I teach my children meditation. We have a meditation corner at home where they can go for quiet sit-down sessions. When they were younger, I sat down with them a couple of times a day. Each time just 10 minutes just to quieten their mind.

It’s a wonderful gift to teach our kids meditation. Life will be stressful for them as the workload increase. It’s important to teach them how to relax.

There’s No need to go into any difficult methods or anything religion based. Just sit down with them and tell them to focus on their breathe. Tell them the busy mind will have a lot of images and feelings coming in, just let them go and focus back on breathe. That simple.

The trick is not to meditate too long, they’re still too young to sit for long time. Even 5 minutes is good. It’s the frequency of the practice, not the intensity, that counts.

They usually get pretty frustrated and frown 1st 5 minutes feeling restless but subsequently, they’ll relax and enjoy the clarity in the mind.

I buy them each their personal meditation cushion. It’s buckwheat husk inside and very nice to use. I even use one as my pillow.

I started my kids at around P1. I must say it takes discipline even though it’s 5 mins. As parent, I have to say, "let’s do it". Good to set routine, say before meal times.

Meditation is a life long practice. So please don’t be so hard on yourself. There’ll be periods of time when you stop. What matter is that you go back to it knowing that there is a way to help yourself get peace.

About the practice. sometimes, my mind get really noisy, chattery and restless. The best thing to get calm back is to just sit and meditate. Believe me, just 15 minutes and you’ll feel better. You’ll be fighting to settle down at first, all kinds of images, thoughts and feelings come in. Just
let them go and return to focusing on your breathe.

Basically, what we’re trying to do is to get our mind to be present. For example, if you hear a loud crash from the road outside, you tell yourself that was a sound. What usually happens is that we’ll start to think, hmm… could it be a lorry and a car? could it be a Toyota car, such a loud crash, someone must be badly injured, etc… This is why we need to go back to our breather to bring our mind back to present as those thoughts are of no use. With constant practice, we find that we’ll be able to focus on the present better as we go through our daily activities.

Please understand I’m not qualified to teach meditation, but I do experience the benefits from it and hope you will too.

If you really want to learn, you can try the Vipassana Meditation. They say it’s non religious but they do talk a bit about the Budddhist philosophy. Otherwise, the Yoga version is good too. Mathsparks recommended one too.

We care so much about our physical body. Must take care of mind too. It really takes so little effort. The point is, don’t give up. Keep it simple to start with. It’s not the intensity that counts, it’s the frequency. It’s at least so for me, still very much a beginner.

BTW, if you are wondering how to tell the time eg 5 minutes. I bought the
kids a kitchen timer for that.

By the way, other ways we can teach kids to relax is to get them to exercise, take walks in the parks or go to the beach for some salty air. We do these with our kids and as they feel the relaxation from such activities, I believe, they’ll turn to them when they are stressed later on in their lives, instead of smoking, drinking, etc.