Healthy Intentions Community

MINDFULNESS MONDAY

Happy Memorial Day!

This week’s activity is designed to be performed with your kids. Helping children to recognize and cope with emotions is one of a parent’s richest responsibilities. Emotional intelligence is a necessity for healthy self-esteem, relationships, creativity, empathy and resilience as adults.

In many ways emotions are like the weather, in today’s activity we are going to use the weather as a way to encourage kids to think about and express their emotions. The imaginative labeling process we will use also helps you to see into their world and understand how you can help them.

A suggestion for the week: ‘What’s your weather like today?’ You can read the following script word for word or adjust it to suit your child’s need or personality.

· Have your child sit or lay in a comfortable position. Tell them we are going on an adventure to fi…

MINDFULNESS MONDAY

In this week’s practice we are revisiting loving-kindness with mindfulness. This technique will enhance your feelings of unconditional love towards others, or help you to love yourself. It helps by reducing feelings of judgement and condemnation and increases compassion, connection and open-heartedness.

A suggestion for the week:

· Sit in a comfortable meditation posture and allow your body and mind to settle.

· Recite the following adjusting it for the intended party (yourself, a friend or a loved one). Loving-kindness for yourself is described below:

o May I be safe and protected

MINDFULNESS MONDAY

For this week’s activity, we are going to look at establishing safety to improve our personal willpower. In order to optimize our mental and emotional capacity, we must feel safe.

Take caution with not overdoing this- if you are truly unsafe where a threat is putting you at risk of real harm, listen to that fear and seek refuge with a more permanent means. This activity today is addressing situations that are fearful to the self- for example being confronted with death, or fearing a financial inability to provide for yourself or family, etcetera. These thoughts and feelings take our focus away from our inner well-being by mentally trying to fend off these outside threats.

A suggestion for the week: The following activities help us to relax, meditate and continually affirm our safety.

· Practice diaphragmatic breathing- concentrate on the ebb and flow of your breath an…

MINDFULNESS MONDAY

For this week we are going to look at empowering your three intelligence centers. We all have three different intelligence centers that are developed and used differently by each of us based on our personal histories.

The three intelligence centers are:

1. Head- clear seeing, connection to the transcendent

2. Heart- integration of experience, deep connection to my path

3. Body- presence, groundedness, detector of personal truth