Meditation is an activity of focusing. The focus can be directed to the breath, a word, the absence of sound or can occur when doing an activity with full involvement such as cooking, playing an instrument or creating. Meditation is being completely engaged in something to the point that we experience ourselves as being one with what we are concentrating on. When we sit quietly, with eyes closed and focus on the breath, our thoughts become less noticeable over time. We witness the thoughts passing in the mind. We become one with the breath and a quiet place within ourselves.
I had a direct experience of how meditation calmed me when I was 32 years old and traveling in India. I had developed a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis; every joint of my body ached. Jolts of shooting pains were so painful. I was fortunate to have a chiropractor assist me with diet, supplements and adjustments. After treatment for one year it then subsided, and I was cured, never to have this again.
I completely changed to a vegetarian diet, and I followed a strict regimen and committed to a meditation and hatha yoga practice. My joints demanded frequent movement, and my mind was always thinking. When I started hatha yoga, I found my mind would quiet down even more. I adopted an easeful practice of meditation.
Each day, I arose at 3 AM to sit in a meditation cave (a darkened room). I meditated deeply in this still space. I practiced focusing on the breath, and witnessing the mind. I repeated a mantra with my breathing. A mantra is a set of words that have a positive vibration or powerful charge (See Chapter on Mantra). I repeated the mantra silently to myself. This helped me go deeper within to a quiet place that is pure awareness and timeless. Sometimes it would feel like I was drifting off to the edge of sleep.
In my meditation, I would see lights, images, colors, and unfamiliar scenes. Pictures, people, music and words flew by. I later learned this is the pure space of awareness, where there is no separation between the experience and the experiencer. There was only stillness and peacefulness. When I meditated deeply, I became very still inside. This would uplift me emotionally and give me strength and detachment from my physical pain.
One morning I was dressing to teach a seminar. I took off the top of my deodorant container, and suddenly the entire cake of the deodorant flew in the air. I stood there watching it fly up in an arc, and then travel down and land on the floor. I watched this as if it was happening in slow motion. I witnessed myself watching this happen and thinking that it was hilarious that my deodorant was flying. My next thought was, “Oh dear, what will I use now?” In that moment, I was a witness to my thoughts, feelings and experience. I was fully present emotionally, but had some sense of distance as though the incident were happening to someone else.
In this story about my flying deodorant, I demonstrate how we often practice being a witness and don’t realize it. When we are watching thoughts pass in our mind, like clouds in the sky, we are witnessing our thoughts. This is the foundation for meditation.
I have applied the witness awareness in my therapy sessions with a child with sensory issues. I was fully present, engaging a child to maneuver through a soft tunnel and then to climb on a ball, repeating the sequence several times in a rhythmic flow. I was in the moment, involved playing, and present to her sensory response to an activity. Yet, I was able to stay detached enough to observe her experience, and myself so that I could determine what was needed next.
Giving children tools to be a witness to their thoughts and feelings at a young age is a precious gift, as these tools to manage and engage their minds and emotions will last a lifetime. Instead of a child feeling out of control when he experiences a strong emotion, he or she can learn to witness these emotions differently and regulate sensation.
It is very empowering for a child to look within for the source of a strong emotion instead of looking to an outside source for its cause. Looking within gives children a new way of understanding themselves. They can learn to notice the many nuances of emotion, the small up and down of hundreds of mild reactions and sensations that come and go in a day. Instead of suppressing emotion, children can sense a nuance, a slight awareness of feeling. Like adults, they can learn to experience changing emotional states throughout the day as small hills and valleys instead of big waves or torrents. They can learn to modulate sensory reactions appropriately and to notice irritability, anger or sadness surfacing. The relationship to the mind and body can be expressed through simple games and tools.
Mind body practices allow children to gain access to a more integrated nervous system response. Therapists have shared with me that they have taught yoga to students who later used the poses when they felt upset. The children would go to the back of the classroom and do poses to self-calm. Those children now have a strategy that can be utilized anywhere. When children can be teachers to adults, or parents be teachers to children and bring awareness to the equation, we are on the right track to helping families.
When we practice a yogic breath, we are changing our nervous system from sympathetic to parasympathetic. In this way, the deep breathing from the belly can reduce stress and make major changes to our health and well-being. A child can be taught to breathe deeply at any early age.
I have worked with children while they watch a yoga DVD. Over time, they have learned to breathe deeply. If you enter the classroom and a yoga DVD is on, the children are either watching or doing the yoga poses. There is a sense of quiet and relaxation. It is remarkable, how simply watching the video, the music, the images and the soft voice of the instructor can so easily engage children into a state of relaxation. When the staff joins in as well and also does the poses and the guided imagery, the students calm down even more, creating stillness in the room. (See Chapter #3)
Start this exploration of learning to practice meditation by enhancing observation skills and building somatic awareness. The games help children and young adults to practice noticing, key to mindfulness. This lays the groundwork for the task of observing and witnessing the mind’s thoughts. This builds the skills for future meditation practice for open-and closed-eyed meditation from a body-based awareness.
• Sit quietly in a comfortable position and imagine a gentle breeze.
• Notice any thoughts you are having.
• Make a decision to let the thoughts pass just as a gentle breeze.
• Allow the thoughts without trying to stop them.
• Release each thought.
• Witness each thought as it comes up in the mind and let it go.
• Be accepting of yourself in this process.
• Breathe in and out.
• Place a finger under your nose to feel the breath come in and out.
• Focus on the breath.
• Focus back to your breath each time your mind wants to chase a thought.
• Bring it back gently to the breath.
I can remember meeting a meditation teacher in San Francisco in 1974. There were about a thousand people in the room. People were standing in a long line, waiting to go up and spend a few minutes with the teacher. The energy of the room was electric with soft music, anticipation and excitement. I didn’t know anything about meditation.
