Meditation for Kids: Turning to Mindfulness to Help Kids Stay Calm

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Recently I was asked to teach meditation to a group of underprivileged middle school kids in El Paso, Texas who are in the chess club.

The chess club team was going to the Texas State chess championship and they were intimidated by other chess teams. I taught them mindful meditation which helped them separate a given experience from an associated emotion which helped them to focus their awareness on the present moment.

Listen to the replay as I teach them the techniques that can help to curb kids’ impulsivity, reduce symptoms of depression and anxiety. The chess club ended up winning state and are headed to nationals!

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Spirituality and the Art of Georgia O’Keeffe

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Patio Door with Green Leaf Georgia O’Keeffe · 1956

In a recent visit to the Brooklyn Museum of Art, I walked past Georgia O’Keeffe’s morning glories and edificial irises and stood mesmerized by a painting that was far more humble, far less glamorous. A wall with a door in it, an expanse of smooth brown adobe centered by a core of a rough black square of absolute negative space.

O’Keeffe liked to paint the same thing again and again, until she had penetrated it to its essence, unraveling the secret of her attraction. The flowers, the blowsy petunias and jimsonweed, were superseded by New York cityscapes and then by cow skulls and miscellaneous animal bones, surreally aloft over the clean blue skies and dry hills of New Mexico. This was the landscape that unlatched her heart, and it was during her time there in the 1930s that she began to obsess over the wall with a door in it, located in the courtyard of a tumbledown farmstead in Abiquiú, New Mexico. First she bought the house, for $10, a process that took a full decade, and then she set about documenting its enigmatic presence on canvas, creating almost 20 versions. “I’m always trying to paint that door – I never quite get it,” she announced. “It’s a curse the way I feel – I must continually go on with that door…it fascinates me.”

The attraction was a mystery, and yet walls and doors figure large in the story of O’Keeffe’s singular life. How do you make the most of what’s inside you, your talents and desires, when they slam you up against a wall of prejudice, of limiting beliefs about what a woman must be and an artist can do? She didn’t kick the door down – hardly her style – but instead set her considerable canniness and will at finding a new way through.

I see classic patterns, which generate archetypal sacred symbols in O’Keeffe’s work especially the door, the sacred center of her home. Though this dwelling may not be a publicly recognized sacred structure, it serves as the center for O’Keeffe.

Guided by her own intuitive response, almost possessed, O’Keeffe paints this archetypal symbol. The door represents the notion of metamorphosis and transition, a passage from one place to another, between different states, between lightness and darkness. The act of passing over the threshold signifies that one must leave behind materialism and personality to confront inner silence and meditation. It is abandoning the old and embracing the new.

Doors hold the essence of mystery, separating two distinct areas, keeping things apart. There is a barrier, a boundary, which must be negotiated, before the threshold can be crossed. The mysterious beyond is hidden from sight by the closed door, and some sort of action must be taken before the other side becomes visible and available to us. The closed door is full of potential, for anything might lie beyond, as yet unknown and unseen.

At the age of 96, Andy Warhol, another creator of a purely American vernacular, interviewed O’Keeffe. She told him about the landscape that she most cherished, her home and, the wild expanses of New Mexico. “I have lived up there at the end of the world by myself a long time. You walk around with your thing out in the field and nobody cares. It’s nice.”

From the beginning, New Mexico represented salvation, though not in the wooden sense of the hill-dominating crosses she so often painted. O’Keeffe’s salvation was earthy, even pagan, comprised of the cold water pleasure of working unceasingly at what you love, burning anxiety away beneath the desert sun.

Elegance shares a border with crankiness, independence with selfishness, and O’Keeffe was by no means a saint. But without O’Keeffe’s sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, exacting presence, chaos loomed. She made it happen, that simple door was anything but, and in painting it, she was opening a door to a new kind of American art, a new kind of woman’s life. “Making your unknown known is the most important thing,” she said, “and keeping the unknown always beyond you.”

Conscious Eating as a Spiritual Practice

Most people say they don’t have time to meditate, yet we all find time to have three squares a day. Eating isn’t typically associated with the expansion of our soul but with a few mindful moments, eating can be an opportunity to cultivate a spiritual practice.

Here are a couple of ways to invite your soul into your next meal:

Give Thanks

When Ricky Bobby (actor Will Farrell) says grace at dinner with his family in the movie Talladega Nights, he prays, “Dear baby Jesus use your baby super-powers…“His wife interrupts to remind him that Jesus grew up to be a man with a beard. But Ricky Bobby likes the Christmas Jesus better, and continues to pray to “the eight-pound, six-ounce baby Jesus who listens to baby Einstein tapes…” Whatever “saying grace” means to you – praying lays the energetic and spiritual groundwork for the meal. Our thoughts and spoken word create a vibration that influences physical matter. My Native American grandmother used to pray for the spirit of the animals that gave their lives so we could eat. She thanked the farmers who grew the vegetables and always thanked whoever physically prepared the meal. As a child I thought her prayers were too long and thanking the animal was ridiculous, but as I look back on her meaningful words I realize now that it was her way of incorporating her spiritual practice into every eating experience. Each meal was a spiritual journey as she took the act of eating to a deeper level and filled every bite of food with the energy of grace. Through prayer, we invite God into our meal making it a blessed and scared experience.

