What is more important than Maths, Physics, Chemistry, or Biology, Geography, History or Languages? What’s more important than all the subjects that you attach so much importance to, and often engage expensive tutors for?
The answer is, developing the ability in your kids to assimilate these subjects, and to extract from them, the aspects that help create lives of happiness and significance.
So where can kids get to acquire this ability? Nowhere! And that sadly is the problem with our education system. In fact, you don’t even have tutors to do that for you. Unless you think of tutoring outside the box. And that, is about tutoring the Mind.
Since all boxed-up subjects go into the mind, it is very easy to clutter up our kids minds with numerous boxes and think we are gifting them “valuable education”. From their perspective, they are being crammed with unrelated boxes marked ‘miscellaneous’. And that doesn’t really help them learn much, or have any fun. Over years, they do understand how to retrieve a fraction of what’s filled in some boxes, to apply that in life. But what is unused is a complete waste of everyone’s time, effort and money. Especially Mom’s!
So what can Mom do?
She can’t change the education system. She can’t fight the authorities. She can’t choose what to do with the syllabus. So she must remember the wise old story of the ancient King. This is of the days when everyone walked barefoot. The King once gashed his foot over a stone. Since he had the authority and the resources, he commanded his Minister to lay a leather cover over all the roads of the land. The Minister thought about it and said, “Your Lordship, what if we have each citizen cover their own feet with leather?” The King thought about that and decided it would be a smarter idea. And shoes came into being!
Well, Mommy-dear, you are the “King” here and the “shoes” are ‘mindfulness techniques’. When your kids realize that they can play with their own minds – and have fun while at it – they will be able to mark their boxes meaningfully and retrieve a lot more for their future lives.
Sounds strange? Let us look at an illustration.
Let’s say we adopt a simple mindfulness technique of ‘linking any new input with a familiar object’. Now let’s say our kid is fed with Pythagoras’ Theorem. Since it concerns a triangle, she could link it with a mountain. And before she knows it, climbing up c-square becomes a fun shortcut. One that she has discovered herself!
Mindfulness serves us in many ways. It is essentially a training of each individual mind into getting into awareness of each moment. Not only does that improve focus and assimilation, it also enhances memory and aids the recall of whatever is relevant – when its moment arises.
Techniques that can be learned through only a few sessions – stretching over 4 to 40 hours – provide life skills that proactively address issues like “work-life balance”, “information overload” and “stress overwhelm”, to name a few. Needless to point out that the incidence of these is increasing by the day. And no permanent solutions are available with “modern science”.
Think of this. All recent technological advances – be they printing presses, cars, planes, internet or whatsapp – have seen trillions of dollars going into the advancement of ways of ‘reaching faster and faster to those outside’. Well, our happiness arises from the inside. Mindfulness is the time-tested means to building meditative awareness in motion, for ‘reaching faster and faster to one’s inside’.
And progressive organizations like Google, Canada Police and several others are realizing this and making a “start-of-day-mindfulness-session” part of their daily work-routine. The understanding of mindfulness can possibly become a “subject” of the future by itself, which can be where the next trillion dollars will go. And while that happens, your kids can get an unfair advantage by learning, practicing and applying mindfulness in their daily lives. Mind it, Mom!
Click the Green WhatsApp Button on top and write to me to discuss mindfulness for your kids. I’m certified in Mindfulness, and coach using Emory University’s SEE Learning System.