Speaker 1 · 0:03Welcome everyone. Been looking forward to this day for a while. We have Susan Kaiser Greenland joining us. Susan is a globally recognized leader in teaching mindfulness and meditation to children, teens, parents, and professionals. She helped pioneer activity-based mindfulness with her first book, The Mindful Child. Her second book, Mindful Games, offers simple explanations of complex concepts, methods, and themes while expanding upon her work developing activity-based mindfulness practices. In addition to her work sharing mindfulness with kids, Susan has recorded a series of brief guided meditations for grown-ups called Mindful Parent, Mindful Child. She collaborated with the creators of the award-winning app Stop, Breathe, Think, to develop an app for children called Stop, Breathe, Think Kids. She's a founding faculty member of UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center's facilitator trainings. And she speaks widely around the world on mindfulness and mindfulness for kids. She's the first person I think of when I think mindfulness for kids. And so I'm really looking forward to today's session. And it's a pleasure and an honor to welcome you today, Susan. Thank you for joining us.
Speaker 2 · 1:39So within the Unikids program, we talk about three different qualities: the qualities of attention, balance, and compassion, what I call the ABCs. Now, this isn't a linear progression. Very little in mindfulness is linear. It's much more of a spiral almost as far as everything interconnecting and spiraling through each other. But generally speaking, we start with attention. We move to balance as an emotional balance and onto compassion. And we were talking about trainable qualities and trainable life skills. The development of these qualities are real, they tend to happen over time and they tend to be modest at first. So under this rubric of three baskets or three umbrellas, attention, balance, and compassion, we've identified six life skills. And focusing is at the center, and it's there because it's really necessary for these other life skills to take hold. So we have a strong sense of focus or attention, and then that helps us quiet our nervous system. And when our nervous system is quieter, we can start to see what's happening within and around us more clearly. Sometimes we need to reframe what's happening. And with little kids, sometimes it's helpful for us to help them reframe. And when we reframe, we are always reframing towards a more caring and a more connecting stance. So these six life skills, focusing, quieting, seeing, reframing, caring, and connecting are these trainable life skills that we develop through the practice of mindfulness and awareness and compassion. So in addition to these three qualities, the ABCs, attention, balance and compassion, and the life skills that I just went through, we also talk about universal themes, themes that make up a wise and compassionate worldview. And these themes are themes like connection and change and patience and kindness. So we have themes, we have life skills, and we have these qualities of attention, balance, and compassion. The life skills and these qualities are trainable. We train them through one of a variety of methods. We use movement as a method, we use analytical methods where we think things through. We use different concentration methods, sometimes called anchor methods. One is just plain old anchor where we focus on one thing and ignore distractions. And the other is visualization, where we focus on an image in our head. And then we have body scans and then an open awareness practice. So the methods we use again are anchoring practice, either a general anchor or a visualization anchor. The most common anchor practices that you probably have practiced already are mindfulness of sound and mindfulness of breathing. So those are the anchor practices. Body scan, which is a combination of an anchor practice between anchoring on a specific sensation or widening your lens for a broader sense of your body. Movement, analytical practice, and open awareness practices. One thing to remember though is that some of these methods, especially the method of open awareness, is one that requires a certain developmental capacity that tends not to come online with children until maybe around fourth grade, sometimes a little earlier, sometimes a little bit later. Sometimes adults have a very hard time with open awareness. But just remember the open awareness practice isn't something we'll do with the very little kids, while the other ones are practices we do with children as young as three. So to give you a sense of what the schema looks like on a grid, we have the qualities of attention, balance, and compassion, the life skills of focusing, quieting, caring, reframing, seeing, and connecting, these contemplative methods that I talked about, and then just these themes. Here are some selected ones: open-mindedness, appreciation, interconnection, helpfulness, compassion, letting go. If you're interested in the entire list of themes that we've worked with in the program, they really could be an infinite number of lists, but you can see either on my website or at the back of the appendix of Mindful Child, there's a list of the themes. I think there's 25 or 26 of them. So through the inner kids model, we teach or we lead classes in a sequence that closely tracks the scientific method, which is play, practice, share, and apply. And how this works is we play first. First, we try to have some fun. We do that one is because we want the kids to have fun. And two, we do that because when kids come to practice from a more playful place, they tend to be more able to be open to the experience. They tend to already be a little relaxed. Then we practice, we play a mindful game, either sitting or standing or lying down. Then we share, and this is very important. Then we just talk about the experience. And then there's another beat that's applied. And this is a very important beat when working in a secular world where we are hoping to help people quickly find mindfulness skills that can ease their suffering quickly. So we talk about what the practice was like for them, and then we apply. So, how could this help you? How could this mindfulness of breathing? How could this movement practice, how could mindful listening help you in a real life situation? So, this framework provides a safe space for kids and adults to speak openly with one another, and that's very much what we're