Mindfulness is practiced by thousands of adults year on year, but now classes are running for children as young as 6.
The Isbourne centre in Cheltenham is running a ‘Mini Minds’ mindfulness session for children aged 6-10. It includes fun actives and mindful practices that help children learn the skills they need to help them fully concentrate, feel more settled and help encourage self-awareness. The aim is to help children understand their emotions and teach them how to ‘watch’ them occur, rather than immediately react to them.
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Angela Hoskins is the instructor for the group. She has been practising mindfulness for over 20 years and has also worked with children in schools before. Mindfulness is something she hopes will be incorporated into all schools and she believes it should be given equal importance alongside other subjects.
“I think at that age its quite difficult for children to actually understand their feelings. With the mindfulness side, I thought it would be quite helpful for when they become out of control about their feelings. They hopefully with then become mindful that these feelings, as for everybody at every age, are transitory and that they come and go. But children live in the moment, they can’t reason at that age very well, but it’ll pass, so I thought it might be helpful for them to understand that these feelings come and go.”
Cheltenham kindergarten students look forward to practicing mindfulness just like their older siblings.#thisischeltenham #mindfulness @CSDCheltenhamES @EdMindfully pic.twitter.com/Ui7vLHosHK
— Cindy Goldberg (@CindyGoldberg13) 6 February 2019
She recommends that everyone practice mindfulness on a regular basis as way to understand our own emotions (to which she names a sort of ‘self-study’) and better equip ourselves to change the way we feel.
One of her taster sessions she ran included ‘mindful crafting’,
“We did craft as part of the taster session and they were very involved with that. I got them to cut out some cloud shapes to represent the mind. If you imagine the mind as a blue sky and then the clouds come across it, that could represent a troubled or happy thought. So, the happy thought is a white cloud that comes and goes and then there’s a grey cloud that is an uncomfortable thought, that turns into a feeling. I wanted to help them understand that feelings don’t come on their own but from a thought. These clouds represented the comings and goings across your blue sky. They learn that with your blue sky you’re naturally cheerful but there are interruptions sometimes”.
The sessions will run on the 2nd, 9th and 16th of March at The Isbourne centre in Cheltenham. Each session will cost £21.
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