CHAPTER FIVE
MEDITATION AND THE EMOTIONS
Describing Emotions
As a result of their work with meditation, children can become increasingly in tune with their emotional lives, and better able to recognize and talk about their feelings. We make reference to this frequently throughout the book, but emotions nevertheless warrant a chapter to themselves, as there are a number of exercises specifically designed to assist emotional self-understanding. These exercises are directed towards helping the children handle troublesome emotions – the encouragement of positive emotions such as compassion and empathy are dealt with in Chapter 11.
One of the reasons why children feel helpless in the face of strong emotions like fear and anger is that they lack any real understanding of them. Such emotions can seem to be powerful things that rise unbidden, and overwhelm them with energies they are unable to control. Part of the problem children often face in learning how to handle their own fear and anger is that they are taught by disapproving adults to see such emotions as dark forces which prompt the withdrawal of love and approval. In consequence children often distance themselves from their own emotions, thus becoming strangers to part of their own nature. It is just as bad if children are brought up in an environment which refuses to allow them to express their love and their compassion, or their sadness and their need for comfort and understanding. The more that children are allowed to acknowledge and accept their emotions, and to recognize that emotions are a natural and potentially healthy part of all our natures, the more they can learn how to express them in personally and socially appropriate and helpful ways.
The next three exercises involve helping children to experience their emotions imaginatively, and to learn how to look at them in a way which will help them to understand and handle their feelings better.
Start by asking the group to close their eyes and focus upon their breathing, in the usual way at the start of meditation, before continuing as follows:
• I want you to imagine you are watching a science fiction programme on television. It is a programme meant for children, but you are finding it rather scary. The hero and the heroine are fleeing along a very dark passageway deep down in the earth, and are being chased by some very frightening people down there who want to destroy them. They run along the passage, and then down a long flight of steps, with their pursuers close behind them. At the bottom of the steps the passage divides in two. They hesitate for a moment, terrified of what is behind them, but not knowing which passageway to take. In desperation they decide to turn right, but round a bend in the passage they suddenly come upon a blank wall which bars their progress. With a shout of triumph their pursuers close in upon them . . .
You can substitute any piece of imaginative story-telling for the above, but the golden rule is that it shouldn’t be too frightening, and shouldn’t put the children in realistic situations that would be potentially dangerous for them (i.e. avoid such things as ‘you are walking home on your own on a dark night...’). If you have the use of a screen, you can even show them a clip from a television programme, but make sure it is a programme intended for their age group, and the kind of thing they would be allowed to watch at home.
Stop the story or the film once it has begun to generate mild amounts of fear, and ask the children, with their eyes closed, to explore the feeling of fear within their bodies. Where is this fear? How do they recognize it as fear? How exactly does it feel? Why is it unpleasant? Then ask them to relax, and allow the feeling of fear to drain away, leaving them calm and happy.
Help your children to realize that the more they know about fear, the less reason they have to be afraid of it! Fear is only the various feelings within the body which they have just identified. When they relax, the feelings of fear just fade away. Allow them the opportunity to talk about the feelings they have just experienced.
Then discuss with them the value of fear. Boys in particular have to get away from the idea that there is anything ‘unmanly’ about being afraid. Explain how fear can help to warn us of danger, and can give us a sudden burst of energy to help us run away if we have to. Fear thus helps us to protect ourselves. It also teaches us that we are right to be wary of the unknown, and of lonely and dark places. Therefore there is nothing to be ashamed of in fear; it is natural and potentially helpful.
However, we need to be able to handle our fear, to keep it within proportion, and to recognize when there is a real need for it, and when it just arises through habit or through our mistaken ideas as to what is really threatening and what is not. In essence, what you are doing is helping the children to make friends with their fear, so that they can see it as a very useful servant, rather than as a dreaded master.
One group of eight-year-olds asked if they could make a list of all the things of which they were afraid, and then used the more common ones as themes for meditation. The result was a growing pride in their ability to look calmly at imaginary fears instead of trying to run away from them.
