Goldie Hawn recently spoke at an event called Dreamforce in San Francisco where she shared her insight on mindfulness and teaching our children how to thrive as a skill.
Cultivating social and emotional skills that draw from cognitive neuroscience, positive psychology and mindful awareness training to help children prepare them for a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Hear what the data is telling us about how to enable children to be able to navigate 21st century challenges while maximizing opportunities for success in life and a bright future.
Teaching Children Mindfulness
Look and imagine a future differently. Look at the opportunity to understand how we can improve our lives, our hearts, our spirit, our health, and our relationships in every way thru the practice of mindfulness.
Goldie Hawn shares her story of being 11 years old and how seeing a film that was traumatizing.
At a very young age Goldie was asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and her response was:
I want to be happy.
As her career grew she started to feel that she was moving away from true self, that which made her happy.
In 1971, she was initiated with Transcendental Meditation (TM) and she started meditating. After practicing TM for many years, Goldie continued to study more and went on to study the brain connected to meditation.
Our reality is created by what we think, what we do, and the choices that we make.
Humans are a rare breed; we have metacognition, the awareness and understanding of one’s own thought processes. We get to see who and what we are doing.
After the 9/11 attacks, she knew that our lives, our world would never be the same. It would not have the kind of freedom that we had before. This brought her back to when she was 11 and felt the trauma.
There is a way to mitigate the fear and frenzy of the mind. We now understand the effects of Mindfulness, Mindfulness attention, meditation, call it what you will.. focused attention can calm us down, calm down the limbic system so that we can make cognitive decisions without all the emotions that drive us that are negative.
One in five of our children has a mental disorder of some kind. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for people 15 to 24 years of age. They are sad, lonely, stressed, and have been given no tools to mitigate any of their fears, their anxieties, their stress.
Over 500,000 children are doing MindUP™, which is a program that incorporates Mindfulness. The program teaches kids to understand their brain, to strengthen their attention and optimism. It is designed to give them tools so they can flourish, the best they can. Children need to have joy in their classroom, a sense of optimism. The teachers are trained differently, learning how Gratitude changes the brain, how habituating positive thoughts changes the brain. It’s a dance for evolution.
There is no wrong answer about Mindfulness, no wrong answer about tasting and smelling because we are all amazingly different. Embrace the diversity of all of us.
In the classroom the kids do Gratitude journals, which is an enormous benefit to their minds and hearts. Research has shown that journaling about Gratitude has pulled people out of very depressed states.
Today is the first day of the rest of my life. Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Every day is a new day, every day is a birthday.
The one person you need to challenge to become better in life for you, and your loved ones, and your job, is to go to the “University of You” and become the best human being you can possibly become.
MindUP™
MindUP™ teaches social and emotional learning skills that link cognitive neuroscience, positive psychology and mindful awareness training utilizing a brain centric approach.
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