Fear-Less

One day, in the summer holidays, I took my five year-old swimming. He was under-confident and clung to me, having lost all the confidence he had gained in his swimming lessons, before the summer holidays began. Then the alarm for the 3-minute warning of the wave machine sounded. He panicked, began to shiver and asked me to take him out of the water.
"It's OK to be scared", I told him. He tried to pull me towards the shallow end, but I held him tightly, and stayed where we were. I decided to use this as a mindfulness opportunity. "I can feel how scared you are. What is it that worries you the most?" He replied, "being pushed over by the waves". So we had something to work on. "That's a possibility. You're scared of the danger, aren't you? That's OK, we can work with this, too. Are you still feeling really scared?" He nodded. "That's OK. But you know that right now, it is safe for you to feel scared, because I am here and I won't let you get into danger." He began to loosen his grip around me. I empathised with his feelings, naming his emotion (fear), and together we accepted the fear. As the wave machine began swirling the water around, he had already acknowledged that he was scared, accepted his emotions, and been given a safe space to experience it. When he accepted that his fear would not be realised, he relaxed a bit.
At this point, I moved a few paces deeper into the water, the waves colliding around us. He allowed me to do this, and I asked him how scared he was. "Not as much as I was" he said. Then he asked to get down and go under the water with me. We submerged ourselves for a few seconds, holding hands, before resurfacing. He was jubilant: "I did it!" He suddenly found his confidence, and he directed me to the shallow end, where we jumped over the waves together. His moment of fear in the past, replaced with fun and confidence.
I have used this sort of technique for all sorts of moments where fear is the thread of the situation. In all cases, once the fear has been acknowledged and accepted, the process of overcoming it can begin. Fear will remain as long as it is unexplained, or unidentified. By tapping into the fear and unravelling it, it can be overcome.

Child's play

Two giggly voices are echoing around the room, interspersed with the sound of paintbrushes dabbing furiously onto paper, and accented by the occasional SPLAT! of bare feet jumping up and down on the spot. This is the activity of two children painting, first thing on a Sunday morning. Oblivious to the November wind and driving rain outside, they are fully immersed in painting a forest: this one has purple, red and green apples growing there. Aw, how sweet! It also contains poo, but we won't dwell on that...

As the two friends continue to paint, they are unaware of everything else around them. I wonder if they would even notice if a horse clip-clopped its way across the kitchen, as they are really enjoying the act of creating this picture, together.

When they finish, they stand back a bit and admire their work. I ask them to imagine being in the forest: they immediately press their noses against the paper and try to get into the picture. "can you imagine how those apples smell" I ask them, and they both take in a big breath through their noses, as if to smell the fruit. Then they are done; they abandon their work of art, and run off to engage in the next activity, the painting forgotten in an instant, and replaced with the next delight.

It's easy to be a child in terms of living in the moment: to focus the mind and the body completely on whatever it is they are doing, block out the outside world, and totally immerse themselves in their present experience. If you've ever got involved in a task and become completely focused on it - then looked at the clock and surprised yourself by the unnoticed passage of time - this is what young children are like for most of their day. Lucky them: I might have to try it, myself!