Buddha Board Meditation

Early attempts at teaching the boys to meditate have only had limited success. They have managed to sit for no more than a minute or two quietly and I haven't gotten the sense that they've exactly been focusing on the breath during that two minutes. And while forcing someone to meditate sounds like an oxymoron I think in this case a little coercion is required. The truth is without some pressure the boys won't participate in much. Merely suggesting an activity with a cheerful voice doesn't cut it for them like it would for a lot of kids. A little fun plus a dose of trickery is required.

Recently I got a Buddha Board as a gift. A Buddha board consists of special paper that allows you to write with water using a thin paint brush and watch the writing slowly disappear as the water dries. The origin of the Buddha board, or Zen board, was to enable one to practice calligraphy without wasting tons of valuable paper. However, watching your drawing slowly disappear also gives you a simple visual reminder of the concept of impermance. Nothing will last forever. It is a pleasant little mindfulness activity.

I thought this might be somewhat helpful to the boys who seem naturally prone to being trapped by fatalistic thinking. Everything is black and white in their world and when something goes bad they tend to think it will be bad forever. So, I tried to show them how they could write a word like "angry" or "worried" on the board and then slowly watch it disappear. A short while later, after some battling between the boys, I saw Daniel using the board. Excited that my lesson was paying off I leaned over his shoulder to see what he was writing. "Kenny" is what he had written. When questioned why he informed me that "he hoped it would make Kenny disappear."

Not quite the message I was going for.

Never one to give up I decided to find a second use for the Buddha Board. I decided I could perhaps employ the board as a means of visual meditation and that perhaps if the boys had something visual to focus on they might fair a bit better. I sat the boys down (a challenge in itself some days) and wrote the word "Quiet" on the board and instructed them to sit silently while they watched the word disappear. Once the word was gone, they could yell all they wanted.

This effort was moderately sucessful. I managed 4 1/2 minutes of still sitting in relative quiet. The boys still seem to be under the impression that whispering and "not talking" are the same thing so there was a fair amount of commentary as to which letter disappeared first, etc. but at least it was a start. For certain, there were some true moments of single-pointed attention on the words and a little single-pointed attention is something they definately need to work on.

Another small step perhaps towards building the skills of mindfulness.