This is an exercise we use in Shiatsu classes to help the practitioners to see the importance of staying focused in the present and not letting their minds wander during treatments. You will need two people for this exercise, but it is a simple, fun exercise that can even be done with very young children.

It works like this:

Person A stands with their right hand in a loose fist. Person B places their open right hand RESTING GENTLY on top of (not hanging onto) Person A’s fist. Person B will then CLOSE THEIR EYES. With little children I would use a blindfold - they enjoy the experience, and they tend to have a hard time keeping their eyes closed on their own. Person A will lead the exercise by moving their fist all over the place, and the idea is for Person B to maintain contact with Person A’s fist at all times.

Don’t feel that you need to stay rooted to the spot and just move your hands – move around, take the other person on a journey around the room, up as high as you can both reach and down to the ground. Alternate quick movements and slow ones, sideways with up and down. Obviously be aware of furniture that you might knock into, and bonus if you can get out into a park where you have lots of space to move.

If you lose contact, simply pause for a second, find the other person, and carry on going. There is no specific time length to the exercise, but you’ll soon find that you’ll get tired enough to know its time for a break!

I use the right hand in the example, but you can obviously swap hands, and swap places as person A and B.

You’ll notice that as Person B, to maintain contact with Person A you need to be very anchored in the present moment. The minute you start thinking about something else, or getting stressed, or trying to anticipate the next move, you will lose your flow. Once you can become totally alert and focused and in the now, the exercise becomes simple and enjoyable and you should feel quite invigorated afterwards.

Play nicely!

For some reason most of us reach a point in our lives where we feel we are not good enough. We certainly don’t start off like this. If you tell most 3 year-olds that they look beautiful their standard response will be “I know”. How do we lose this sense of our wondrousness, our importance in the world, our beauty and our light? Somehow, by the time kids are in mid to late grade school, they are filled with self-doubt, and sometimes even self-loathing.

So what can we do to help our kids to grow up with a healthy self-image, one of the cornerstones of success in life?

This is a wonderful, simple exercise that even small children can enjoy and benefit from. It is based on the work of Marci Shimoff. It is a wonderful exercise to do with little ones, to get them into the habit of loving themselves early, but it is never too late to start.

Step One: Place the palm of your hand over your heart. Even just this simple gesture can start bringing your awareness from your head into your heart and is relaxing and calming.

Step Two: Imaging that you are breathing directly into and out of your heart. In other words, imagine that instead of your breath coming into and out of your nose and through your lungs, that your breath is going straight through your skin into your heart.

Sep Three: Every time you breathe in, imagine that you are breathing love into your heart. You can even imagine this as a color – a vibrant pink energy flowing into your heart on the in breath, and then as you breathe out, see it spreading throughout your body – calming you and filling you with love.

Do this with your kids at least once a day, but as many times as you feel like it.  Don’t let the simplicity of the exercise fool you into thinking that it is not extremely powerful and life changing. The more you do it, the easier it will be to get yourself into a vibration of love, which will transform your world in unimaginable ways!

I was listening to an audio replay of Deena Morton’s Four Principles and was thinking what a wonderful skill this would be for all children to grow up practicing in their daily lives.

I would highly recommend listening to Deena Morton’s replay yourself, but I’ll do my best to summarize the main points here and give you an idea of how we incorporate this into our lives and help our children to do the same.

In short, the Four Principles are these:

1.     Have a clear goal.

2.     Be others’ focused.

3.     Experience gratitude.

4.     Have unwavering faith.

It works something like this… You get a clear goal in mind, something that you would like to achieve. This can be a small goal like getting your paperwork done today, or a huge goal such as building a multi-million dollar business. Whatever your goal, you need to be able to visualize it clearly – to write it down, see it in your mind, express it in a journal or on your vision board. The more clearly you can visualize or express it, the better.

Then, put it aside for now. Don’t forget about it, but trust that the universal energy is working with you to make that a reality and so you don’t need to stress or strive to get there. Your focus now should be on others. How can you help someone else to achieve their dreams or goals? With every person you meet or interact with, make your primary focus how you can help them. This may be with a smile, a piece of good advice, something you can actually do for them, a contact you can help them to make… whatever. Keep in mind that you are not helping in order to get something in return, just helping for the sake of changing someone else’s world for the better.

Step three is to experience gratitude for everything, and I mean everything. Whatever occurs in your life is there to assist you in moving forward – do your best to see it in this light. All your obstacles and difficulties and issues have some gift to offer you. Look for the gift in everything. Take the best out of every experience. Trust that everything is happening in your best interests. Life brings you only the best. Gratitude is a very powerful force, so even if you can only find one small thing in your day to be grateful for, really feel it. Just listing things you should be grateful for in your head is not the same as experiencing the FEELING of gratitude.

And finally, have unwavering faith that your goals will be realized. Never let obstacles along the way deter you from moving step by step towards your dreams. Even when things look like they’re not working out, that you are moving further and further from your goals, learn to trust. If you are following these steps, things will work out, but they seldom happen in the way that you think they will.

Following these Four Principles will transform your life in ways you cannot even imagine, which is why I think that all children should be given this gift as early as possible.

In our family we do it like this…

Our children are still very young (3 and 5), so we focus on small, daily goals and on helping others within the family. Over breakfast, or in the car on the way to school, we all discuss what our goals are for that day. We each get a turn to say what we would like to achieve that day and all goals are accepted, no matter how big or small. My husband and I help the kids to focus on all sorts of goals by modeling this ourselves. In between our work goals, for example, we’ll express goals like having a calm day where we have time for meditation or sharing a laugh with someone. Once everyone has expressed their goals, we look at how we might be able to help each other to achieve our goals. We will also assist the kids throughout the day in showing them how they might help each other or ourselves to move forward with our goals. Throughout the day we look at things we can be grateful for, and we also each have a turn at dinner to say what we were grateful for that day, how we were able to improve someone else's wrld, and how things worked out for us in unexpected ways. During breakfast I will remind everyone that if they can see their goal clearly then they don’t need to struggle to get it – they should relax, help each other and trust that it will work out.

The Principles are really so simple, that even a 3 year-old can apply them, and as they see success in their practice of these principles they will find it easier and easier to keep applying them and to start applying them to bigger and more complex goals as they grow older. An added bonus is that as children see how they can make a difference in other people’s lives, and help each other and their parents to achieve their goals, even in very small ways, they learn to value themselves and increase their self-esteem and sense of purpose in the world.

I would encourage you to start putting these principles into practice in your own life today, and to start teaching your children to be masters of their own destinies as well!