Mindfulness for parents and children

For parents and children to experience more patience, acceptance and overall better health. Understand your thought processes to have a better mindset. Mindfulness and breathing techniques has helped myself and my students better understand their emotions and how they are chemically based. With practice we can all learn to monitor our thoughts better. Growing up I knew no other way to process my thoughts and feelings except to act more than not with my fight or flight response. Working from a tiny gland at the base of the skull called the 'amygdala'. I would run from situations I felt slightly uncomfortable in or I would fight it verbally. No winners there obviously. Since learning better ways through yoga and learning more about emotional intelligence you can then pass this onto your kids and hopefully with this understanding and mindfulness they will be better equipped to face challenges (as they are just part of life) and better control negative thoughts and unhelpful ways of dealing with stress. If you are not content within yourself nothing will ever be right in your life. We are hard wired since our creation to be on alert for bad things to happen and we hold onto them, so we can avoid them again in the future. That's what has helped our survival since our beginning as humans, but we need to understand that this is an in- built ability that we don't really need to hold onto these days. We don't have to be on as high alert as we were in the cave man days and this crosses over to our reaction to things in life also. We can overreact to what our mind perceives as a threat to us and react with our ‘fight’ or ‘flight’ response. This response is what kept us safe millions of years ago from predators. We don't need to react this way as much now and it is time to settle our brains. Being on high alert all the time sets us of on a bad negative path (and it can be exhausting!) where we perceive threats when there really isn't any and we give up too easily or fight or worse yet, come in straight away with our guard up and not open to anyone's point of view. Another needless outcome of working from these negative reactions is that we become stuck in this mind- set of not being able to see anything as positive anymore. We get around on auto-pilot of always reacting the same way and never finding peace, whether we fight or take off from the perceived threat without trying to work around it. We all know now that high stress levels can cause disease but we continue to tell ourselves we are hard done by and play the victim. We tell everyone who will listen all the stored up negative stuff that has happened to us, not storing up any small positives. We need to remember why we were made with these responses and that they once helped us survive in a harsh world and we could draw upon all the negative stuff we had remembered to keep us safe in the future. But we are not cave men and women anymore and we now can afford to store up some positives. Therefore, work on storing up some positives by maybe having gratitude for what you do have and enjoy in your life. Give your friends and family a break from hearing about your hard day after day after day…. Because it doesn't matter where you run to with your 'flight' response or whether you stay and fight, you will ultimately never be happy until you find happiness within yourself and only yourself. Things you may not know but might change your reality.... to practice for better health. 1. Thinking of things you are grateful for everyday (Studies have found that regular grateful thinking can increase happiness by as much as 25 per cent). 2. Exercising regularly- just going for a walk can elevate your mood and increase feelings of well-being. 3.Remember that we are essentially programmed to see and remember the bad things that happen as that is how we have survived by being able to recognise what is something to avoid again since we lived with danger everyday as far back as cave men and women. We can change this by focusing and remembering the good. 4. We are also hard wired to hang onto resentment, which is also a primal fighting response as we are hard wired to fight to protect ourselves from hurt and danger and internalise it to continue the protection. 5. Craft and colouring activities can help with anxiety and depression and are a form of mindfulness, which helps shift unhelpful thoughts and can even help sleep. (Calms the 'amygdala' that I mentioned. ) So get crafty, breathe, focus on the good, let go of resentment, live in the moment and exercise and encourage the same in your children. References: Black, A. The Little Pocket Book of Mindfulness. 2012.Cico Books, London, New York. # If you'd like to learn more please join one of my classes for kids, workshops or teacher training.