We have started a new series of mindfulness meditations for kids on our channel.
Introducing Cosmic Kids Zen Den!
Jaime has been trying out some brilliant mindfulness games in her kids yoga classes and we’ve now made many of them into videos.
We’ve made 15 episodes so far. We think they are probably best for kids aged 5+ but we would love to hear how anyone gets on with them. We are hoping that they might be helpful in schools as a ‘brain break’ too.
The first 3 episodes we made are here:
Whirly Burly Snow Storm
This meditation is all about what happens in our minds when we are a little stressed or busy. In this video, Jaime uses the metaphor of a snow storm, and shows how we can use our breathing to calm the snow storm down.
Candle of Concentration
Kids hear a lot about concentration at school, but it’s quite a complicated thing for them to understand. In this video, Jaime shows us a candle and encourages us to focus on it, then we close our eyes and still see it in our mind’s eye. Candle gazing is an ancient form of meditation which encourages calmness. Here we use it to introduce the idea of visualisation (we see the candle still when we close our eyes) and to explain what focus or concentration is.
Movies In My Mind
This one goes a little bit more into helpful visualisation. Creating positive images in our minds is a really useful thing to do – we build a picture of what we want and move towards it. This video shows the kids that they can make a movie in their mind of anything, then offers them the opportunity to go through a door to a lovely place where they feel safe in the movie in their mind.
Please do let us know how you get on – we think there may be something very positive in these meditations, and we are aiming to make them work really well.
The rest are here in the Zen Den Playlist
Here’s some really great resources we have found useful: Paws-b – part of the mindfulness in schools project in the UK. Eline Snel’s book Sitting Still Like A Frog. Susan Kaiser Greenland’s book – The Mindful Child