The Cup Concept

Anyone who knows my husband Barry knows about his cup concept. Essentially Barry suggests choosing a cup to eat out of, so that each time you eat, your meal takes on an element of sacredness. A cup that is the same size as both of your hands cupped together is about the size of your stomach. If you are eating just enough as provided to you by the confines of the cup, you will be less apt to overeat compared to eating from a plate of food on which you can pile lots of food. You hold the cup in your hands, in a prayer-like manner to set your intention. Additionally, I like connecting a cup to the dimensions of the stomach because it is a subtle reminder that your stomach is the “altar of your being.” It is where your mealtime offerings are made to your entire self. If we considered eating as the process of making an offering on the altar of our stomach for its transformation and integration into our being, that might create a different awareness of our intake.

Make a Spirit Offering

Although I grew up Christian, I became acquainted with various spiritual religious traditions through university classes and by studying with spiritual mentors of different faiths. When I traveled to Tibet I noticed in the Buddhist temples that food offerings to the gods are common practice. Food may be simply and silently left on the altar, with a small bow, or the offering might be accompanied by elaborate chants and full prostrations. However it is done, offering food on an altar is an act of connecting with the spiritual world. It is also a means to release selfishness and open the heart to the needs of others.

It is a common practice in Zen to make food offerings to the hungry ghosts. During formal meals or during Sesshin ( an intense meditation retreat) an offering bowl will be passed or brought to each person about to partake of the meal. Everyone takes a small piece of food from his bowl, touches it to the forehead, and places it in the offering bowl. The bowl is then ceremonially placed on the altar.

Hungry ghosts represent all four greed and thirst and clinging, which bind us to our sorrows and disappointments. By giving away something that we crave, we unbind ourselves from our own clinging and neediness to think of others.

If you don’t have time to meditate, use the daily ritual of eating to enjoy and enrich your life by creating enlightened experiences and meals full of meaning.

Are you wearing the best colors for you? According to the ancient art of Feng Shui, each of us has a power color based on the five elements and the day you were born. Sign up for my email list and provide me the day, month, year of your birth and I will send you your birth element and power color!

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Inner Flame

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October is my favorite month. In the Roman calendar, octo, Latin for eight, was actually the eighth month, but the Gregorian calendar, instituted by Pope Gregory XIII established January as the first month of the year, making October the tenth.

The leaves are changing colors; the weather is cooling off; football is in full swing; Halloween decorations are going up and I am going to celebrate another rotation around the sun. October is my birthday month and I get to blow out a candle.

Candles on birthday cakes derived from an ancient practice. Birthday celebrations began as a way of recognizing the spirit that comes to life with each soul born. Originally, there was only a single candle representing individual life no matter what the age of the celebrant might be. The single flame symbolized the inner spirit and natural, shining genius that enters the world at the birth of each child. The flame of inner intelligence burns at the center of the soul and would light a path through this uncertain world. The single candle was lit to remind everyone of the invisible fire at the core of each life and birthday gifts were not given to the person, but to the spirit born within them.

In this old sense, a birthday serves as a reminder that each person is already gifted – each having an inner genius and some God-given gifts to bring to life. One’s birthday involved a return to the mystery of oneself and a reminder of the inner flame of one’s life. The point wasn’t simply to make a wish, but also to consider what the candle of each life burns for. When the candle was blown out it was said that the rising of the smoke could carry prayers for the spirit of the celebrant to the heavens above.

I am a disciple of myth, a servant of stories, and strangely a devotee of the notion that the soul is threaded through with a plotline from the beginning that aims at a destiny that might be possible to find before the end. For life is an eternal story, a mythic drama that begins again each time a soul enters the world. This year on my birthday I am going to contemplate the candle on my cake, my inner flame and what my life burns for. Through meditation and prayer, I will begin this quest by seeking the counsel of my soul. The soul is a kind of ancient library that holds the exact knowledge we seek and need most. Call it an inner spirit, the great soul or deep self, the inner genius or divine twin. It has many names but each refers to the older wiser self. We may enter paths where others have found meaning and even transcended; that’s a good way to begin a quest. But in order to answer the question of our own lives, we must risk taking our own steps. The only genuine safety in this world comes from risking oneself completely in order to become oneself more fully.

Moses began being Moses when he was placed in a basket and given to the river of life. Later, he knew how to part the waters and lead others from bondage to safety. Buddha had to find a way to go between the two great religions of his time because he could not go along with either of them. Each of these men became a prophet in their own way and each is remembered for the way they became themselves.
Those who learn to paint like Da Vinci imitate a master; yet as long as their own inner mastery remains unknown, they are imposters. They may grow by following the brushstrokes of an original but only become themselves by grasping their own originality.

So, this year, when I blow out my candle you will know exactly what I am wishing for, searching for and hoping to find…me.

Michelle Cromer