Mindfulness power for kids and adults

A couple of years ago, I was completely overloaded: I was working very hard in interesting projects and I was very happy about that. At the same time, at home, I was feeling that things were getting out of control. The kids were arguing all the time when they were with me and I had no energy left to help them to take things easier. My work / life balance was not aligned with my family needs. I was exhausted and stressed.
How could I help them to take things easier if I was not able to do it myself? My situation was very close to a burn out. Actually, I was in burn out.

A friend of mine who was also going through the same shared with me the benefits that she was getting from Jon Kabbat-Zin’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program.

As I did not have a lot of time to join one of the program close to my place, I decided to start practising by my own. I bought the book, Full Catastrophe Living and the meditations CDs. After 6 weeks of daily mindfulness practice, I started putting more focus on living moment by moment and being present.
Practising mindfulness is helping me to have clear priorities and slow down when I am trying to do to much. As all of us, I want to do everything ; being mindfulness helps to choose calmly what is important for me and for the family, and to enjoy it.
Mindfulness has helped me to reduce my stress and focused me on what I am doing.
I would like to share with all of you my own experience on meditation with my kids.

Reduce tensions:

One day, I decided to replace yelling at kids by 1 meditation minute. When the kids are arguing between them and I start feeling that I am reaching my limits, I close my eyes and I start breathing. After a couple of months practising the result is amazing, when my kids see that I close my eyes they just stop and they whisper “Look, she’s doing the breathing thing” and they calm down immediately.

Improve time to bed:

We started practising guided meditation (for kids) with “Sitting still like a frog”  from Eline Snel . After practising with the CD, I learnt how to guide a meditation and I started to facilitate it when kids are not able to sleep.

Having fun:

I attended to one yoga family workshop with our oldest (9 at the time) and we learnt some acrobatic yoga, he enjoyed that and shared with Lucia and Yago some of the posses. We have a lot of fun doing those posses all together.

Appreciating nature:

I started sharing mindfulness moments with the kids, “Look at that scenery kids! This view is just beautiful.” Now my kids are sharing these nice feelings with me.

Did you give a try to mindfulness?
I am looking forward to hearing from your mindfulness experiences or questions!

Disclaimer: please note that we are only providing links to the referenced material because it proved to be valuable for us and we hope it works for you too ; we are not associated in any way with the authors.