Malcolm Holmes has been meditating for over 30 years, and a parent for 20+. He combines work in IT with developing materials on meditation and related topics. He has been teaching meditation since the mid 1990s, and since becoming a parent has been developing this approach to meditation, specifically targeted at parents.
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Establishing a meditation practice can be hard. Doing this as a parent, is commonly harder still.
In this section, we suggest the basic problem that causes meditation to be hard as a parent, and offer a very simple, yet practical antidote.
You’ll learn that meditation absolutely is possible as a parent, and that it can be a joyous experience to share with our children.
When we meditate as a parent, it can be tempting to tell our children that they are meditating. However, kids are generally too young to understand the concept of meditation (and have the mental circuitry to engage in self-introspection). It works just as well (actually, better) to simply tell them that we’re having quiet time.
In this section, we’ll explore how how to introduce quiet time to our children and how to begin establishing a meditation practice with our children present.
Further, we’ll explore how having “quiet time” can be an amazing gift for our children, helping them to grow up as individuals that are not afraid of silence.
When we meditate, it is common to close our eyes. Yet, doing so can appear, to a child, as a sign of abandonment. “I’m being ignored!”
In this section, we explore the basic needs for safety and love, and how we can make sure that our children feel safe, loved and appreciated, even while we are meditating, potentially with our eyes closed.
Again, we may learn this in meditation, but it can have significant implications for us outside meditation too, helping our children grow as strong, stable individuals.
It is commonly some distance into adulthood before a person can fully regulate their emotions - assuming they even learn it then.
Our children, depend upon us to regulate their emotions. When they experience something unpleasant, they depend on us to understand how serious or not this is. Yet, we don’t often understand that this is happening and can sometimes make it worse.
In this section, we’ll explore how we can help co-regulate our children’s emotions, and how, through regulating our own emotions, we can “bring them down” from tantrums, strops, overwhelm and more.
In the previous section, we explored regulation and co-regulation. Sometimes our kids are high energy, and that can be challenging when we’re attempting to meditate.
In this section, we explore some things we can do in such situations. We’ll look at how we can help bring greater calm to our children such that they can meaningfully join us in our “quiet time”.
In a previous section we explored co-regulation. In this section we go a little deeper, exploring how we can work with our child when they are dysregulated. This can show up in low energy (sadness, withdrawn), or more likely high energy (shouting, screaming, kicking off).
By paying careful attention to our own emotional regulation, and staying in touch with our love for our child, plus a little neuroscientific understanding, we will learn how we can re-regulate our child, and how, perhaps surprisingly, this can even happen in the course of a single meditation session!
Having explored background to get us to a point where we can meaningfully meditate with our children present, now we can begin to address specific meditation practices that we can undertake. The first style of meditation we explore is “Focused Attention”, where attention is directed to a specific object over a period of time.
The second style of meditation we explore is Open Monitoring. Here, we do not focus on a single aspect of experience, we keep a broad, non-judgemental awareness of the breadth of of experience.
Lastly we explore non-dual meditation. Not some esoteric semi-enlightened state, but rather a simple practice that can help calm us by training us to create less distinctions. This ability, as well as improving our life, can help us become better parents, through us not needing to respond to everything our children say or do.