I am teaching a Mindfulness course to the fourth graders at my school currently.We just did an activity on Peace this week. Peace can be defined as: ease, non-violence.
Most kids said some version of “Non-Violence” which I thought was really cool. “How we act and what we say should be not hurting other people,” said one girl. Gosh, it’s THAT simple isn’t it?
I was teaching them to thing about Peace in the context of nature. One of the natural elements was visualizing being “Strong like a Mountain.” We did Mountain pose from yoga and tried to push each other over. We realized that if we imagined ourselves like a mountain our strength and our position took on a different level of solidity. We embodied strength. A mountain experiences all kinds of weather: snow, wind, rain, beating sun… and yet it still stays tall and strong. It is a mountain.
What if the weather is like our emotions? Variable and ever-changing. One moment it is raining, and the next the sun is coming out. What if “we ARE the mountain?” Can we maintain our strength in the face of the rain? Or the Wind? Or the freezing snow? If we can “be like a mountain,”maybe we just observe our emotions as just that…emotions.” Instead of becoming unsteady and carried away by them, we just let ourselves experience them, knowing that they will pass soon. What if we are the mountain already? And we possess great solidity, grounding in ourselves and what is real, already? The truth is we are already the mountain. We are powerful, grounded in goodness and wisdom. When we have this knowledge then we truly are at Peace. We can can handle anything that happens. Perhaps, in difficult times, the call-to-action is no action. The call is to be the mountain.
