meditation for children

Emma and William were playing with my meditation cushion. I said, "hey, don't mess up my meditation cushion!"

Emma said, "what is meditation?" She wanted me to teach her.

So I taught her, a childish version of the metta bhavana. William was all over the place, he couldn't stop talking. He wanted to think about dinosaurs instead of a near and dear friend. He was squirmy, he couldn't sit still. Emma made a weird kind of concentration face.

I hope it gave them some kind of taste, I hope I didn't turn them off from meditation. I've got a lot to learn about teaching meditation.

I've also been doing mindfulness and short meditation exercises with my patients in jail, which is quite exciting.