This one is a great meditation to teach children. Can we really ever start too early to help foster peaceful hearts and minds?

We forget that children are like sponges in their environment. I once had a grieving grand-aunt tell me that her grandchildren didn’t understand “a thing about death” and didn’t want them to know that their grandmother had just died. My heart ached for these kids because as Alan Wolfelt is fond of reminding us, “Any child old enough to love is old enough to grieve.”

We teach many things in school but we don’t teach essential things that children can build upon for the rest of their lives. . . like good coping skills, the ability to access their feelings, nonviolent communication, living with someone’s death and their own loss.

Give a child a wonderful gift . . . Take them for walks in nature. Teach them to breathe with their bellies by placing a dictionary on them so they can watch the book move up and down as they breathe correctly. Help them cultivate right speech and right action.