Mindfulness with Children: Working with Difficult Emotions

Abstract

In Buddhist psychology, difficult emotions are defined as forces that visit the mind. Imagine that your mind is like water in a pot and your emotions are the wind. When the wind blows, the water ripples on the surface and the still water below is hidden from view. If you were to gaze at the water’s surface your reflection would be obscured by ripples. Damaging emotions make it especially difficult to see the water’s surface clearly; they make waves, and in the ensuing turbulence you may feel upset and confused. Mindfulness practice helps you see and calm the emotional turbulence, allowing your mind to be clearly reflected on the surface of the water. This is one way we talk to children about their feelings. In this chapter we discuss mindfulness as a way to help children understand their emotional pain. We present a method that we dub scram to help children loosen the grip of their difficult emotions and respond more mindfully to them. We choose this acronym because children and mentors (therapists, teachers, parents, and others working with children) often want to scram – or quickly leave – when faced with difficult emotions. scram is a step-by-step approach toward a mindful resolution of a painful emotion or experience: Stop or slow down; Calm your body; Remember to look at what is happening both inside and out; and only after completing the first three steps, take mindful Action with kindness or Metta.1 This chapter is a collaboration between two writers with different perspectives. Trudy Goodman (Trudy) co-founded the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy in 1995, and founded InsightLA in 2002, a not-for-profit organization for the teaching of mindfulness. Trudy, a psychotherapist for 25 years, has worked with children and mindfulness in