Growing Up Mindful by Christopher Willard, PSYD

Growing Up Mindful by Christopher Willard, PSYD.

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First of all, I bought this book to find balances, calm and resilience as a working mom, but then I found so many interesting things in this book, full of practices things actually.

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This book consists of 3 main part:

1. Understanding mindfulness

2. Practices for children and teens

3. Sharing mindfulness in a formal setting

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Well, actually for me, I just need the first and the second part.

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So, what is mindfulness, according to Mr Willard, it is about PAYING ATTENTION to the PRESENT MOMENT with ACCEPTANCE and NON JUDGEMENT.

Why practicing mindfulness? For me, its about to release my stress... or in this book we can response it by befriendly or attend to our stress. Well, in America the most stressed group is TEENAGERS. So this book also share how to practice mindfulness for our kids.

He also said that "it is not the stress is bad. We just need to better match our response to the situations we find ourselves in."

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And like my other book that I read before, this book also said that we had to let go about our multitasking skill now, it reinforces the illusion of being efficient and than making it a hard habit to break. Let's embrace singletasking now.

As a working mom, I often run out of our energy after we handle the problem at the office then we heard our kids cranky and cry, just remember "..when we angry, we see only threats, and not the big pictures."

And also when we want to make a decision, just remember this "..when the brain is relaxed, it takes in the big picture and opens to new ideas, making important new connections."

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Ok, so what actually we can do together with our kids? For me, the cute part is ; we can bring mindfulness to any movement we do in our daily lives, when we walked, eat, played games, coloring etc. We can teach them counting by brerathing. And that's all adjusted with their ages and hobbies.There are a lot of practices that we can take from this book.

Willards, remind us about setting our intentions and expectations : " If you set intentions rather than goals or expectations, you focus on process uc an influence rather than the outcome, which u cannot control." Well, it remind me to theory of : Dikotomi Kendali by Om Piring anyway.

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Last but not least, teaching children mindfulness is like planting seeds. But this book actually is not really for my kids, but it;s for me, practicing mindfulness so I won't be an anxious mother anymore.

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Like Willards said "I've seen a lot of anxious kids who don't have anxious parents, but I've almost never seen anxious parents who don't have anxious kids"