What is mindfulness ?

Mindfulness can be described as present moment awareness, without judgement. 

Mindfulness is not about being seated with an empty mind - far from it. It can be applied to many activities and have many forms. Have you looked at how kids can be fully engross at colouring a page or building a brick world ?

Having a mindfulness practice is about helping your brain see the moment more fully, not identifying yourself with your thoughts (hello little voice) and being able to act rather than react to life’s events. It will not transform you into a full smiling blissfully happy being, but it will allow you to be fully there, manage your emotional and mental states better, in particular your stress levels, to be more resilient and even, with regular, practice help you with focus and memory, which is very good for these pesky school tests!

You can start exploring longer or more formal meditation practices with kids that age. Depending on their capacity and their mood that day, they can perform mindfulness up to 10 minutes.

In addition, they might like starting journaling and gratitude ritual to release negative emotions and train their brains to look for the day’s positive as well.

Don’t force kids if they don’t want to engage into your planned activity: come back to it when they are more receptive or try another approach. Kids are all different and have all their own development rhythm, and mindfulness is at the end of the day a highly personal practice, you cannot do it for you.

Examples of mindful activities:

• Daily weather: ask kids at the beginning of the day or the yoga session how they feel inside, feel free to support this question with colour or a thermometer to help them answer (they should not be obliged to say the answer if they don’t want to),

• Mindful breathing

• 3-part breathing: breath in into your belly - lungs - collarbones than out from collarbones - lungs - belly,

• Counting breath: e.g. breathe in and out at the same length to balance yourself, or longer exhale to calm down,

• Mindful eating: great family activity to do at mealtime once in a while where you explore a fruit with all your 5 senses, as if it the first time encountering such a fruit,

• Gratitude journaling and journaling:

• See as well the blog on bedtime routine.

• Gratitude ritual is also great in the morning to start the day better: ask kids for what they are grateful to-day, it could be big things or smaller ones (a ray of sun, the birds’ songs …),

• Guided Meditation and visualisation such as:

• Body scan: bring attention to each body part one by one,

• Progressive muscle relaxation: squeeze one body part tight and release, moving up and finish by the whole body, do not forget to make silly faces when you squeeze it!

• 5 4 3 2 1 grounding: name 5 things you can see, 4 you can feel, 3 you can hear, 2 you can smell, 1 you can taste.

• Mindful movement such as:

• Mindful yoga: move through a yoga slowly slowly and with the breath,

• Mindful walking: focus on each tiny parts of your walk pattern as you move very slowly,

• Colouring: explore mandalas and other nice colouring pages,

• See as well the activities for smaller kids that you can adapt this age group.

How do you teach mindfulness to Preteens (10-13)?

Preteens are a very difficult group as they are about to leave their childhood and about to become teenagers, but just not yet. In addition, kids of the same age might be on different timings.

Peer pressure is also very important. Please be very attuned and open on how they act on that day and if there is a positive or not peer dynamics.

You are not their friends, neither their parents - engage with them considering them as human beings with their own minds but take into account their need to still be protected.

First and foremost, it is important to explain mindfulness and its benefits to them, to make clear it will come with practice, that there is no right or wrong practice and to empower them with it, without judgement and with letting go of the results. Mindfulness is here to help them develop skills to deal in particular with stress and anxiety.

As Master Yoda once say « Do or Not Do, There is no Try ». Here it will means you have to practice - that is the core of mindfulness, the practice counts (not the results, not the fact that the practice could be seen as good or too busy) and the benefits will come by and by.

Mindfulness is about accepting how things are at the moment, with an open mind. It does not mean you cannot decide to act on it - but be it a conscious decision to take this or that action and be it without pressuring yourself on a give outcome, what counts being your conscious undertaking.

Mindfulness means paying attention to your thoughts, emotions and body sensations with a curious mind, being able to identify and name them, and to distance yourself from them (you are not your thoughts).

Mindfulness is about present moment awareness, without judgement, with curiosity and an open mind, and with compassion to yourself.

Over time, mindfulness will help them in particular:

• manage their emotions and stress better, especially when stress goes through the roof

• increase their attention span and ability to focus, their memory (great for their academic performance)

• improve their social connection and communication,

• boost their sense of self.

There are several mindfulness activities you can teach to teenagers - let them see what works for them at that time, but the core advice is to empower them (and let them feel empowered):

• Adapt the activities for kids into a more « grow-up » version (see above) and with longer time (up to 45 minutes),

• Silent Meditation:

• Observing breath / Breath as an anchor: focus the attention on the breath, without forcing the breath in any way or expecting the breath to look a certain way, come back to the breath every time the mind wanders and congratulate yourself for getting back

• Note: Breathing can be stressful for certain persons (for different reasons); in that case teens can focus on sounds, body sensations or body points of contact with the chair or the mat all the same.

• After a few practice, they can do all by themselves if they want to, using one, two or all the anchors at a time, come back to they favourite anchor at the end and then to the sensation of themselves into the room at that moment.

• Regular journaling to vent their emotions and stressful events out + focus on gratitude journaling to train their minds to see the positive of the day as well,

• Mindful activities: bring attention to all the tiny actions and movement needed in a daily activity such as teeth-brushing or there chores.

It is even better is:

• they can note somewhere how they felt after their practice 

• they can do it with friends

• they set a specific time or place to practice.

As teens have a lot going on inside them, they might sometimes resist to things they’ve done before or be afraid of their peers’ opinions. That is why it is important to explain them the benefits, give them options and bring no judgment whatever they choose to do or not - especially in a group settings.