Meditation for Families

**This post was written in collaboration with Beeja Meditation London, a meditation centre who work across London to provide meditation classes for both children and adults.**

For many parents, family life can feel rather intense at times. Being the noisy, creative and wonderful creatures they are, children add spontaneity and sometimes a little bit of chaos to our days – and they take an awful lot of looking after. Introducing your household to meditation is one way to enhance everything that’s brilliant about having a family, while also helping everyone to deal with any stresses they may encounter.

There are many benefits of meditation for children and adults alike, and it’s something the whole family can do together – creating a little time and space within the day for calm and relaxation.

How meditation can help parents.

Life as a parent can be pretty stressful, with the responsibility of protecting the wellbeing of a tiny human often leading to lots of apprehensions. The result is that grown-ups tend to worry about all sorts of things, from keeping on top of the bills to making sure the kids aren’t just about to seriously injure themselves, and sometimes this can become overwhelming.

Meditation has been shown across a variety of studies to significantly reduce stress – in fact, the area of the brain associated with stress has been shown to shrink in people after only 3 months of regular meditation. By making us feel calmer, we find it easier not to get in too much of a spin about the small stuff – giving us a better sense of perspective and helping us to stay cool and composed.

Parents also need lots of energy to keep up with their progeny but can find themselves feeling a bit like a zombie due to lack of sleep – especially when their children are very young. Meditation can both improve the quality of our sleep and also gives us an energy boost, not to mention an often much-needed twenty minutes to ourselves. When we meditate, we allow our minds and bodies to rest even more deeply than sleep, which helps us feel refreshed and ready to take on the world.

How meditation can help children.

We tend to think of childhood as being completely care-free, but in the modern world, that is rarely the case. Whether it’s social media or school pressure, children can feel the effects of stress, and they can also find it hard to develop a healthy sense of self-esteem.

While it would be unrealistic to expect a very small child to meditate as an adult would, there are some meditative activities children can take part in, and once they enter their pre-teen and adolescent years they can start meditating in earnest. Being encouraged to participate in relaxing, meditative activities can take children out of the bustle of every day and give them time think about their experiences and feelings, helping them to become more self-aware and comfortable in expressing themselves.

Meditation can also have a great impact on a child’s creativity. When we meditate, the area of our brain known as the pre-frontal cortex fires up and allows our creative functioning to really flourish. Furthermore, it can help when children have been struggling with their behaviour because they will become calmer and less reactive to small triggers. As they gain more positive reinforcement and learn to express themselves creatively, children can become more confident within themselves.

Bringing meditation into your day.

There are lots of benefits of meditating for families, but where should you begin? If your children are a little older, you can look around for local meditation courses or classes and take the whole family, but if this isn’t possible there are lots of other ways to bring meditation into your family life.

Once you yourself have learnt how to meditate as an adult (there’s lots of advice online and apps you can download) you can include your children by meditating at a set time every day, helping to create a routine. Even if they are only 3 or 4 years old, encourage them to sit with you a mimic your pose and quietness – they may only join in for a few minutes, but every little helps! You can also make a small meditation space in your home or garden, which is calm and inviting.

Another way to bring meditative activities into your children’s lives is to encourage them to be mindful of the present moment. Deep breathing exercises and simple kid-friendly yoga poses (it’s good to get the advice of a teacher) is one way to do this, but it can be as simple as asking them what they notice about one particular thing – such as a leaf, or the colour of the sky that day. Even cloud gazing can be a great introduction to meditation, while colouring in is something children already enjoy that can be very calming.

However you approach it, making meditation something you do as a family will create more tranquillity in all your lives, and help everyone be as happy and healthy as they can be.

[AdSense-A]