Why Educate in Mindfulness for Children and Adolescents

Mindfulness is usually translated as “full attention”, and its derivation mindful as “fully attentive.”

Promoting knowledge about awareness and attention and being “mindful” leads to deeper knowledge than what we come to perceive through changing emotions and thoughts.

Consciousness and attention are at their core dynamic we can enhance them and to do so, mental training techniques are taught from a simple and concise pedagogical methodology based on full attention.

The relationship between Mindfulness and thoughts

The fact of understanding that one is not “our thought” will allow us to stop identifying with the thought and stop being possessed by it. Mindfulness understands that thought fragments reality It is a point of view, the way we interpret our own behaviors or those of others. Likewise, it is the significance and intensity that we give to an emotion and even a diagnosis. It is just one perspective among many other possible ones.

This is easier to understand with the following example. We have the fictional case of Pedro. Pedro is 16 years old and was diagnosed with dyslexia at the age of 8. During the school years, when Pedro did not have that diagnosis, his thoughts told him; “I can’t study like the rest, therefore I’m worth less.” When Pedro started his treatment he thought, “I’m different and I can’t do certain things.” Today, after years of therapy and with the practice of Mindfulness, Pedro knows that his dyslexia does not define him, that it is only an aspect of him to take into account for certain situations, and he also knows that he can and is worth as much as others.

The relationship between Mindfulness and emotions

Along the same lines, we will say that one is not one’s emotion A teenager is usually defined as impulsive, aggressive, intense, with extreme values… Well, these aspects do not really define him. They are simply his emotions that are part of that specific evolutionary stage.

Adolescents are more than all that emotional framework, they are growing people who are building their identity like adults and need to be listened to and understood to really know what is happening inside and be able to translate their emotional world.

The child and adolescent are in an intellectual learning process that is facilitated by school. But… And your emotional learning? If our children were educated in this, they would become healthy adults free of anxiety symptoms. Anxiety comes when we don’t understand ourselves and when we send each other messages of hostility. We can introduce this education to them from a young age, and Mindfulness can accompany them in this function.

Working on our Mindfulness promotes the ability to pay attention, and at the same time allows us to develop awareness of what is happening at a certain moment, in our own body, with our own emotions and thoughts. In this way we will be able to notice what is happening at this particular moment.

The importance of the present moment

Now we must ask ourselves… Why is it important to develop awareness of what is happening here and now?

Well, the answer provokes reflection. When one perceives the feeling of one’s own body, the performance of the other, the surrounding context and all of this in its pure state without any judgment or evaluation, avoids interpreting reality in a fragmented way thus emerging a vision of reality itself as a whole.

When one is able to value a whole beyond oneself, what happens is that one will have the power to decide what to do next without issuing a passive response, that is, without reacting automatically.

Why do we have to work on our mindfulness to avoid these automatic responses? Because The automatic reaction makes us vulnerable to anxiety, stress, depression and emotional reactivity If Pedro had not understood both his strengths and the weaknesses he has in his studies as a result of his dyslexia, when he obtained a grade of 5 on the dictation exam he would have experienced only negative emotions such as disappointment and frustration, and this It could cause anxiety about new exams and other self-destructive thoughts.

All this about the reactions and interpretations that come from thought It is seen both in interpersonal relationships in the family environment and in the school environment, and here is the importance of increasing attention through training based on Mindfulness. In this way, not only the attention capacity would be improved but the skills of emotional balance would also be reinforced.

If we work on our Mindfulness We will understand that reality is something different from the emotion that we have as the answer that each of us gives to a specific situation, and therefore the suffering caused by a certain situation begins and ends with ourselves.

Within the family context, among friends, at school and other social contexts, situations arise that lead to reaction without the appropriate approach to the situation itself, producing an emotional imbalance. All this happens daily in all areas. Hence, the Mindfulness workshop proposal was born at Capital Psicologías. We will learn to connect with our body according to our evolutionary stage of development, and there will be different proposals for children, adolescents and adults.

Benefits that Mindfulness brings in the school environment

We can highlight the benefits of practicing meditation in evolutionary stages such as childhood and adolescence, although they were extended to all those people in a learning situation, and above all list the benefits to publicize its usefulness in the school environment, since These are less reported by the media.

These are the main psychological benefits of Mindfulness in the school environment:

Once the benefits are explained, we can understand how useful and necessary this practice is in order to achieve holistic well-being in as many areas as the social roles we play. From Capital Psicología we invite you to learn about our proposals for Mindfulness workshops for children, adolescents and adults.