Are you interested in exploring a meditation practice that is so vibrant and enjoyable that you will want to do it every day of your life?
Join Alison Potts for this 2-hour meditation workshop and learn a practice where you are allowed to be who you are and are encouraged to learn how to love and enjoy your mind, rather than judge or limit its activity. In this workshop you’ll learn an approach to meditation which celebrates your individuality and instincts; brings a feeling of deep connection to yourself and life; imposes no rules on your practice (you don’t even have to sit still!); and activates the parasympathetic nervous system to allow for healing, integration and renewal. Suitable for first time meditators and those with a regular practice. Cost $45. Click here to book.
“I really want my child to meditate. How can I encourage them when they don’t want to?”
Your child is probably expressing constantly a desire, a need, a craving to meditate.
It all rests on our understanding of the word “meditate” and where that comes from.
A lot of our ideas about meditation come from a historical context that has nothing to do with our own lives now and was never meant to apply to lives like ours. These meditations were designed by and for monks, to keep them veering from vows of renunciation of the energies of life in the world.
What is appropriate for a celibate male living centuries ago and who had no connection to the world is almost certainly not going to rock your child’s world – or yours for that matter. Nor was it ever meant to.
Maybe when your child hears you say “You need to meditate” they are filtering it into the same category as “you need eat to broccoli, do your homework, stop playing on your Ipad, go to bed earlier, take a shower”?
Ie. “You need to do something boring that someone else wants you to do and that has nothing whatsoever to do with your life of fun and play and adventure.”
This is not a great way to introduce your child to a practice which could be joyful, exhilarating and transformational all their lives long.
Your child is signalling a response to a spontaneous call to meditate…
…every time they sit at their desk and instead of doing homework start to daydream, fiddle with something or get distracted by an object, a thought, a sound that absorbs their attention.
…every time they come home from school, fling down their bag, and run outside to climb a tree faster than you can say “change out of your uniform”
….every time they get out their Lego and get completely absorbed in building an imaginary town of coloured bricks, while you are begging, pleading, negotiating, commanding them to take a shower, do a chore, study for a test.
…every time they play with the dog, get on Minecraft, jump on the sofa, turn a pile of cushions into a den, make up a song, tell a tall tale, rough and tumble with each other or the dog, stare into space, zone out or steadily lick down an ice block as if the ice block was the only thing that has their attention.
All these are healthy, instinctive ways children automatically re-centre from their lives of scheduled action so that their parasympathetic nervous systems can do their important renewing, restoring work.
To understand this, roll back the years to when you were a child, maybe seven or eight years old. What made you feel happy, peaceful and relaxed?
What things did you do spontaneously that made you feel joyful and vitalized?
Were you a star gazer, a cloud watcher, an artist, a dreamer, a fort builder, a puzzle-lover, a tree climber, a surfer, a rider, a quietly knowing soul?
Anytime our attention is spontaneously absorbed by something, we are in a state of meditative awareness. We are innately wired to experience these moments so that we can collaborate with the body’s intelligence – the work of our parasympathetic nervous system to rest and restore us by filling us with the healing energies of life.
Meditation works best when we recreate the conditions for this kind of spontaneous experience. As adults, we can unwittingly condition ourselves away from our natural spontaneity and what instinctively pleasures us. Our kids, however, have this one nailed. When we were children we were all closer to our natural, healthy instincts and indeed our natural healthy instinct was to keep ourselves as close to that state as possible. That is why we were drawn to wherever our attention found itself absorbed, that is why we engaged in pretend play, that is why we stayed in our bodies and climbed, jumped, danced and lived in any way we felt moved to do. Life seemed compelling then and we kept our vitality high. This is what we want from a meditation practice.
We have it the wrong way round when we want to guide our children into meditation. Our children are the best meditation guides around. When we meditate in their world, an alchemy happens, and we recapture our own. We find lost parts of ourselves again. It’s very powerful.
