Frequently Asked Questions about Practicing Mindful Awareness with

Children, Teens and Families, the Inner Kids program,

Mindfulness Together and Susan Kaiser Greenland

Mindfulness training was developed in response to four deceptively simple insights into the nature of everyday experience.

The 1st Insight - Life has both ups and downs.

The 2nd Insight – Delusion makes life harder than it needs to be. To skillfully manage whatever life sends our way it is helpful to view inner and outer experience clearly without an emotional charge.

The 3rd Insight – Happiness is within our reach. The key to happiness lies in how we respond to life’s ups and downs. For example, we can mitigate the painful emotional impact of a challenging life experience by skillfully choosing how we respond and relate to it.

The 4th Insight – We can learn to live in a way that minimizes frustration and discontent by developing our capacity to view experience clearly and better control our response to what we see. This 4th insight refers to both a way of being in the world and a system of mental training that has been refined over millennia known as mindfulness practice.

Formal mindfulness training is a largely introspective process by which people develop tools to view experience clearly, contextualize it within their own unique framework of past experience, goals for the future and ethical constructs, and integrate what they’ve learned into their actions and relationships. When working with children the process typically goes like this:

First, we acknowledge our experience whatever it might be; if it is a difficult one, denial or avoidance is not going to help and is likely to make matters worse. Knowing that an emotional reaction is not as useful as a clearheaded one, we calm our bodies and minds with specific mindfulness practices developed for this purpose. Once settled, we suspend judgment long enough to look at our inner and outer experience objectively. If we become emotional or excited again, that’s ok, it’s part of the introspective process; we just use our calming skills to settle down and take another look. We continue in this way until we are confident that we see the problem clearly, calmly and objectively. Only then do we choose where or how to respond in a way that is in our best interest, as well as kind and compassionate to all those involved.

Before working with any system (families, schools, health care facilities) we encourage the adults within the system to learn as much as they can about mindfulness practice and consider a commitment to accompany the child(ren) in both the formal and informal practice of mindful awareness. The benefit of this approach has been borne out in early research findings that indicate a high degree of adult (particularly parental) involvement enhances the benefit of mindfulness training for children.

What is mindful awareness as taught in Mindfulness Together programs?

· Mindful awareness derives from Eastern meditation traditions with over 2500 years of development.

· Mindfulness helps children increase their capacity to experience life in an integrated and holistic way with unique and refined attributes for training both analytical and intuitive mental processes.

Analytical mental processes, sometimes referred to as left-brain processes, include linear thinking, memorization, and computation.

Intuitive mental processes, sometimes referred to as right-brain processes, include compassion, creativity, pattern recognition, and emotional intelligence.

Mindfulness Together teaches mindful awareness through the following approach:

Play: First we have some fun.

Meditate: Next we practice introspection, often mindfulness of breathing while sitting, standing, walking or lying down. As we meditate we observe our minds and bodies from the perspective of the friendly observer, with a curious, open mind as free of pre-conceived notions as possible.

Council: Then, we talk about what it is like to learn to meditate and how we can use what we’re learning in real life.

Action: Lastly, we use what we learned in our daily lives, informed by an understanding of the principles of mindfulness – particularly those of impermanence, interdependence, and service.

Is mindfulness entirely about training attention?

· While training attention is fundamental to mindful awareness training it is not the whole picture.

· To encourage a balanced and holistic worldview, Inner Kids mindfulness training integrates several areas of practice that are taught in tandem:

o Awareness practices that emphasize clarity and attention;

o Kindness practices that emphasize a way of being in the world;

o Process orientation that emphasizes an integrated worldview informed by an understanding of impermanence and interconnection.

How does mindful awareness benefit children and adults?

· Mindfulness training is a process that takes time, patience and expertise; the benefits (particularly when working with kids) may not be immediately obvious.

