Mindfulness Meditation (For Everyday Life)

path but yours. As they grow, they may also detect
the hypocrisy of it, as well as any distance between
what is being professed and what is being lived.
If you are devoted to your own meditation practice,
they will come to know it and see it, and accept it
matter of factly, as part of life, a normal activity. They
may even sometimes be drawn to imitate you, as
they do with most other things parents do. The point
is, the motivation to learn meditation and to practice
should for the most part originate with them, and be
pursued only to the degree that their interest is
maintained.
The real teaching is almost entirely non-verbal. My
children sometimes do yoga with me because they
see me doing it. But most of the time they have more
important things to do and no interest in it. The same
is true for sitting. But they do know about meditation.
They have some idea of what it is, and they know that
I value it and practice it myself. And when they want
to, they know how to sit from sitting with me when
they were little.
If you practice yourself, you will discover certain times
when it may be sensible to make meditative
recommendations to your children. These
suggestions may or may not "work" at the time, but
they can be a kind of planting seeds for later. Good