn’t a cult, and doesn’t belong exclusively to any one religion or philosophy. From time to time in this book there are references to the Buddha and to Buddhism, but this is only because the Buddha was the first person to try systematically to explain the theory and practice of meditation. This book is not an apology for Buddhism, any more than it is an apology for any other belief system.

Unless you and your children are operating within a recognized and agreed religious framework (such as within a denominational school), it is important that you teach meditation without the trappings of any particular set of beliefs, and without the kind of vague thinking that gets generally classified as ‘New Age’. Many parents will object if they think their children are being introduced to ways of thinking of which they themselves may disapprove. Some meditation exercises for children are grounded in very doubtful science. For example, they might instruct the meditator to direct ‘streams of light’ to trees and flowers, or to ‘send energy from one child to another’. These exercises are sincerely written, but we live in a world where many people regard the ways of thinking upon which they are based as at best a waste of time, and at worst as actively misleading. So these somewhat esoteric approaches are best avoided until meditators are old enough and experienced enough to make personal decisions as to their value.

There is admittedly rather a fine line between encouraging children to use their visual imagination, and taking them off on flights of meaningless fantasy. But the line has to be observed, in fairness both to your children and to their parents. If you are working within a school, you will probably need the approval of the headteacher and perhaps also of parents if you are using anything more than simple meditations for physical relaxation. Such approval is rarely difficult to obtain, provided you set out clearly what your objectives are, and what meditation practices you intend to use.

Children’s Ages

The term ‘children’ is used throughout this book for all young people under the age of eighteen, which marks the transition into adulthood. Some people may find this strange. It is a sign of the hectic, frantic modern world that the term ‘children’ is coming to have a pejorative tone to it, and is beginning to be dropped in favour of such absurdities as ‘school students’ for children as young as five. We take the view that childhood is something to be honoured, and is as important a period of life as any other, so we are not afraid of the term.

This book provides material for use with children from as young as five right through to eighteen. However, although the basic techniques we present are the same for all ages, the way in which these techniques are presented, and the details they contain, will inevitably differ in some cases. We give guidance on this wherever it is really necessary, but it would be tedious to give every exercise in a different form for each age group. Accordingly, you may need to adapt individual exercises to suit the stage of development your children have reached. This isn’t difficult to do, and the better you know your children, the easier you will find it to be.

We give more details about children and their needs and abilities in Chapter 2 and from time to time throughout the book, but there are, however, certain preliminary guidelines to bear in mind, and the most important of these are summarized below.

Five- to eight-year-olds

Children of this age find abstract thinking usually beyond them, and need to have everything related in some way to their own practical experiences, i.e. to the things they have seen and heard and touched. They have vivid powers of imagination, but these powers do not extend to anything which lies beyond these practical experiences. Nevertheless, television and computer games have exposed them to far more of these experiences than was the case even a few years ago, and the range of stimuli and of examples that you can use in your meditation exercises is more than extensive enough.

The second point to remember about this age group is the children’s love of stories, rhymes and songs. Simple exercises like reading a story aloud, or singing a song, and then asking them to close their eyes and imagine the characters and the actions they have just been hearing about are an invaluable preparation for meditation. They also help lengthen children’s attention span and develop the depth of their interest, points to which we shall return in detail later.

Nine- to twelve-year-olds

This age group spans the junior school years and the beginning of high school. During these years children mature rapidly, and their interests, general knowledge, and powers of thinking and reasoning all develop considerably. For the most part, however, they still need to have new material linked clearly to things they have already experienced, and abstract concepts still present some difficulty.

Children of this age still enjoy stories, and their imagination remains as vivid as ever, provided that it has been encouraged and not dismissed by adults as immature daydreaming, but they now begin to show an overriding desire to be interactive. They want to initiate activities, to take responsibilities, to have a say in how things are said and done, to have questions answered, to receive explanations, and to discuss, question, debate and argue. Little progress will be made by the adult who simply tells them what exercises they are to do, and expects them to get on with them passively.

