CHILDREN’S WORKSHOP

Then I wanted to do something about their behaviour, specifically their problems with focus and concentration. I approached my son’s school and they agreed to let me do the children’s workshop. Each workshop works in a series of 7, and deals with an emotion per workshop, e.g. anger, fear, worry, grief, guilt, sadness, love. We relate each emotion to an organ, a gland and a mental state.

The children are taught to feel and deal with the emotion on a physical, emotional, mental and spiritual level. Then we teach them to heal the emotion and its consequences and effects using meditation, tai chi, yoga, colour visualisations, left right brain integration and a variety of holistic techniques.

Their rapidity of their response is truly awe-inspiring and humbling. These children are desperate to have help and direction. By giving them these tools, which they can use at any time, we teach them self-reliance.

As a result of the successes in the workshops, I devised Zack and Millie, who are two cartoon characters. They are approximately 5 and 8 years old and their first production are Zack and Millie yoga cards with a deck of 12 yoga poses. They work really well in the workshops and it means that parents can be more involved with the work we are doing by repeating these exercises with the children at home.

You know how some children find it hard to focus for more than a few minutes at a time? You know how they can tell you the times table perfectly at home and not be able to answer the same question in class? Does your child find it hard to settle down to homework? Are they able to make full use of their skills?

The benefit of this will become immediately apparent in three places: their schoolwork, their behaviour and their sleep patterns. We will be using a combination of techniques to build their clarity and confidence, based on 5 minutes for each exercise. The exercises will be a combination of colour therapy, confidence building exercises, left/right brain integration and always finishing with 5 minutes of yoga, specifically designed to calm and clear the childrens minds prior to starting the school day.

The children’s ability to focus and concentrate during the workshops has grown to such an extent that we are now able to start and end each workshop with 2 – 3 minutes of a deep breathing, meditative exercise.

Unless a child is able to calm and quiet their mind, they are unable to call on their latent ability to focus and concentrate. To that end the meditative periods will be slowly extended to a solid 4 minutes each – which is quite long for most people, let alone the children.

By the end of this half term, your child will be able to breathe themselves calm before they will need to focus eg. homework. Please feel free to try it at any other traditionally stressful time, but note that your child will get better at it the more he practises it so try not to start with an expectation.

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Each workshop will be working with one emotion and its associated physical, emotional and mental consequences. At the end of each workshop your child will have understood how to feel the emotion, and remove any harmful consequences from his body. For example the last workshop dealt with Fear. Fear manifests physically in the kidneys, and the adrenals and mentally as panic and emotionally as a shutdown.

The children talked about fear and how it felt, then they learnt how to let it go physically; then they used tai chi to get rid of any fear stored in the kidneys which affects their mental functions of focus and clarity; finally they used colour to help them move from fear to courage; and finished with yoga and meditation to reinforce and remember the feeling of being strong and grounded.

We will be going through grief, anger, sadness, guilt, worry and love each week, but not in any particular order.

The idea of this is to help each aspect of the child, physically, mentally and emotionally so that these emotions become part of their vocabulary and their bodies are not negatively affected by suppressing them. Also it allows them to become calmer, more focussed and clearer. It helps them to have the tools at a very young age to be more of who they are and to know how they work.

Eventually this work leads to balanced, grounded, centred children in total harmony. And won’t that be amazing?

Parents are welcome to attend the classes but will be limited to 3 parents per class. Please contact me for details as to where the workshop will be held.