Here are some ways to start sharing some joyful and fun natural meditation practices with your kids. If none of these sounds good, explore your own and please join the conversation so that I and other parents can get to explore them too. It’s fun to play and great to journey!
Top Tip: Always start with where your children are (Tired? Hungry? Need to move and energise? Need to rest? ) and with what they love (Lego, video games, sport, art, music, dancing, reading and so on) and you can’t go wrong.
Soothing Sky Meditation
Go outside. Lie on your backs on the grass. Really feel the wide curve of the stable earth underneath you, supporting you. What does that feel like? Gravity can feel like it is drawing us down into a hug from the earth. Our muscles and bones relax. And then there is a slight push up from the earth, which holds us. This might be a good way to feel the embrace of life: to feel held, grounded, supported and on a firm foundation. You can spend some time sharing with each other how good it feels to lie on the solid earth. Then let your gaze drift to the sky. You may feel like you are breathing in the sky, drinking it in or watching the clouds make particular shapes. You may feel like you are floating away. The sky has its own moods just like we do – sometimes dark and stormy, sometimes bright and mild – but always in motion. You can watch the moods of the sky change, shift and pass and appreciate them as the different colours and textures of life. No mood is a “bad” one, but part of a tapestry which is continually showing new threads and colours. After a while, if it feels right, you can share where you went in your sky-travels.
Bubbles
Make some bubble mix from detergent and water and find or make something to blow through ( a simple wire bent into a circle is fine). Blow bubbles to your heart’s content. Notice where they drift, where they land, how they hold the light and how they burst. Surround each other with bubbles and get completely heady with bubbles and then sink down somewhere and imagine a bubble around you. A sphere of energy 360 degrees around your being which is luminous. What does it look like? How big is it? Is it close up to you or further away? Inside this bubble you are protected and nothing from the outside can penetrate unless you say yes. What do you want to bring inside the bubble right now and what would you like, for now, to leave on the outside? Many of the kids I teach say the first thing they want inside is chocolate! What pets, activities, loved ones, prized possessions? What qualities – such as peace, strength, confidence, joy? (This meditation is an adaptation of my dear teacher Camille Maurine’s meditation for claiming your inner sovereignty from Meditation Secrets For Women. HarperCollins)
Play Meditation
This is a simple one. What games does your child most love playing at the moment? Young children might guide you to play a character in their imaginative world. Really go for it, enter into it, forget any other world exists. Countless clinical studies show that deep play is exceptionally healing and transformative. Older children might like to jam with you playing instruments and making music, creating a science experiment or some art, dancing or playing a sport. What makes this meditative is simply to be guided by their instincts without controlling, editing, judging or filtering their experience. Follow their lead and be willing to get absolutely absorbed in their world.
Widen your Perspective
In our 21st century lives we are all very forward focussed, looking at phones and computer screens. And even when walking down the street, research shows we use the front of the eye almost exclusively. We tend not to lookg to either side. We have neurons and synapses in every part of our eyes, albeit fewer at the edges than in the centre, and if we don’t use them we lose them, dulling our experience of life and making us feel less alert and disconnected from the “big picture”.
This is a meditation to open one of the senses to literally take in more life. Rest your gaze lightly somewhere ahead of you where it is comfortable. You can blink, but try not to move your eyeballs. Start by steadily widening the periphery of your vision to the right and see how far you can see, how much you can take in from the right. When you think you are seeing as far as you can, try and go a little further. Do the same to the left. Then above you and below you. Then all directions at once. Then sit for a moment with all the new sensations and share what you are experiencing, if that feels right.
When we open at least one of our senses as far as it can go, we feel a stronger connection to be alive.
Feel the Best Parts of Your Day
This is a nice one to do at the end of the day and is similar to a gratitude journal without the need to write. Many children do like to journal or draw their experiences but many others have had enough of that activity at school and we want to make sure we create a natural balance for our inner rhythms.
Try beginning with questions along these lines
“Was there anything that made your heart feel full today?”
“Did anything that happened today make you feel excited?”
