CHAPTER TEN

FINDING A PEACEFUL PLACE

Many children, even in adolescence, are not fully in touch with their feelings. Sometimes this is because they don’t possess the language to explain things properly to themselves, but more often it is because they are caught up in confusion as to what they ‘ought’ to be feeling. Ask a class of eight-year-old children whether they have any worries, and hardly a hand will go up. Tell them instead that most children of their age have worries, and that you would like to hear about them, and nearly every child in the class will be eager to disclose something. Most of the things disclosed will be genuine, and not merely invented in order to please their teacher.

Children’s Anxieties

Children worry about what their parents and teachers think of them, about their friends or their lack of friends, about their possessions, about their own safety and the safety of the people they love, about being bullied, about their pets, about dying, about where they came from, about God, and even about the state of their health.

In some ways children worry as much as, if not more than, most adults. As the foundations of our mature personalities are largely laid down during childhood, the way in which children deal with their worries can influence much of their coping behaviour throughout life. Children who are helped to keep their anxieties in perspective, and to develop a serenity of mind that prevents them from being overwhelmed by them, are thus advantaged not only in the present but in the years to come.

Meditation helps children deal with anxieties both mentally and physically. The body and the mind are closely linked. If the body is relaxed, it helps the mind to relax. If the body is tense, the mind becomes tense, and a vicious circle develops. If the body is tense, it signals this tension to the mind; the mind tenses in response, which further tenses the body, and the body feeds back yet more anxious signals to the mind. So the process goes on, unless we break the circle by relaxing the body in meditation.

At the same time, meditation helps relieve anxiety by providing the mind with a point of focus. By concentrating upon this point of focus, the mind is less distracted by anxious thoughts. The thoughts may still be there, but the mind does not attend to them, or get caught up in the chain of associations that lead it from one anxiety to another. And as the mind relaxes, so it prompts relaxation in the body.

This can be brought home to children within the context of a general discussion about anxiety. Ask the children what it is like to be anxious. Encourage them to report the physical sensations involved – the pain in the pit of the stomach, the feelings of nausea, the tightness in the shoulders and the neck, the headache. With very young children, it is often helpful to ask them first to imagine a situation in which they feel anxious, and then to report the sensations involved.

Once children are fully aware that anxiety produces bodily reactions, ask them how these can be relieved. Bring out the idea that if the body can ‘let go’ of these sensations in meditation, by relaxing tight muscles and letting the physical tensions drain away, then the mind is also going to feel more at ease with itself. In addition, the act of meditation, by virtue of its calm non-involvement in thoughts, gives children what can best be described as permission not to dwell on their anxieties. All too often children come to regard anxiety as a merited punishment for their misdeeds and for their weaknesses as human beings. In the minds of many of them, anxiety is inseparably associated with guilt. They are ‘bad’ boys or girls, and therefore must suffer by feeling guilty about themselves. Meditation helps stop this kind of thinking.

Teaching meditation isn’t a way of excusing children’s unwanted behaviour. But it is a way of helping them keep things in perspective, so that they can become more rational and less emotional in their self-judgements, and can increase in self-understanding and self-acceptance.

Point out that all the meditation exercises the children have done so far can help relieve anxiety, particularly those in Chapter 5 and those involving concentration upon the breathing and body awareness. These techniques are combined in the following exercise.

MEDITATION 15: Releasing Anxieties

Remind the children that when concentrating upon their breath, they should make sure it comes from as deep down as possible, that it is calm and regular, and that they attend to it instead of to the thoughts that may be going through their heads. Then ask them to allow their awareness to sweep slowly through their bodies, as in Exercise 9 (see pages 78–9).

• If you find any tension in any muscle or group of muscles, gently let it go. Check particularly the muscles of your back, your stomach, your shoulders, your neck, and the muscles of the face. Notice how letting go of tensions in the body helps you let go of any tensions in the mind. Now bring your awareness to your breathing, and keep it there. Should any worries or anxieties come into your mind, let them go in the same way that you let go the tensions in the muscles.

In addition, an excellent way of helping the mind to relax when faced with particular anxieties is to use the method employed by Fiona (see pages 95–6), namely to visualize a peaceful place, and allow oneself to enter and enjoy its serenity. Most children tend to choose the seaside, or somewhere in the country, or a park, or a quiet room all to themselves. Some children, however, prefer the excitement of a funfair or a theme park. The important thing is that it should be the child’s own choice, and that they should feel happy with it.

Self-empowerment

A further benefit of meditation, as we stress particularly in Chapter 5 but also elsewhere, is the ability to deal with personal feelings instead of being at the mercy of them. This is an important aspect of self-empowerment. From childhood onwards, we need to feel in charge of our lives, rather than at the mercy of the guilt, the self-accusations, the low self-esteem and the other dark energies that can come between us and happiness. Anxiety, as much as anything, is a habit – a habit all too often acquired early in life and arising from the feeling that we don’t deserve to be happy. So when happiness appears, the mind hunts around for reasons why we should not be happy. And obligingly, something we ‘ought’ to be worrying about rises to the surface.

Anxiety has a legitimate role to play even in childhood, in that it warns children of dangers, reminds them of things needing attention, prompts them to reflect upon the consequences of their behaviour, and prods them when they have failed to live up to the reasonable expectations others may have of them. But it should be a valued servant and not a demanding master.

When discussing the role of meditation in self-empowerment, it is helpful to ask children what happens to their thoughts when they are anxious. Allow them to recognize that at such times thoughts often seem to take on a life of their own, one thought leading to another leading to another and so on until the mind embarks upon a mental roller-coaster of vain imaginings.

Children often readily recognize that the mind plays the ‘what if?’ game. (‘What if this happened, and what if this led to that, and that led to something else?’) The ‘what if’ game is typically followed by the ‘how would?’ game. (‘How would my parents/ teachers/friends feel if these things happened? How would I feel? How would I get out of the situation in which I landed myself? How would I get back on the right side of my parents/teachers/ friends? How would I make sure that such awful things never happened again? How would I get back to feeling happy once more?’ And so on.)

The great American writer Mark Twain once said that his life had been full of tragedies, and most of them never happened. The creative power of the mind, of so much value in other contexts, is a past master at dredging up the most far-fetched things to worry about once it embarks upon its roller-coaster. It has the knack of making the most implausible things seem plausible, even inevitable. For some children, virtually every possible tragic event in the world is waiting to pounce upon them around the very next corner.

The way for them to avoid the roller-coaster is to keep their minds focused upon the things they want to think. If their anxieties are illusory, then they must refuse to become caught up in them. If their anxieties are real, then they must concentrate upon seeing if solutions exist. Meditation not only calms the mind, it opens it to the creative thinking that helps produce these solutions. Explain to children that meditation is similar to riding a bicycle. When riding a bicycle, they have to keep the front wheel pointing ahead. If they lose control and let it wander to one side, the bicycle will career off the road, with disaster as the inevitable result. Most children understand analogies of this kind.

Another useful exercise is to ask them to focus upon their breathing while you clap your hands at random intervals. The claps represent anxious thoughts, and most children will recognize that if their minds are calmly centred, they are not as startled or distracted by the clapping as they would otherwise be.

Children are in the process of learning how their minds work. Much of the mind is still a mystery to them. They are unaware of its potential. Thus to be told that the mind has the power to direct and shape itself, rather than be at the mercy of any emotion or feeling that chooses to surface, can in itself be a liberating experience. It allows them to push forward the boundaries of the known, and in the case of many children introduces them to an enduring interest in the workings and the possibilities of their own inner world.