LIGHTING THE PATH FOR CHILDREN

Meditating with Your Child

Elena Fritchle

Think of it this way...you have to brush and floss your teeth every day to keep  
them clean and healthy, and you have to sit every day to keep your minds happy 
and healthy.                                

—Kerry Lee MacLean, The Family Meditation Book

Children can be taught to 

meditate

 by using a simple tech-

nique that allows them to experience 

the settling of their thoughts and 

emotions. One such technique is the 

Chime Meditation. The following 

instruction on meditating with 

children is taken from a session with 

young people in CSE’s Youth Spiritual 

Education program. 

The Chime Meditation has children 

focus their attention on the sound of 

the chime until they can no longer 

hear it, then experience a moment of 

silence where they are encouraged to 

feel love or peace in their hearts, or 

if they have a concept of God, to feel 

God in their hearts. Each child and 

adult has an opportunity to ring the 

chime. The repeated 

refocusing of atten-

tion on the sound of 

the chime increases 

the children’s ability 

to concentrate and is 

similar to an adult’s 

focusing on the 

breath and the spaces 

between the breaths. 

Throughout the practice, we encourage 

children to be the leaders wherever 

possible, to increase their confidence 

in their own meditation practice.

The technique of using concen-

tration to enter into meditation is 

mentioned in the Yoga Sutra [1.32]: To 

overcome these obstacles (to Samadhi) 

one can meditatively concentrate on a 

chosen object or ideal. The benefits of 

focused concentration are delineated 

in Roy Eugene Davis’ commentary 

on this sutra found in The Science of 

Self-Realization, “When concentration 

on a meditative object is focused, the 

mind is calmed, emotions are easily 

regulated, deep physical relaxation 

prevails, stress is reduced, breathing 

becomes smooth and refined, and 

subliminal influ-

ences that formerly 

stimulated the nervous 

system and mind 

become dormant.” Our 

children can realize 

these benefits.

Prior to medita-

tion, we first do a little 

Hatha Yoga to get the 

wiggles out of our