“Did anything happen today that felt different?”
“That made you feel curious?”
“That made you feel in wonder or awe”
“That made you want to find out more?’
“That gave you an idea?”
“Did anyone do something particularly kind today?”
“Did anyone say anything to you that made you feel good?”
And so on. Notice all these questions guide your child towards their feelings. You can enhance this sensory embodiment by asking them where in their bodies they feel things when they have these memories from their day. See how they move their arms and other parts of their body while they talk and get them to repeat these movements or “mudra” establishing a muscle memory of the experience. Then suggest they breath the feelings through their body, as if breathing them in – like smelling a beautiful flower or a delicious meal – infusing themselves with this quality. Like our muscles, our cells have memory, and the deeper we make a cellular memory of a life enhancing experience, the more quickly we can bring that back when we need the resilience it provides. This exercise is an inner strengthening. It a great one to do before sleeping as once activated, the nervous system can keep bathing in these healing and renewing energies while your child relaxes in sleep.
I would love to hear your discoveries and ideas! Here’s something my 11 year old came up with when she was about seven. “Mummy, I have discovered if you say ‘excited excited excited’ over and over again you get this really incredible feeling that wants to burst out of your body…”
Try it – it works!
Photography by Juliet Wioland. Cannot be reproduced without permission.
We all have preferences. Preferences are our individuality
Animals have preferences – a certain spot on the sofa, certain kinds of touch, certain food.
I don’t like coconut but I adore avocados. Climate-wise, I prefer warmth to the cold.
We are supposed to have preferences. They come from our essential nature. We strengthen when we know intimately what our preferences are and respond to them – know when to say yes, when to say no, when to join in, when to stand alone and when to compromise.
Preferences are instincts. All relate to our individual nature, our unique essence. We can fall out of connection with our instincts when we say too many yeses when we feel a no, when we join in when we really don’t believe in the community we are joining, when allow ourselves to be drawn into conversations, when we give our power away in whatever fashion. In a meditation practice where we cherish every instinct, listen deeply to every inner calling, we can bond with our innate, instinctive self again and that changes everything in life for the better.
At some level, our preferences are actually reporting on what our internal organs prefer, what our internal organs need to be balanced and happy.
Honouring our preferences as instincts creates healthy boundaries for ourselves. Think of our boundaries as like connective tissue, like a “second skin”. That’s our aura. Boundaries are infinitely nuanced. How much energy do I have, how much time, which part of myself have I lost or stopped tracking and how I can find and reclaim it?
Individuality, preferences, boundaries – all are ultimately about honouring our individual nature. When we meditate from our individual nature, when we live like this, we live in harmony with ourselves. We are less likely to get into fights with ourselves in or outside of meditation.
And that is the ultimate path to inner peace.
*Read on if you’d like some tips for meditating with your own individuality and personality:
– What would make meditation feel most easeful and natural to you: sitting in a chair? Lying in the grass or on a sofa? Walking, dancing, moving? In the shower, the bath or the ocean?
– What are your favourite songs or pieces of music? See how you feel if you meditate with these playing?
– Do your eyes feel like being open or closed?
– Do you want to meditate on a particular issue or affirmation? Or with your breath, or with your sense of taste or smell (using food or a fragrance you love). Or do you simply want to let your mind drift, daydream and unfold?
– How long do you want to meditate for today? When does it feel like enough? When does it feel like too much?
– If your instincts are telling you to fall asleep during meditation, don’t resist them. Most of us are chronically sleep deprived. We can enjoy a deep meditative rest. Studies have shown these are more refreshing than a night’s sleep.
– Do you want to meditate with others or by yourself? Use a guided meditation or let your inner guide take you on an adventure…
– Do you feel like moving, singing, shouting, crying, laughing during meditation? If so, can you embrace that expression of inner flow and go with it?
-…and so on and so on. For every individual on this earth – and that’s about seven billion of us – there is unique way into personal meditation. Listen to your instincts, play, experiment, journey, get curious and explore in your personal space. Own it. Make it yours.
