Eyes onWee Seeds’ Mini-Mindfulness Exercise
A few weeks ago we shared with you the top tips we learnt from Gelong Thubten and Dr Rangan Chatterjee during their respective talks at the Edinburgh Wellbeing Festival (which you can catch up on here). One of the tips has been lingering with us: Thubten’s iteration that it is really, really important to learn and be comfortable with both online and offline meditation techniques, which help you introduce ‘mini mindful moments’ into your everyday life. This way, mindfulness and meditation become normalised and natural practices that we can call upon without even realising. Through our Wee Seeds digital toolbox we’ve got you covered when it comes to online practices, but we also want to share some super simple but effective offline mindfulness exercises.
One of the easiest offline exercises is ‘noticing’. Developing the ability to ‘notice’ is a key strand of mindfulness and meditation. By being aware of our minds and our surroundings, we can learn that we have choices in how we act and react to thoughts, feelings and situations.
Here’s three ways you can try to instil the practice of noticing with your littles ones!
1. When you’re out walking or on the bus and there’s lots to see and listen to, tell your wee ones you’re going to play a game to see what we can see and work on the Super Power of Seeing! Tell them you’re both going to put on your Focus Eyes and tell each other what you notice. Children learn through mirroring, so you have a go at ‘noticing’ first, then encourage them to take over.
2. Try to add some colour and movement into your descriptions: “I notice a tree, it’s blowing in the wind; I notice a man, with a big dog…” Then, notice what you can hear next — say “I hear…” the bird tweeting, the bus swishing, the person talking. Build a rich picture of your surroundings.
3. Help your wee one develop their focus by urging them to put their Focus Eyes on when doing a task everyday, like getting ready to leave the house. Notice together all of the steps that it requires and what they need to do to complete it.
Try to repeat this daily, at a time when you can do it everyday — like on the way home from nursery, or during a morning walk, or even around the supermarket. If they give up halfway through, don’t worry. Just make it a game again later, or tomorrow.
These ideas work whether it’s a 1-to-1 with your own child, or you’re working with a classroom with lots of children. They can be easily adapted to work in the home, in school, outdoors, during journeys, out for walks. There’s so much around us waiting to be noticed — and that we as adults often neglect to consider — you may find it quite grounding yourselves to fully notice and appreciate all that’s going on around us!
Let us know how you get on with noticing! Find us on our Instagram (@weeseedsmeditations), our Facebook (Wee Seeds) and our Twitter (@WeeSeeds), or email us at weeseedsmeditations@gmail.com