Thirteen- to fourteen-year-olds

Children show marked changes in their behaviour during their early high school years. There is a tendency to turn away from anything that appears in any way childish, and to assert more and more their independence from adult authority. The peer group becomes of increasing importance, and it is difficult for teachers to hold the attention of anyone whose friends reject the activity concerned.

During these years, most children become capable of abstract thinking, which not only extends the scope of the meditation exercises that can be used, but also allows them to discuss more deeply many of the concepts associated with meditation. Mindfulness, compassion, empathy, universal love, wholeness, tranquillity, peace, concentration, spirituality, spaciousness, eternity, beauty, truth, openness, purity and so on can all now enter freely into the language you use, and children can see that meditation is not only a way of having a gentle and relaxing inner experience, it is also a way of reaching out towards people and things, and arriving at a deeper sense of harmony and unity with the rest of creation.

Later Adolescence

The ages fifteen to eighteen inclusive mark the final stage of the transition from childhood to adulthood. Although still limited by their inadequate experience of the world, children in late adolescence are in many ways physically and intellectually the equals of their parents and teachers. They need to understand the things they are doing, and to recognize that they are of value not only now but for the future as well. If they are to take more than a passing interest in meditation, they should see it as a practical skill for life, something that will help them become more effective as well as more balanced and sane.

It is often harder to introduce the theory and practice of meditation to children of this age group than to any other. They tend to be naturally critical of anything to which adults try to introduce them, preferring to see for themselves what is on offer, and to make their own choices. This is discussed in more depth in Chapter 15.

No matter what their age, all children like to succeed. It is little use trying to teach through failure. Always concentrate upon teaching through success. Find a level at which children can get things right, and then move gently and at the right speed upwards from there. If children fail at something they will, dependent upon temperament and upbringing, either blame themselves for a lack of ability, or reject the whole thing as not worth doing anyway. Avoid this by always working at the appropriate level. Two or three minutes of effective and enjoyable meditation are worth far more than double or treble this time spent in frustration and boredom. Nobody need fail at meditation. Meditation is a natural state of the mind, the state to which it returns when we stop bombarding it with mental chatter.

Raising Awareness

Although the techniques of meditation, at least at the level at which we are discussing them, appear relatively simple, meditation itself covers a vast area of human psychology. Thus, although the title of the book refers only to meditation, we have much to say about the raising of children’s awareness – awareness of their minds, of their bodies, of the outer world, of their imagination, and of their thoughts and feelings.

In addition we have much to say about the problems children encounter in their psychological lives, the reasons for these problems, and the way in which meditation can help children deal with them. We do not see meditation as an esoteric practice designed to take the meditator away from everyday life, but as a peerless system of mind training and self-exploration that renders children more effective in what they do. As we explain in the following pages, meditation can enhance children’s learning, memory, self-awareness, emotional balance, powers of attention, creativity – and above all their sense of inner harmony and peace. Meditation will not suddenly turn children into different people, but it has the potential to make them much better at being all the good things that they really are.

The Structure of the Book

This book explores chapter by chapter the range of abilities with which meditation can be of help to children. Part 1 explains the rationale behind teaching meditation, while Part 2 covers the different areas of life which can be enhanced by meditation. You will find explanations of the most suitable meditation techniques, practical exercises for introducing these techniques to children, and a range of other exercises which support meditation and help develop the necessary mental attitudes. You will also find the theory that allows you to render meditation fully understandable and, we hope, acceptable both to you and to your children.

The last section of this book discusses the practicalities of introducing meditation to children, whether you are working with small groups, with a whole class of children in school, or with your own children at home. These chapters cover such things as the organization of space, the links between meditation and the rest of the school timetable, and methods for gaining and holding the children’s interest. We illustrate the advice given in these chapters by referring back to the basic exercises with which any programme of meditation with children should commence.

It is suggested that you read right through the book before beginning your work. In this way you will have a thorough knowledge not only of the material with which you will be dealing, but also of some of the problems you may encounter on the way.