English
It’s hard enough for grown-ups to preserve peace of mind and focus in the world where we spend hours every day behind blaring screens of all sorts and sizes.
So how do we even go about ensuring that our offspring develop skills beyond finding the most attractive filters on Instagram or acing at Candy Crush?
Fatherly.com, a popular parenting advice resource website, has a hack against the “less attention and more distraction” epidemic. It’s meditation!
Mario Orsatti. Photo: DLF
In the published article, Mario Orsatti, Co-Director of the David Lynch Foundation Center for Leadership Performance, explains:
“Our mind is constantly moving towards something more interesting from something less interesting.”
Yet, in a world where devices capable of hyper-stimulating our senses are literally in our arm’s reach, the result is not endless pleasure but increasing stress, anxiety and dissatisfaction.
“Twenty-three percent of teens have anxiety,” Orsatti points out. “Children as young as 6 and 7 have learning disorders. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among teenagers — and you know all of it is stress-related.”
But once you get kids to sit down and meditate things can turn around quickly. In one San Francisco high school previously nicknamed “Fight School,” there was a 75-percent decrease in suspensions after the kids started regularly practicing Transcendental Meditation (TM).
Read a feature story on students who meditate during school day: “Mantras Before Math Class,” The Atlantic.
TM has been proven to help kids of any age to excel – from toddlers to university students, improving both emotional well-being and academic abilities. It takes a few hours over four days to learn TM and later can be practiced independently at home.
“A 10-minute deep meditation is all junior high kids need. In high school, it’s 15 minutes,” Orsatti says.
“It’s as automatic as eating an orange to get vitamin C. You don’t need to believe in the vitamin; you just get it,” Orsatti assures parents who fear that meditation requires radical changes in one’s lifestyle or belief.
To start kids off, however, Fatherly.com suggests the following: You sit still. Start your own meditation practice and give yourself a timeout before you give them one!
Feature image: flickr.com
This article originally appeared on TM Home at: www.tmhome.com
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