Meditation for children is trendy and effective!

Discover meditation with the family

Mindfulness meditation… A very complicated word to mean something very simple! Meditating is connecting with the present moment, bringing your attention back to yourself as you would close the shutters of a house and observing what is happening, observing your breath, your emotions, your sensations, and letting your thoughts pass by. focusing on his breath to calm the emotional hubbub. Whether you are 30 or 4 years old, you can learn to meditate easily …

What is mediation for? Feel and appreciate calm, regulate stress and emotions, develop self-confidence and bond with others, mobilize all your resources to be more efficient, be more attentive and focused, more present and less dispersed. Extensive program, which you can carry out with your family and at home thanks to easy and fun exercises. Choose a quiet, welcoming and warm place. Place a blanket on the ground. Invite your child to get comfortable there. Each meditation session begins with a minute of silence, a gift we give ourselves to help children integrate the length of time that passes. Using an hourglass to visualize the passage of time is a wonderful aid. Ask your little fan to close their eyes and feel the air coming and going. You can suggest that he put a hand on his stomach to observe that he goes up and that he goes down to the rhythm of the breaths. Don’t ask him to take deep breaths, just to feel his tickling breath, the air inflating and deflating him, like a balloon. Wave a little bell to get his attention. When the bell rings, it means “I am here”.

The bell marks the beginning and the end of each exercise.

Exercise 1: Indoor weather

The rain, the sun, the clouds, the snow, the wind, the storm, the hot, the cold, the children, are very sensitive to the weather. Find a minute a day to ask your child, “What’s the weather like inside you?” “If he answers:” The weather is very beautiful, there is a great sun “,

it is because he is happy. But if he answers: “There are dark clouds”, something is bothering him. Any emotion – joy, fear, anger, sadness… – is felt in the body, in the belly, it is a physiological reaction.

This exercise very quickly accessible to toddlers helps them to feel their mood, to get back to them. They learn to relate to their emotions as they feel them, to question what they are feeling. 

Exercise 2: The hunt for small pleasures

It is the small daily pleasures that make the Great Happiness! They are captured like a butterfly hunt. You just need to encourage your child to pay attention: “Look how the sun gives a beautiful shadow, listen to the raindrops crackling on the sidewalk, it makes nice music, look at the reflections of the sun on the water, it looks like gold, listen how happy the baby’s laughter is… ”Focusing on the beauty of ordinary little pleasures frees the mind. We do not think about the past or the future, we live the present fully.

Exercise 3: The Tagada strawberry

Give your child a Tagada strawberry and ask him not to swallow it right away, but to look at its beautiful red color, to make it squeal under his fingers, to press on it to test its softness. Then, encourage him to roll it on his tongue to feel the granular envelope of the grains of sugar, to suck it to perceive its taste, and finally to chew it slowly to appreciate the different textures. In general, the child is surprised: “Usually, I eat a lot of it, but I had never noticed any of this, it’s great! “

Exercise 4: Slow motion

Meditation praises slowness. Ask your child to slow down as he moves from room to room, for a few steps, a minute as if he were slowing down on the moon. This exercise will allow him to feel all the movements of his body. When he eats, encourage him to chew gently, to enjoy the food. Teach him to look at everything around him with curiosity, objects, nature, insects, to listen to all the sounds, the wind, the insects, the waves, the conversations in the distance, the mechanical noises, like a Martian who disembarks on earth and who would never have seen anything of our planet. The goal is to be present

to what he saw in the moment.

Exercise 5: The little ant

This exercise is practiced lying down. Ask your child to close their eyes and listen to your story. “It’s a tiny little ant climbing on your big toe, it tickles, can you feel it? She goes down between the toes, she feels it’s sweaty, she goes up from one toe to the other. If you move your toes, she has to hang on to hold on. It continues on your leg, there are small grasses (the hairs) which help it not to slip on the tibia, it arrives on a mountain, the knee, it goes up the thigh, forks and falls to the bottom of the navel, she goes up and continues valiantly, she feels like an earthquake under her little paws, boom, boom, boom, the heartbeat scares her a little, it goes up it goes down when you breathe, it arrives in the neck, must climb the chin, reaches the lips. It’s wet and there is air coming in and out through the mouth, she is afraid of being sucked in, she climbs on the bridge of her nose, she is afraid of slipping to one side or

the other. Phew, she arrives on the front, it’s flat, she walks quietly and arrives in a jungle, it’s dark, there are lianas. She climbs on top of a liana and pouf, the liana bends and she falls to the ground. ” What’s great is that children are looking everywhere for the little ant after exercise! Tell this story with your own words, you will share intense sensations and emotions with your little one. Physiologically, this triggers a hormonal cascade that strengthens the feeling of bond, the pleasure of being together and mutual well-being.

Exercise 6: “Jacques said”…

A bit like the traditional “Jacques Said” game, this exercise is a small trip to visit your body. Ask your child to lie down on the floor and pay attention to what is being asked of him. The easiest way is to give the instruction with your own first name. Lea said: “Make a right fist!” And now watch all the sensations in your clenched fist. Lea said: “Release the fist as if the hand becomes very soft and heavy. »How do you feel now? Lea said, “Put your hand on her stomach. ” What do you feel ? Lea said: “Make a smile! »What do you feel in your face? The child focuses on the different sensations

of his body as he acts.

Exercise 7: The tree

Ask your child to imagine that he is a tree.

His feet are the roots that go deep into the ground, the top of his head is the top of the trunk, his arms and hands stretched out to the sky are the branches and leaves that seek the sun. Feeling the alignment of your body, standing up like a majestic tree for a few seconds is a moment when time expands, when you feel like you have more space. Train your child to take this “break” when they are tired and / or overwhelmed by their emotions. He will find his calm more easily.

Exercise 8: smile

Smiling triggers a whole series of positive hormonal secretions in the human brain. Make your child smile by closing their eyes, and they will feel more relaxed. It also works by placing a pen between the lips. This exercise allows you to draw on your resources to regain energy and overcome fatigue.

Exercise 9: The gratitude journal

At bedtime, invite your child to write down in a notebook (the gratitude journal) three things he liked to do during the day, three things he is proud of, three things that made him happy and for which he feel gratitude. For example: thank you because the weather was nice during the outing with the school, thank you because my boyfriend Theo shared his snack with me, thank you because dad kindly accompanied me to school, thank you because mom prepared me the lasagna that I prefer, thank you because I made a beautiful drawing and the teacher congratulated me, thank you because I finally managed to prevent Melvin from bothering me …

Exercise 10: The garden of wisdom

Place a large white sheet over your child’s bed and each night before he falls asleep ask him to think of three positive things that have happened to him during the day: “What the hell?” can we put as a flower in your garden? »Draw together three flowers that will represent three times when he felt good and happy. Filling his garden with wisdom forces the child to rethink the good times of his day. In addition, every time he goes to bed, he sees the flowers he has already drawn, he resynchronizes with the positive emotions he has experienced and reconnects with the sensations of pleasure.