· In adults and late adolescents, practicing mindfulness has been shown to significantly improve general well-being, emotional reactivity and physical health. In general, the research on mindful awareness during childhood and early adolescence is quite limited, however, the Inner Kids program is one of the first children’s mindfulness programs to be studied by a major research institute and is the subject of a multi-year, multi-site research project at UCLA’s Semel Institute. The preliminary research results are very promising particularly with respect to improvements in executive function in children.

What is Executive Function?

· Executive function is the term used to describe the mental process of how we think through decisions and carry them out. Like a corporate executive whose job it is to prioritize, manage and coordinate multiple (and sometimes competing) tasks and subordinates, the role of executive function is to manage, prioritize and coordinate multiple mental tasks related to attention and self-regulation.

· Self-regulation that is pro-social requires a well-integrated capacity for both Attention/Awareness and Kindness where a child:

o Chooses to establish and maintain attention, and

o Is motivated to act in a way that is hopefully kind and compassionate, but at a minimum, in a way that does no harm.

· In pre-school children executive function is more predictive of school readiness than IQ.

· Executive function is directly related to social-emotional competence and academic performance, highlighting the importance of an approach to mindfulness training that emphasizes both Awareness and Kindness.

Are mindful awareness and meditation the same thing?

· No. There is a common misconception about mindfulness: that it is exclusively about sitting quietly and meditating. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Introspection (or meditation) is a critical element in developing a clear and unbiased way of looking at life experience, but what good is that skill when it’s not integrated into how a child relates to experience? The aim of Inner Kids classes is to give a child the tools to take what he or she learns through introspection, contextualize it, and integrate it into every day life. Integration is not only as much a part of mindfulness as meditation: it is the reason for the practice in the first place.

Can children and teens meditate?

· Some of them can. A person's capacity to meditate varies and is related to his or her capacity to direct and maintain certain attentional states. This is true not only with children, but also with teens and adults.

· It is important to remember that the focus of the mindfulness together programs are not on meditation but worldview: The way a child looks at inner and outer experience is far more important to us than what a child sees. Our emphasis is not on the content of a child’s mind but on the quality of attention (focused, open or executive, for example) and/or the perspective he or she brings to the:

(a) process of introspection,

(b) framing of what he or she becomes aware of during introspection, and

(c) integration of that awareness into actions and relationships.

Is mindfulness practice calming?

· Usually but not always. Mindfulness brings a child’s awareness to his or her inner and outer experience and, if that experience is unpleasant, the effect may not be calming at first. There are mindfulness-based calming tools that children can learn and use when they are upset, but usually it takes time and practice for a child to master these skills.

Is it necessary to meditate every day to make progress?

· Meditation is similar to exercise in that the more you exercise the greater the benefit. But meditation is different from exercise in one important respect, meditative understanding is not necessarily linear.

Why the name Mindfulness Together?

· A systems approach is crucial when practicing mindful awareness practice with children and teens. A systems approach recognizes families and classrooms as units in which all members are to some extent connected emotionally. It is not unusual for members of the same emotional system to deeply affect each other's thoughts, feelings, and actions without recognizing that they’re doing so. No system is more emotionally connected than a family where challenging emotions that affect a parent or child will often escalate by spreading infectiously among other members of the family. Even though the aim of a balanced and interdependent system is to provide an emotional refuge for its members, if anxiety or other difficult emotions increase it is not uncommon for the emotional connectedness of parents and their children to become more stressful than calming or comforting.

· Given the emotional interdependence of a family, classroom or other social system, we encourage everyone in a child’s community to learn as much as they can about mindfulness practice. We encourage the adults in the system to make a commitment to accompany their children in both the formal and informal practice of mindfulness while they participate in our programs. The benefit of the systems approach has been borne out by early research findings that indicate a high degree of parental involvement enhances the benefit of mindfulness training in their children.

Does Mindfulness Together teach a religious practice or is it connected to any particular religious tradition?

· No. All games, activities, language and themes are secular.