Sending Ourselves Kind Wishes

Kindergarten Artist

During our last few Mind Move Make classes we focused on sending kind wishes to people we love.  Today we will concentrate on sending kind wishes to ourselves.  We will only spend one class on this, but it is such an important practice!  Mindfulness teaches us to hold ourselves gently and non-judgmentally and offers us a healthy dose of self-compassion.  Practicing sending ourselves positive thoughts can feel strange at first, at least it did to me.  But it is imperative that we give ourselves the same kind of care and love that we offer to others around us.  Children can start negative self-talk at a very young age, and this practice is the opposite of that.  So many wonderful things are taught at school, but unfortunately self-care and self-compassion are usually not part of the curriculum, and these are some of the most important tools that we need to be happy throughout life.

I asked the students two questions and we discussed them:

Why is it important to be kind to yourself?

                                                            What do you do to take good care of yourself?

I had the students turn to a friend sitting next to them and talk about these questions, then we shared together as a group.  We talked about how mindfulness can help us take care of ourselves because it allows us time to listen to our emotions.  It allows a pause, a rest, a time to connect with what is happening without worrying about past or future.

After that I invited the students to find their mindful bodies and close their eyes if they felt comfortable doing that.  I asked them to imagine themselves doing something they love to do, something that makes them happy.  "Imagine yourself with a big smile on your face and pay attention to how you are feeling," I said.  After letting them settle into that picture in their minds, we sent ourselves these wishes:

May I be healthy

May I be happy

May I be peaceful

Afterwards, we discussed how it felt to send kind thoughts to ourselves.  All the students seemed to feel pretty good about it!

During the art part of our class we began creating self-portraits.  I demonstrated some very basic things about the proportions of the human face and they got started creating themselves!  We are incorporating the hearts we designed with all the people we love inside them into the self-portrait drawing.  Here are both works in progress and a few of the finished artworks!

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