Adventures in Family Meditation
We started with meditation because it’s the most logical place to start. Meditation is a powerful tool for increasing resilience, navigating stress, and growing through struggle. When you’re a living being, it’s nice to have a few minutes where you just sit still, remember that you have a body and listen to your breath moving in and out of it. Each night, after Jessica puts on her pjs and brushes her teeth, we sit cross-legged in a haphazard circle and practice meditating together for 2 minutes before we say a family prayer. To increase kid-appeal, we light a little candle and use the free Insight Meditation Timer app and Jessica gets to choose the chime that signals the beginning and end of our practice. It’s fun because there are little dots that show you who else in the world is meditating with you. (We found that Friday evenings are a low point for global meditation while Sundays are pretty popular). Usually we meditate with around 800 other people and it makes it feel a little less foreign and a lot more communal.
Now before you say “we could never do that” let me reiterate that it’s a practice meaning the whole goal is to try, put forth the effort, put our bodies there, recognizing that most of the time it’s a little crazy with Cassie licking our faces or Jessica staring at the wall (sometimes I peek to see what she’s actually doing while Ritchie and I are closing our eyes). It’s me telling her to meditate the way I do instead of respecting that she’s going to have her own little 6 year old way of managing things (something you’d think I’d be used to by now…). It’s Ritchie chanting “ommmmmm” with a playful smirk on his face. I take it all in stride (probably because I meditate on my own each day so that I can handle whatever these yahoos throw at me 🙂 and I smile. Meditation is changing our life.
With love,
#Homemaking #familycouncil #LovingOurselves #relationships #meditation #mothering #Marriage