I am not a religious person. In fact, I’m not sure I even believe in god. Growing up, my religious education was diverse, to say the least: Native American ceremonies with my dad, singing in the Episcopal church choir with one friend, celebrating Passover with another. As an adult, I learned about meditation through yoga classes but never tried it beyond shavasana. And although I’m thankful for my exposure to many different religions, I’m worried that my children are missing out on a crucial spiritual element.
I may just be raising a house full of pagans.
So when a friend invited my children to join hers at a Sunday morning Buddhist meditation designed for kids, I cajoled mine into going. I even corralled a friend for each and dragged them along. And it was all fine and dandy until the stress kicked in: I worried about being late, about the Barnacle (read: baby) misbehaving and about my kids disrupting the class. “If this is what going to meditation means to you,” my husband told me in the car, “You are obviously missing something.”
So I calmed down. I sat with the Barnacle in my lap while my kids joined the circle on mini pillows. We closed our eyes and envisioned negative thoughts blowing out of our noses as black smoke, and positive thoughts entering our bodies as white light.
Then she did a science experiment, beginning with baking soda in a cup. “This is your mind,” she said. She poured in vinegar, which created a cloudy liquid that foamed up and over the top of the cup: “This is what negative thoughts do to your mind.” And as she read aphorisms from a book while my ever-inquisitive children asked increasingly out-of-context questions, my anxiety grew.
By the time we wrapped up with an art project where the kids decorated hearts with pictures and descriptions of what made them happy—and my 10-year-old son and his friend began a heated discussion of their favorite new video games that culminated in both of them writing that what made them happiest was the absence of their siblings—I was fuming. When my husband returned from getting an (inopportune) cup of coffee, I basically shoved the Barnacle at him and stomped out of the room.
I wasn’t mad at my husband, and I wasn’t mad at my kids. I was mad, I think, at the fact that I had envisioned the experience of meditation as transformative—I’d hoped that we would start deep breathing together and the five of us would become some kind of model Zen family.
The reality of my real family disappointed me.
But why? Because my kids are competitive, combative and loud? Because my son likes to talk about video games and my daughter knows all the words to Selena Gomez’ latest album? Because the Barnacle is—for want of a better descriptive—two?
As my husband pointed out, I was the cloudy cup in that situation.
My children moaned and complained every time I mentioned the meditation class, but in the end they came with me to experience something completely different. They sat quietly as someone they didn’t know talked to them about things they didn’t understand.
Sure, they ended up back in their comfort zones. But they trusted me enough to take them outside of it. That’s white light to inhale, a story to write about on a paper heart and a concept I’ll try to remember the next time the water clouds.
