Forget mindfulness, this is how you really let your children love yoga

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When I started as a PE teacher many years ago, Mindfulness was a relatively new concept in schools. When you called it to students, they were with big eyes, their interest aroused by this concept that seemed accessible, but still esoteric. Telling a group of students that you were going to practice was as if you told them that you were going to do games. It sounded exploratory, mysterious and seductive unknown.

However, that ship has long sailed. Mindfulness is no longer a novelty, and unfortunately many students nowadays associate it with boredom and still. Unfortunately, as a PE teacher and mindfulness director at a PK-8 school, I have been instructed to bring this useful grounding practice to my students. One of the ways I do that? Let’s start not call it mindfulness.

Call it ‘breathwork’, call it a ‘attention hack’, call it ‘old energy practice’, but whatever you do, don’t call it mindfulness. Leading with the joy of breath and movement and being synchronous with each other is much more powerful than leading with a term that has developed a number of challenging prejudices.

To be honest, there are times when I am explicitly about using the term mindfulness. After all, I have been a ZEN practitioner for more than twenty years, I studied in Buddhism at the university and I received my MA in mindfulness studies. I feel happy to be in favor of the practice and to offer it to others. But I am increasingly avoiding the term mindfulness until I have developed buy-in around the ideas of presence, consciousness and wonder.

Mindfulness does not have to be and yet. It is a practice to be as alive as possible for what is happening now. A lot of research has revealed that we are happiest if we do that exactly. I often lead with playfulness, use games that enter us, heat our percepta packs and make us curious about the receptive forces of the body mind. The use of a term that will make students shine over it is not the best way to start that process.

Try to be unexpected instead. Do tongue twisters. Play games for which students have to concentrate in one sentence. Let everyone get up and sit down when they think a minute has passed. Turn on calming music and give off colored pencils and coloring pages. Have students invent and mention their own yoga games. Offer a context in which they will do that are Mindful, their attention tailored to the synchronized energy of body, breath, mind and community.

Maybe you can tell them later that this was mindfulness, and maybe much later you can teach them how sitting exercise can help them find more consistently, so that they can do it everywhere, everywhere. But let them be joyful and involved for now. After all, it is what children do best.