Category: Parenting & Children

Help Children Relax at Bedtime

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Excerpted from Good Night Yoga. Written by Mariam Gates and illustrated by Sarah Jane Hinder.

Mariam Gates holds a master’s in education from Harvard University and has more than 20 years’ experience working with children. Her renowned Kid Power Yoga™ program combines her love of yoga with teaching to help children access their inner gifts. See kidpoweryoga.com.

 

 

Illustrator Sarah Jane Hinder creates acrylic artwork for a variety of children’s book, including Good Night YogaGood Morning Yoga, The Three Little Pigs, and The Elves and the Shoemaker. She lives in Manchester, England, with her husband and two chihuahuas. See sarahjanehinder.com.

David Wallin: A Good Marriage, Therapy, and Meditation...

David Wallin, PhD, is a practicing psychologist whose work on attachment theory has shaped related fields for decades. The author of the classic text Attachment in Psychotherapy, David has partnered with Sounds True to offer the online course Attachment in the Practice of Psychotherapy: Relational Transformation, Nonverbal Experience, and the Psychology of the Therapist. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, David and Tami Simon discuss the basics of attachment theory—specifically how our early childhood experiences influence social patterns later in life. They speak on the four general attachment patterns and the three factors that help influence these patterns for the better. Finally, David and Tami talk about what it takes to raise a securely attached child, including the importance of making room for a child’s entire inner life. (69 minutes)

Christopher Willard: Growing Up Mindful

Christopher Willard is a licensed psychologist who focuses on mindfulness, anxiety, and learning issues. With Sounds True, he has released a new book and companion audio called Growing Up Mindful: Essential Practices to Help Children, Teens, and Families Find Balance, Calm, and Resilience. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Chris and Tami talk about the inherent difficulties of being a child and how mindfulness practice can help ease the tensions of growing up. They discuss the different ways one can teach meditation techniques to kids, as well as the different ages at which one can start this instruction. Finally, Chris shares his vision of how mindfulness could be a powerful public health intervention—one that could possibly have an essential place in the future of childhood education.
(59 minutes)

Intellectual Diversity

Dawna Markova is an inspirational speaker and writer, and Angie McArthur is one of the creators of the Worldwide Women’s Web, a network intended to retain and encourage women in corporate leadership roles. With Sounds True, Dawna has created the audio series The Open Mind, where she offers a seminar on different learning patterns. Most recently, Dawna and Angie have written a new book called Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People Who Think Differently, in which they teach how to recognize mental patterns and use that knowledge for better coordination, teambuilding, and long-term planning. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Angie and Dawna about the different styles of attention, learning, and thinking—and how a better understanding thereof could improve our education system. They also discuss the best methods of collaboration, and the great joy that comes with understanding how to work in concert with someone with a completely different mode of thought.
(69 minutes)

The Mystery of Holding

There is an ancient longing wired in us as infants to be seen, to be felt, and to have our surging, somatic-emotional world validated by another. When our subjective experience is empathically held, contained, and allowed, we come to a natural place of rest. What is love, really, other than fully allowing the other to be who they are, for their experience to be what it is, and to offer the gift of presence to their unique subjectivity? In this sense, I love you = I allow you.

The late Donald Winnicott, a brilliant psychoanalyst from Britain, used the term ‘holding environment’ to describe the ideal mandala in which growth and development could occur, weaved of the qualities of contact and space. Through making attuned, present-time, somatically-engaged contact with another as they are – and by providing an open, warm sanctuary in which their experience can unfold and illuminate – we become vehicles of love in action.

Simultaneously, by offering the gift of space, we do not interfere with the unfolding of their heart and majestic inner process. We do not pathologize their experience or demand that they be different, change, transform, shift, or ‘heal’ in order for us to love them. If sadness is there, or fear, or despair, or shame, or depression, or profound grief, we will infuse their inner mandala with validation and presence. We will be there for them, but only if they need us. We will not engulf them with the projections of our own unlived life, nor will we unload upon them our own requirements and agendas, arising out of our own undigested psyches and bodies. Instead, we will seed the intersubjective container with tender space.

While not talked about as much, we can provide this same contact and space to ourselves and come to discover that our nature as awareness itself is in fact the ultimate holding environment. You are always, already resting in the majesty of presence and are always, already held – by the beloved – who is none other than your own miracle nervous system, heart, and somatic brilliance. While we may not always understand our experience – and while it may never fit into our ideas, hopes, dreams, and fantasies about the life we were ‘meant to live’ – we can come to trust that it is unfolding according to a unique blueprint which is emerging out of the unseen hand of love. We are invited to practice a radical intimacy with our experience, staying close to our ripe bodies and tender hearts, but not so close that we fuse or overly identify with it. Rest in the very middle and stay astonished at what is being birthed out of the unknown in every moment.

For so many I speak with, there is an undercurrent of aggression towards themselves, a subtle movement of self-loathing, unexamined shame and embarrassment, and a very alive (if not conscious) belief that they are flawed and have failed. Each time we exit our present, embodied experience into thinking, interpretation, blame, resentment, and complaint, we turn from the preciousness and the majesty of what we are. In this movement of rejection, we keep alive the archaic belief that our immediate experience is not valid, that it is not workable, that it is not forming the actual particles of the path of healing, exactly as it is. From one perspective, this may be seen as the ultimate act of self abandonment.

Let us all take a pause on this new day, and from a place of love visualize a holding environment for ourselves, where we grant unconditional permission to make intimate and direct contact with all of our vulnerabilities, with our tender bodies and with our raw hearts, with our unprocessed challenges from the past, and with our less-than-awakened thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.

Let us make the most radical commitment to no longer abandon ourselves, exiting into our conditioned stories and unkind judgments, and inquire with love into the habitual belief that there is something fundamentally wrong with us. As we open our eyes and our hearts to the always, already present holding environment which is our true nature, we behold the drop of grace which pours through the eyes of everyone we meet, including that unknown precious one that we see when we look in the mirror. And then all that could possibly remain is an unshakeable faith in love’s perfection.

Teaching Yoga and Meditation to Kids

Mariam Gates is a highly skilled teacher and yoga instructor with decades of experience, as well as the founder of the Kid Power Yoga program. Mariam is the author of Sounds True’s first children’s book, Good Night Yoga: A Pose-by-Pose Bedtime Story—a tale designed to bring parents and children together in a relaxing flow of postures and visualizations. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tami Simon speaks with Mariam about integrating yoga into public school education and the special considerations of teaching the practice to children. They also talk about Mariam’s vision for teaching yoga and meditation from kindergarten through twelfth grade, as well as the possible benefits from such a sweeping program. Finally, Tami and Mariam discuss the background and inspirations behind Good Night Yoga. (54 minutes)

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