EXERCISE 7: Dealing with Anger
A similar exercise to that used for fear can be used to explore anger. You can tell the children a story that is likely to make them feel some anger – anything to do with unfairness to children, abuse of the environment or cruelty to animals usually does the trick. Or again, you can show them a clip from a children’s television programme which is likely to make them feel angry on behalf of the child or children whose story they are watching. Once again, ask them to identify where the anger is in their bodies, and how it feels and how they recognize it as anger. Then ask them to relax and feel the anger, like the fear, draining away.
In the discussion that follows, encourage them to describe the sort of situations that make them angry. Then prompt them to see that anger, like fear, has a very useful function. It helps us to protect ourselves when attacked, and to stand up for others who are being treated unfairly or who cannot stand up for themselves. But like fear, anger should be a servant and not a master. The more children can understand their anger, and the kind of situations which make them angry, the more they are able to see where anger is justified, and where they should just relax and let it slip away.
EXERCISE 8: Dealing with Sadness
Sadness is another often troublesome emotion that can be dealt with in a similar way to fear and anger. Once more, the stimulus can be a story or a video clip that, without arousing emotions that are too overwhelming, allows the children to feel sad or sympathetic or concerned for another child, an animal, a broken toy, a lost doll, or whatever seems to be appropriate.
Ask the children once more, with their eyes closed, to locate the sadness in themselves, and to explore where it is located, how it actually feels, and how they know that it is sadness. Then ask them to relax and feel the sadness slipping away, to be replaced with peace and a sense of happiness.
Discuss with the children other times in their lives when they have felt sad, and listen to the various reasons for their sadness. Ask them the purpose of sadness – why do we have the potential inside ourselves for this particular emotion? If possible, the discussion should bring out the point that sadness is linked to sympathy and concern for others and for ourselves, and can prompt us to do something to help those who are suffering. Help them to see that sadness is thus a very valuable emotion, and only becomes a problem if it is there for no reason or if it goes on too long. Make sure the children understand that through understanding more about this emotion, and through meditation and relaxation, they can learn how to handle their sadness more effectively.
To Sum Up About Emotions
Essentially what the children are learning to do in these exercises is to observe their own feelings without identifying too closely with them and becoming overwhelmed by them. You are not trying to stop children from feeling emotions (which would be to blunt their sensitivity and interfere with their humanity), or to repress and bottle up their emotions (which would store up trouble for them later in life, for repressed emotions are one of the major causes of adult neurosis). You are not trying to prevent them from expressing their emotions, as the expression of emotions is often a necessary safety valve. To sum up and re-emphasize what we have already said, you are trying to help them to:
• recognize and accept the presence of their emotions
• stop feeling guilty or weak when experiencing emotions, and to understand that emotions are a natural aspect of human life
• get to know and understand the exact nature of their emotions, at both the psychological and the physical levels, and to understand the purpose of emotions
• reach a better appreciation of when emotions are appropriate and when they arise merely through habit or through misunderstanding
• recognize that it is possible to let go of emotions instead of allowing them to become too overwhelming.
Children vary greatly in their sensitivity, and your concern must always first and foremost be to protect this sensitivity. It is also important to realize that those children who experience emotions less deeply than others should not be made to think that they are in any way inferior as a result. Some may not feel even the smallest stirring of fear in response to the story you tell them or the video clip you show them in Exercise 6. Some may not feel anger or sadness in response to the material in the other two exercises. That’s fine. They must be who they are. You don’t want them to feel inferior or superior to others as a result. Neither do you want them to pretend to experience emotions that they are not actually experiencing.
Such children will nevertheless still gain benefit from the exercises which will help prepare them for those bigger occasions when they actually do experience the emotions concerned. Rest assured that time spent in work of this kind is never wasted, even if children are unable to see the value of it until some time later.