Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky
Conscious breathing is my anchor
Conscious breathing is my anchor”
Rooting our trunks deep into the
earth we ground our hearts and minds and took on the form of our favorite trees
for this blustery poem and stretch. Waving our arms and stretching on tip toes
we sang the first 2 lines as the very embodiment of our trees in a windy stormy
sky. We had Birch, and Oak, Maple and Apple, African savannah, Willow, and
Palm, all swaying and bending in the wind. The second part of our poem reminds
us what to do. By pointing the flashlight of focus on our breath, and noticing it
coming in and out, we slow the wind, and help our trees transform. This is
lovely to do in a circle, because by the end of the poem we are all in tree
pose, making it is easy to imagine all our branches in bloom!
"In
order to love you need to understand, because love is made of understanding.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
While exploring our kindnes & compassion
theme we uncovered one of it’s most important elements… understanding. Last Sunday we followed that important connection in the book Zen Ties by Jon J. Muth. This story beautifully illustrates how
understanding blooms compassion and kindness. Awash with gorgeous watercolor
images, It is the second in a series about the giant panda Stillwater and his
human friends Michael, Addie, and Karl– the children of a neighboring family. “Stillwater, introduces the three to
Miss Whitaker, an elderly neighbor whose crabby outbursts have frightened them.
Stillwater’s inward eye sees through her anger to her fear and loneliness. She
turns out to be a marvelous spelling coach and when Michael wins a red ribbon
in the School spelling bee, the pictures show the whole group sharing his
victory with their own red ribbons.” Fantastical
and beautiful - an instant bedtime
favorite.
Taking our exploration up on
it’s feet, we played a Feeleez empathy game, and acted out our own true to life
scenarios.
Dividing ourselves into 2 groups, one group to roll the feeleez
dice and create an emotional scenario based on the facial expression and body
language of the illustration on the card, the other group to be the compassionate bystanders - ready to come up with a kind & helpful response.
Group one decided the person
on their card looked “left out”, “sad”, and “lonely” so they choose to set
their scene in a gym class, where this person was picked last for a team event.
The second group were the bystanders, their job was to
come up with a compassionate response to the figure in the scene. The first
effort by one of our bystanders was to go up to the teams doing the picking,
and give them an earful of how wrong they were. No dice. this didn’t seem to make
the situation any better, and when asked, the left out person still felt left
out. The second attempt was no better, as another bystander went and shouted at
the teams to stop. It wasn’t until
a group of 3 bystanders together walked over to the left out person and asked
if he wanted to join them on their team that things turned around. The left out
person felt better, and the 3 bystanders felt good too. Win win!
When the teams switched…
our
second scene was set in the parking lot, where a mom had just lost the keys to
the car, and had 3 very upset children in tow. After the scene played, the
actors were asked to freeze, while the group of bystanders came up with a
response. A kind bystander asked the visibly distraught mom if she would like
help looking for her keys, and together they found them. Afterward the
bystander shared that “this exact thing happened to my mom” it was a great
moment that really proved understanding does give rise to feelings of
compassion, and a desire to be helpful and kind.
After our sunny cantaloupe
snack, and beautiful food contemplations, we practiced with…
“First aid for Unpleasant
Feelings”.
This 6 minute guided
meditation from Sitting Still Like a Frog is excellent. Eline starts off by making a really
important point… “No matter how you are feeling, don’t try to push it away.
Don’t try to make it better or think you are stupid for feeling this way. See
if you can bring your most loving attention to this feeling, the kind of
attention you might get from your best friend.” We like the way she frames it in a way kids can relate to.
Keeping the focus on loving attention, the breath, and what is happening in
your body at the moment, her tone is reassuring, encouraging, and non
judgmental. “Quietly and curiously you observe all the different feelings
inside your body”. It is also great how she stresses not pushing away your feelings, but
rather letting them in as the
“fact of life” they are. so good. And they really loved it!
Off we went to the ART ROOM to finish our beautiful mobiles blooming with kindness, compassion, peace,
friendship… check out our gallery photos
This Sunday we will continue our
exploration of kindness and compassion by taking the search inward with another
Jon J. Muth Classic : The Three Questions, Eline Snels meditation, A Safe Place, and a new
kind of inner self portrait in the art room.
We can’t wait to see you all!
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