04/08/2026
Today in the creative mindfulness class we started with our breathing exercise, Superhero Breath. Breathing in, we stood tall like a superhero: arms out, chest open, back tall, strong and steady in our legs. Breathing out, we imagined helping someone, hands moving to our hips, and just sitting with that feeling of goodness for a moment, that warm, gratitude-filled feeling of having helped. It's a lovely one because the whole body gets involved, and it opens up the chest and lungs while we breathe.
From there we moved into body mapping. Using a little cutout person with some areas already marked, tummy, chest, throat, hands, head, we talked through where different feelings might show up in the body.
Butterflies in the tummy, tight shoulders, a lump in the throat and what emotions might sit alongside those sensations. It's such a valuable skill, learning to notice what's happening in the body as well as what's happening in our thoughts.
We closed with a very short, simple meditation, just two minutes, with the little chimes rung once at the start and once at the end. At this early stage, it's really just about awareness: helping the children understand what meditation actually is, in the gentlest possible way, before we build on it.
We continued with our emotion cards, picking a couple more from our list of over 170 emotions, naming them, and drawing how they feel: is it spiky, or smooth? What colour would it be? As the weeks go on, the children will start adding something to the back of each card too, what helps them when that feeling shows up, building a little toolkit of their own. And we made a start on our mind jars, which we'll finish next week.
Everything we make continues to go home in the toolbox, and I always share with parents at the end of the session what we've covered. But there's something powerful about the child being the one to tell their own story of it, to a sibling, a parent, a grandparent. That repetition is where it really settles in. And when these little practices become part of everyday life, not just something reached for in a hard moment, they start to feel familiar rather than strange, exactly when they're needed most.