I can still remember the experience vividly. When I came up to the teacher, he made a loud grunting sound. The sound had such a strong impact on my mind that it completely knocked all thoughts out of me like a strong bolt of wind and my mind felt completely still. My mind stopped for a few minutes. He also laughed and I could feel his happiness deeply. There was so much love coming from him. I wanted to experience that stillness and love for myself. He seemed supremely happy, self-accepting and comfortable in his body. I began meditating after this.
At that time, mindfulness wasn’t as familiar to most people as it is today. There was no Internet, magazine articles, DVD’s or mainstream books written about meditation and yoga. Magazines didn’t write about how to quiet the mind. Except for a rare esoteric bookstore, this information and experience weren’t readily available. People learned about meditation and mindfulness from a meditation teacher. One witnessed one’s own mind become quiet in the teachers’ presence. The teacher’s mind state was very still, and you became still sitting there, even just for a short while. By sitting and going into meditation, you learned to quiet and witness the mind. With practice you learned to create that stillness for yourself.
Creating stillness for myself taught me to slow myself down in the presence of children with processing issues. Once I was playing with Play Doh with a 4-year-old girl. I had allowed the moment to be in stillness, rather than chattering and striving. I realized that this was allowing her to be in a state of meditation in the depth of her play and concentration.
Today there are many books and courses on these subjects, and public schools are using mindfulness, yoga and meditation because it has positive results. A study by Dr. John Medina, author of Brain Rules, comparing walking and yoga, proved that the increase in oxygen from yoga’s deep breathing created an uptick in mental clarity and longer sustaining results. This resulted in a positive impact on academic success. Here are some stories that can easily demonstrate what it means to witness our thoughts.
I had been meditating on and off for 5 years when I had to go to surgery for a repetitively dislocating shoulder. That evening, while lying quietly in the hospital bed, I was reflecting on my life. My mind, as always, was active. I was scared and concerned about the outcome of my surgery. As I attempted to sleep, I could see a white cloud of palpable loving energy hover above my body as I glided into meditation. I remember noticing and sensing its energy of peace and safety. It was clearly there to give me a message, and it comforted me as I fell asleep.
One morning in St. Louis, I was sitting in a Starbucks. There was a tremendous wind blowing outside shaking the glass wall where I was sitting. As I looked outside, I saw a flagpole and a flag blown every which way by the ferocious winds. I sat quietly with my warm coffee inside the building and witnessed the wind blowing. The flag moved around wildly. It occurred to me that the flag was very much like the mind. The flag was attached to the pole and it didn’t blow away, it just blew around uncontrollably. I thought of this analogy:
• The wind is like our thoughts or our reactions to outer events that constantly blow the mind here and there emotionally.
• The flag is like our mind, responding to thoughts as the wind blows.
• The pole is the breath, grounding us.
• The halyard tethers the flag (the mind) to the pole(the breath)
• When the mind (flag) is tethered to the pole (the breath), it hangs on despite being blown around by heavy winds.
• The halyard is our choice or will to hold on to the breath.
This is an excellent guided imagery for children who love baseball and sports:
• Sit quietly and breathe in and out at “home plate.”
• Watch the thoughts passing as you would watch a ball being pitched.
• Allow the breath to be “home plate.”
• Hold your focus on inhale and exhale.
• Gently nudge the mind back to “home plate” when it wants to run the bases.
• Encourage the mind to just let thoughts pass by.
• Focus back to the breath “home plate” rather than follow the thoughts (Run the bases)
• Imagine riding in an open car through the sky.
• See yourself laughing and having fun.
• Hold on tight to keep from falling.
• Feel the bumpy ride as you move up and down, left and right.
• Focus on the breath as you inhale and exhale.
• Imagine the car is your breath keeping you safe.
• Hold tight to the car and let go of each thought as it arises.
• Watch the thoughts pass into the distance just as the objects you see below pass away as you drive by.
• Enjoy sitting in the stillness as you go deeper on the journey.
1. Remember that practicing witnessing is much easier for children than adults, because children are so close to the present moment.
2. Take a moment to notice your own breathing, settle down and establish yourself in a calm state before starting the activities.
3. If time is limited, just sit quietly and do a simple guided imagery of a cloud passing, Golden Ray with deep breathing or The Flying Car, equal breath.
4. Use the somatic and embody cues readily.
5. Let the kids describe their meditation experiences.
6. Try to follow the kids’ lead and honor their intuitive experience.
7. As you shift into this new awareness, remember to be as gentle with yourself and the children as you would be holding a baby bird.
8. Allow whatever comes up for the children to be part of the activity, holding a safe space that is large enough for even a few exaggerated tales or giggles.
Learning to meditate is a cumulative process, and every time you invest a few minutes you are building your bank of meditation practice. It is like riding a bike; once you have felt it you will be able to return to that awareness with little effort.
Understanding the concept of the witness, watching and observing our thoughts helps us to allow our mind to quiet down. In meditation, the goal isn’t to have fewer thoughts or to stop thinking, it is to take a dip into the deep reserves of stillness and rejuvenation that is accessible to everyone within ourselves. By focusing on the breath, we are able to shift to a state of pure awareness, and we experience the mind becoming quiet. Be patient with this developing practice and honor every experience, as there isn’t any right or wrong. Open-eyed meditation while focusing on the breath brings us to the same awareness. Becoming deeply focused in an activity such as drawing, dancing, cooking, skateboarding or many other tasks that involve focusing can also bring the same quiet awareness or by repeating a positive thought or a mantra. It can also increase the ability to concentrate, remember and develop compassion.