trying to do. All of these methods are taught through activities that we call mindful games. And they are largely activities and takeaways that can be dropped into daily life in transitions very often while sitting in the back of the car during carpool, while standing in line, waiting at the lunch line. As you're running out of the house just before leaving, you can stop and take a few deep breaths. So these are the types of activities that we try to give parents and teachers that they can integrate into what they're already doing. One that makes mindfulness very much just a part of daily life. And another is it makes it easier for parents and teachers to really bring these practices to home at school, as opposed to giving them just something else that they need to do on top of a very, very busy work and home day. So let's talk about this first quality. Remember, we had the attention, balance, and compassion. So let's first start talking about attention. Life skills under that idea of attention are really quieting and focusing. So one of the ideas, one of the definitions of mindfulness that I like a lot is just that mindfulness is a mirror of what's happening now. So this is the seeing aspect of mindfulness, the clarity aspect of mindfulness. And mindfulness accurately reflects what's happening in both our inner and outer worlds. So we can see what's happening. And if there's another layer of thoughts, if there's a layer of emotions, we see those as well, but they're not blurred together. So we're talking about different stances of attention. In one is the spotlight stance of attention. This is also, if you're used to more traditional terms in meditation, it's shamata practice or an anchor practice where we focus, we gather our attention primarily around a single object of attention. Concentration is another word for this kind of practice. So if you practice a type of meditation that uses mantra, that's one of these types of practices where you hold a word in your head or you repeat a word over and over again. You can hold an image in your head and imagine an image over and over again, or you can just focus on the sensation of breath or the sensation of sound or any one of a number of objects. There's another stance of attention that is called the floodlight stance of attention, where the spotlight is more of a narrow beam of light that is gathered primarily around one object. The floodlight is a wider beam of light that lights up the whole range of experience. So this is the stance of attention I was telling you about that usually doesn't come online until late elementary school. So with the younger kids, we really stay with these anchoring practices, gathering our primary attention around one thing. And to be honest with you, adult meditation training starts this way too. Adult meditation training very often starts with these focused practices. There are some practices and some traditions that start with the floodlight, but often it's the spotlight of attention. One last thing to remember these two, again, spotlight and floodlight, these are not two mutually exclusive stances of attention. In fact, the floodlight of attention, it's said by meditation experts from hundreds of years ago that about 30% of this floodlight stance of attention is the spotlight. You have to have strong focusing skills in order to be able to rest in open awareness. Otherwise, your mind is going to keep getting distracted by whatever shiny object happens to enter into your mind. We all know what that's like. Sometimes it's called monkey mind. So if you're looking at the spotlight of attention, if you're working with groups of kids where you really can't get involved into an inquiry with the whole group, what are you able to hold in mind? What's actually happening? Can you describe what's happening in your head right now? I think, as a general rule, just stay with the idea of focusing on one thing and ignoring distractions until around grade fourth or fifth, and then start adding the idea of being able to notice the different things that are coming up in your mind and body all the time and holding them all in mind at the same time. So I would stay with the younger kids with just the focusing. Also, remember building that focusing skill is really, really important. Really building that muscle is not a waste of time at all. In fact, the opposite. So it helps build and also other games that work to develop that kind of focused attention, things like doing puzzles, that sort of thing. Those are all attention-building strategies that will have positive effect when you are trying to translate those attention skills into mindfulness activities. I think if in a perfect world, and this is easier to do with your own children than it is if you're in a classroom teaching kids, is to point it out to them when it happens, especially out in nature. And if you think of the very early teachings in the classical mindfulness traditions, the very first one was basically learning about real world specifics. So in nature with kids, if they're seeing that snail walking across the rock, you know, you can say, wow, isn't that awesome? Isn't that magical? And just start talking about how do you think this works? How do you think that got there? How do you think it's related to the rock? How is it related to the grass? How is the slime that is coming off the back of that snail? How is that related to everything else that comes into contact? So pointing out to them the awesome moments when they happen so that they're experiencing them again from an experiential level as opposed to an intellectual or conceptual level, especially when you're talking about wonder and awe. We don't want that to get dry by talking about it too much in the abstract. We want it to keep its juiciness. And that really comes from pointing it out in the real world while it's happening. And if you're working with kids in a classroom, finding ways to bring an experiential activity in that has some of that. I mean, one of my favorite activities, you know, if you go to the stores where they sell plants, you know, the nurseries where they sell plants, they often are selling containers of ladybugs or containers of other kinds of garden insects. Or if you go, unfortunately, if you go to the pet store where they sell lizards, they'll often sell, you know, little bugs. And so you can release them. You can take them with the children or take them with the group and release them out into nature and have the kids talk