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"Wishes" collage by Lani, textures by FlyPaper. | | |
This idea came from mindfulness and compassion training that is happening in some schools today. You can get an idea of what is possible in Susan Kaiser Greenland's website. She calls herself a recovering lawyer, and became very interested in teaching mindfulness to children after turning to meditation during a family crisis. She learned different meditation practices as a way to maintain inner calm when the
world was anything but. After making it through the crisis, she
continued to practice because it helped her feel calmer and see life
experience more clearly. She decided to develop the
Inner Kids program which was was researched at both UCLA and UC-SF. (And the
findings are promising.) There is a
link to a pdf of
the research conducted by the
Mindful Awareness Research Center of UCLA on the Inner Kids program. Susan Kaiser Greenland also wrote
The Mindful Child which shows parents how to teach these practices to their children.
One of the practices is "Sending Friendly Wishes" which is actually a very kid friendly guided meditation. You can
listen to it on Susan's website and you can
see a clip from a class that is practicing it. You can also
see kids describing what the experience is like. Lovely!
So the Fun Monday art challenge today is to think about a "Friendly Wish" that you could incorporate into an art piece. After some thought, try creating your piece. Now check in with yourself. How does it feel to create a "Friendly Wishes" art piece? What if you turned it into an
"Art Abandonment" piece, a random act of art kindness? How might that feel? As always f
eel
free to share your work or play on Instagram by adding
#14SecretsChallenge to your description, or by adding your photo to our
Flickr pool.