Welcome Home.
At times of new moons, we are extra-supported in moving forward in our lives in ways which feel truer to our individual selves and nature.
However, does this ring true for you?
Does it tend to happen that, whenever you feel in a space of manifesting new creations and forging new pathways which you know are going to bring you closer to what you makes you feel peaceful, happy, healthy and most alive… “The Voices” come up? The gatecrashers at the party. The critics, the queriers, the nay-sayers, the fear-mongers, the ridiculours and the saboteurs? The ones you feel with every bone in your body don’t belong here and yet someohow make themselves feel so comfortable and welcome. Maybe they are saying
“this will never work”
or
“you don’t deserve this”:
or
“Feel that dose of tension and fear and insecurity we have brought with us as your party gift? Clue: this is a warning about what will happen if you make these changes.”
I’ve got good news.
This is meant to happen.
It happens to everyone.
It is a sign things are really shifting – when you can see the beings inside you who have, in the past, created the very obstacles in you that you wish to address now as you make plans to shift and grow and move forward.
When this happens, you can welcome it. You can make these seeming enemies your allies.
As adults, within each of us are the Old Tribe Rules and The New Tribe Rules. When we are children, it is wired into our sense of survival that our brains imprint and encode what our tribe tells us is true about life. “Don’t expect to much, you will only be disappointed.” “Don’t shout, don’t be too loud.” “Be brave, don’t cry.” “You may want to be an artist, but artists don’t do well in life – get a real job.” “Be careful.” “What a silly idea.”
And so on.
These are the Old Tribe rules.
As adults, we get the glorious and also challenging opportunity to create a new tribe with new rules that allow us to be fully ourselves – from small changes to new changes.
We need time and some self attention to allow our brains to relax into the new ways so they can encode them, just as we did the old rules.
This is where meditation comes into its own. When we are children, all of this encoding is unconscious. It happens automatically and surrupticiously. It creates literal physiological neural pathways. We just imbibe what the members of our trive tell us and show to us, over and over again until it travels in our bloodstreams.
As meditators, we are conscious and awake. Meditation is a state of relaxed alertness. It is the perfect space for healing the wounds we were caused by old programming and to form new neural pathways. Science has evidenced this again and again. So you can trust this process of being awake and holding space within you to get a good understanding of the voices that are coming up – where they really come from, what they really want for you. Originally, however it was manifested, they were there to protect you from something.
So one thing you can do, is to reframe them by seeing them as old protectors who leap up to help you because they are from the old tribe and that is what they know.
You can do this by saying, every time you feel that tension in the background, ” Thank you for trying to protect me but I don’t need that protection now. That was how the old tribe did it. In my tribe (or my family) we do things this way.”
You can be very specific:
“In my tribe, we encourage and support each other.”
“in my tribe, we know there is space for everyone to do their own thing and no one is a threat.”
“In my tribe, it is not selfish to care about ourselves.”
Or use the word family –
“in my family, we don’t tell each other to shut up.”
You can even add…
“…in fact, I am not even going to tell you (the Voices, the feelings of tension) to shut up.”
I have used this enlightened technique for years. I still do. Let me tell you, it is very powerful and joyeous athe more you practice it, the more you can be at peace to forge your own destiny, no matter what wants to “speak up.”
Meditation gives us space, it gives us choices, it shows us things tnhat give us powerful understanding of ourselves and our lives. The trick it medtate effortlessly – which means creating the space where you can honour and allow everything that comes up for healing – rather than use even a smidgeon of effort to resist, block or silence any part of yourself.
I will soon be recording a guided meditation for Creating Space For Yourself.
Your meditation practice can and should evolve. We know that we are in a dynamic flow of life. Both our outer and inner worlds are defined by motion in every sense. The universe is not static, creation is not static, we are not static – we as humans are active, creative, evolving, transitioning, changing.
