![]() This was the first mindfulness exercise that my daughter and I did together. All you can do is stop interacting with them, stop listening to them. Parents also like to have a way to free themselves from their relentless stream of consciousness. Mindfulness-or deliberate, friendly attention-is beneficial not only for children. Although simple, the exercise really helps you get out of your head and into your belly-where your thoughts cannot get to you, where all is quiet and calm. My daughter is twenty-one now and still does the exercise. There were no thoughts in her belly, only her breath, which moved her belly with its gentle rise and fall. But then I realized that if she paid less heed to the troublesome thoughts that kept popping into her head and slowly shifted her attention from her head down to her belly, she might finally calm down. ![]() ![]() Relaxation exercises, bedtime stories, a hot bath, an irritable admonition to "go to sleep like everyone else"-nothing worked. She kept getting out of bed, kept awake by all the crazy thoughts that were churning around in her head: about Tim, who did not want to play with her anymore about the goldfish floating belly-up in its bowl about somebody under the bed who was sure to murder her. Young as she was, she often asked me: "When your body wants to sleep but your head says no, how do you get to sleep?" Sometimes she would still be awake at ten. At the age of five, my daughter had trouble falling asleep. ![]()
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