Learning to Surf: Mindfulness for kids

The presidential election is over now, and a lot of people I've encountered have been unsettled by it. They are uncertain about our country’s future, and so am I. All around me, parents are struggling to explain the election, and the words and ideas of the president-elect, to their kids.

In this stressful time, practicing mindfulness is more important than ever. That’s true for both adults and kids. After completing the exercises of Stoic Week—many focused on becoming more aware of my own emotional responses to events in my life—I decided that I needed to do more than just work on myself.
 
So I began to put together a session for children. I plan to lead mindfulness training at a Girl Scout meeting for third-graders in a couple weeks. From there, I will look into other ways to share both Stoic ideas and mindfulness training with grade-schoolers and middle-schoolers.
 
Here’s a preview of what I’d like to tell students. (The surfing metaphor is inspired by a passage in the book Sitting Still Like a Frog by Dutch mindfulness teacher and therapist Eline Snel.)
 
A baby cries when she is hungry or wet or tired or just feeling bad. She giggles when she’s happy or something seems funny. It’s all pretty simple. As we get older, our emotions get more complicated. But the good news is that we can become more aware of our feelings.
 
During each day, we have a lot of feelings, like frustration if we can’t get an answer correct in math, or anger if our friend wants to play with someone else at recess, or joy if we get a basket in basketball.
 
Some feelings are pretty tough to handle. We worry about people being mad at us. We are upset about having a fight with someone. We think about how we might not be good enough at something in school or in our activities. We remember seeing bullies pushing people on the playground and wonder, what if that happened to us? It’s normal to have worries and feelings that rise up inside us and make us feel bad. But what I’d like to remind you is that YOU ARE NOT your feelings – you just have them for a while. (Or put another way, one of my favorite notions in mindfulness: “Don’t believe everything you think.”)
 
What if we could imagine that our feelings are like a giant ocean of waves?
 
Then we could learn how to surf. Surfing is a hard sport because you can’t really change the waves. You can’t make them bigger or smaller. You can’t stop the waves. It’s like that with our feelings. We can’t make our emotions change, nor can we fix or stop the people around us from making us feel a certain way.
 
But we can practice surfing. You can start seeing your own reaction to problems and issues and you can try to stop and think. You can notice what makes you upset or frustrated. And instead of having an automatic response, take a deep breath. Take a pause, and keep breathing, as you work on building the balance of a surfer.
 
From there, I'd ask the students to pay attention to their breath, doing a simple meditation.

​This, I think, is one way of conveying the essence of Stoicisim. We all need to become skillful surfers of life’s emotions, of its ups and downs. I can’t wait to see how the kids respond!