Women especially experience profound changes in their hormonal patterns and physical beings at different times of life. This means that no one technique will work for us forever. We need to be constantly exploring and developing meditations for ourselves that keep us in healthy, in balance and full of mojo whatever stage of experience we are in. We need to be athletes – sensitive to how we need to prepare and live in order to move with strength, flexibility and artistry enjoy the sport in our individual life. In this sense, meditation is a place we can go to in order to receive nourishment and personal training uniquely matched to our own spirit, and to all the ways in which we we want to express and create and receive in the dynamic flow of our own rich lives.
Some people think that doing our inner work is naval gazing or selfish. For meditators, this can be a big force of resistance we need to work on melting so we can open up fully and dive more deeply in the meditative space which is so healing.
The thing is, wall human beings desire to be healthy and in balance, at home in their own skins and able to show up in the world , feeling full in all the ways we are called to and long to, as individuals. Our work as meditators can involve melting, dissolving, shifting and moving skilfully, moment to moment in our lives and in our meditation skills, as if negotiating a path in which there will be all kinds of “Shoulds” “should nots”, shame, guilt, feelings of being selfish or unworthy and undeserving of the time and space we crave. Lets get this straight – lets remind ourselves – working within ourselves mindfully, heartfully, sensefully and sou-fully is HOW we are being called to live. It is in our wiring – the fields of science, psychology, neuroscience, biomechanics, anthropology, sociology and the arts all back this up. We are called to live from within, to exoplore within, to heal within….for the greater good of healing for the world.
Think about it like this – when you feel at home in yourself, happy, healthy, balanced and in love with life – do you feel more able to able to give? More able to forgive? More able to respond to others? Able to uplift? To create and live in vibrations which are healthy, happiness and harmonious for the whole world? That is why inner work and meditation are the least selfish practices on the planet.
In this meditation, I offer the experience of tasting and savouring a small bite of chocolate to open the sensory pathways – a fantastic way to expand inner and outer awareness and to fill all the levels of your being with an experience. I use the example of chocolate as so many people find it pleasurable, but you can use any food or drink that you especially look forward to savouring.
In life we often race through pleasure and yet dwell and ruminate on pain. As one meditator recently said to me, “We press the fast forward button instead of Play.” We often make pleasure something we have to “earn” or “deserve” and in doing so, undermine our enjoyment with feelings of anxiety over worthiness.
Life is full of special treats. On some level, all of life is a treat, a gift, an invitation for us to fill our beings with experiences of wonder, awe, gratitude, thrill and adventure from a place of feeling natural with ourselves. We are invited all the time to suffuse ourselves with these experiences and let them play on inside of us long after the experience is over.
This meditation is really about savouring all the flavours of life, not just a few. When we meditate this way, we really get to feel so many inner awakenings and to sense an expansion, an illumination, on the inside. With this style of meditation, every touch of life becomes almost psychedelic. Colours, flavours, sights, sounds, touches infuse us and we feel touched by all the fingers of life.
This practice is also great if you are someone who loves being in the “highs” of life but feels a crash afterwards which leaves you feeling a little flat, empty or lost. In this meditation, we learn how to sustain all the sensations of the experience, long after it has gone, using the great meditation secret of “infusion”.
There is so much to this meditation – which I offer as a practice frequently in my classes and workshop – that the feedback from meditators afterwards is incredible in its range of experiences, surprises and spontaneous arisings. I have quoted some of the feedback I have heard after the chocolate meditation, at the end of this piece.
To take this meditation a step further, you can actually meditate on savouring all the flavours of something you love to eat or drink but without actually having that thing available. This is using imagination to awaken sensory pathways and inner life and is incredibly powerful. The last time I offered this meditation to a class, there were two people who cannot eat chocolate. They each instead, imagined they were sipping a glass of their favourite wine. You will see their feedback along with the others at the end of this piece!