about what it's like to set them free. Where do you think they're going? What do you think they're doing? What do you think they're thinking? So creating an experience where they have the experience of awe or magic or wonder or connection that then allows you to ask them questions about it. So again, it doesn't become dry. So it's more experiential. So those would be a couple of suggestions I would have. So we've talked a little bit about attention. Now let's talk about balance and emotional balance and how it helps us navigate the ups and downs of daily life. And again, in this area, the life skills that we're really looking at are focusing again and seeing, seeing what's happening in and around us clearly. It's a way to show kids what seeing clearly is like, and how when our minds get busy or our bodies get restless, it's tough to see clearly. It's tough to see through to the other side. Another area that we really pay attention to as far as young kids developmentally and what capacities they have that come online or haven't come online yet are what we call friendly wishes or loving-kindness meditations. So with little kids, it is sometimes very difficult, if not impossible, for them to make a distinction between wishing someone well. And this does bring us into the see and the compassion and the caring and connected and the loving-kindness aspect of this. Wishing someone well and liking them. And this is really key, especially if we're talking about trauma-informed practices for children or for the classroom, is that we never want to be in a position that we are encouraging kids or inadvertently planting the idea that we want them to tolerate discomfort or that it's okay for other people not to treat them well. So kids very quickly will conflate wishing somebody well with liking somebody. So in those situations, we're careful with little kids. And when we practice friendly wishes, when we practice kind wishes, we're very careful about making clear that just because you are wishing someone well doesn't mean that you like them. And when they're very, very little, we just don't talk about wishing people well who might be getting on our nerves or who might be bugging us. Although we will talk about wishing everyone and everything well, you know, sort of in a very general framework, but not specifically those practices we do with older kids and teens and adults where we wish people who are getting on our nerves or bugging us well. So that's another place that we pay close attention to the developmental issues. The other thing that really is helpful as far as being kind to yourself and kind to other people is really learning to let go and let be. And that doesn't mean we give up trying, it doesn't mean we give up hope. But sometimes there are things that right now, at this moment, we can't do anything about. So we learn to let them go, we learn to drop that rope and we learn to let it be for now. And then maybe come back to it tomorrow and try to make some changes. One of the games we play with kids that's really, really fun and useful is this pink bubble game where we have them imagine something that's bothering them or bugging them. Not someone, we don't put people in the pink bubbles, but we put things in the pink bubbles or feelings in the pink bubbles, and you imagine it in a pink bubble or whatever color bubble the child likes, and it floats off and you wave goodbye. And if you can, you wish it well. And that wishing it well is a really lovely note because again, it goes back to reframing and how be kind and kindness to everyone and everything, especially ourselves and especially our big feelings. We don't want to battle these big feelings, we don't want to get into a fight with them. We just want to be kind to them because they're part of ourselves, but we also want to let them go. And the pink bubble is a great way of kind of figuring how to let kids see and imagine that concept in a concrete way. So when you really come down to it, if you're really asking, at least from my point of view, how can you tell if you have a mindful child? What are you looking for when you want a child to be mindful? What are you looking for if you want your school to be mindful? There's all of these things we've been talking about, attention, balance, compassion, self-regulation, these different universal themes. But ultimately, how does it show up? And how have I personally seen it shown up in the world? It comes out through kindness. All of this distills down in very simple terms to kindness and kindness to ourselves, kindness to other people, and kindness to the world around us. So if we start getting caught up in a lot of thoughts of what's mindfulness, what's not mindfulness, how can I bring this down into something practical, just bringing it down to developing a type of an awareness of ourselves and the world around us and becoming more familiar, familiarization is being a translation for the Tibetan term for mindfulness, becoming more familiar with our thoughts and emotions. Why? So ultimately we can be more kind in the world, so that the world is a kinder place. And equally important is to be kind to ourselves, not to be battling with our thoughts, not to be battling with our emotions, but really to be more allowing and relaxing and accepting. And it's through this process this is how the transformation takes place when we talk about mindfulness, awareness, and compassion being transformative practices.
Speaker 1 · 19:58Thank you so much, Susan. Really appreciate everything you've shared. People can start applying this starting today. There are a lot of great like practical things and concepts that we can all take away. So thank you very much. One other word of encouragement is to buy Susan's books. It's an encourage for everyone who's interested in what Susan has shared and teaching mindfulness to kiddos. Susan has a wealth of information and games and activities on her website, SusanKaisergreenland.com. You can find her on Amazon. Susan, it was such a treat to welcome you today. I think we all gleaned a lot. So deep bows to you and your practice, decades or lifetimes of practice. Really appreciate what you're doing in the world. Who knows how many generations of kids have been impacted by your work. Hopefully, we can support that work and share it with others and widen those circles of influence in the name of kindness, wisdom, and compassion. So thank you so much for everything today. We hope to have you back at some point. Thank you.