Practice
Take your chocolate, still wrapped, and place it in front of your gaze. Look at it for a few moments, savouring the feelings that come with the anticipation of unwrapping it and then biting into it. Let your attention bask in whatever feelings, thoughts and sensations come up as you pause on this threshold. These may be eagerness, curiosity, excitement, anticipatory pleasure or a feeling of gratitude for the self-awarded permission to enjoy yourself and feel pleasure. That itself can feel relaxing and a relief to your nervous system.
Then slowly unwrap the chocolate, listening attentively to the sounds the paper makes as it crackles open, feeling its texture in your fingers, watching it unfold and beginning to sense any scents that come up from the chocolate as it is unwrapped.
Be luxuriously unhurried with this opening and revealing. Be aware of any emotion, visualisations, sensations in your physical body and memories that arise as you unwrap it.
Then lift it to your nose and reach inwards and outwards with your sense of smell to experience the full scent of chocolate. Be aware of your sense of vision, smell and hearing awakening, opening and expanding when you give them all your attention.
Now take a small bite from the chocolate and hold it on your tongue. Don’t chew it yet. Let it melt in your mouth for a few moments, feel it and taste it as it spreads around your mouth. Savour the melting and the spreading for as long as you feel you want to before you chew and then swallow. Allow yourself to feel fully everything awakening in your body and your mind – your pleasure centres, taste receptors, the readiness of your intelligent digestive system as you salivate, the feeling of your throat receiving the chocolate as it moves down inside you. Savour the swallowing.
Eat the whole chocolate this way and notice the rhythms of the experience within you moment by moment.
When the chocolate is finished, rest there in the afterglow. You will find the taste, the texture, the feelings of eating the chocolate remain with you long after the actual chocolate has gone and you rest in pleasure, enjoying all the awakened energies inside you, body sensations, feelings in your heart, thoughts, dreaming, memories. Pause in pleasure here, with curiosity and wonder, for as long as you like.
This meditation is of course about much more than chocolate. It is about savouring and cherishing all of our instincts and about savouring and cherishing all the flavours of life. Savouring the feelings of anticipation before you even unwrap the chocolate is “pausing on the threshold”, a practice in life which is very rewarding and very conducive to nervous system repair and balance. Paying attention to all thoughts and feelings as they arise is king in the practice of meditation – that way we learn to know, understand and tend to ourselves and all of our needs and most cherished desires. “Savouring the afterglow” is about “infusing” and processing an experience. We know that nothing is truly over – that the cells in our bodies hold every memory, experience, thought and feeling. This is true of every exciting, pleasurable, life-affirming, surprising, hilarious, joyful, poignant, tender, loving moment or experience you have ever had. When you have an experience that lights you up, take time with it and in its afterglow (reflecting on it, journaling about it, meditating with it) as if bathing in essential oils. By calling into the sacred, infinitely tender glow of your awareness, the full range of your senses, emotions and bodily sensations, you can be filled with and nourished by life itself.
Some Experiences reported by “chocolate meditators”
“I often eat several chocolates in a row without really noticing them. This way, one chocolate is enough, more than enough. I was totally fulfilled and satisfied by it.”
“I could still taste the chocolate, even hours later.”
“I had a memory from childhood, when crinkle cut potato chips first came out, of eating them that way – taking tiny nibbles with my front teeth – being so excited about this new taste and texture and wanting to make every part of it last.”
“It made me think of that scene from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory where Charlie unwraps his first bar of Wonka chocolate…that scene always gives me goosebumps.”
“I went to other places for a while. I actually went to Mars for part of that.”
“I was amazed at how long something that wonderful could last and how deeply I could take it in.”
“I can’t believe how much I experienced inside myself just by eating chocolate.”
“I feel refreshed and invigorated.”
“Tt really made me think about how I rush through everything in life and in doing that, don’t really enjoy it as much as I could.”
“If I sipped wine like that, I am sure I would drink less and this would be good for me.”
“I imagined I was drinking a top shelf shiraz. I poured the glass and when I offered it to my nose to smell, my nose actually tingled! I really do feel like I have had a delicious glass of wine.”
