Headspace for Kids

Once again – a Headspace update.  As you know from my posts, story Headspace is a meditation app – it teaches your how to meditate and apply mindfulness, ed or awareness, in your everyday life.  The benefits are less stress, better sleep and being more connected to the world around you.

Headspace starts off with Take10 – 10 sessions of 10 minute meditations in which you are taught, and guided, on how to meditate.  Once you subscribe and get deeper into the practice, you can keep your sessions at 10 minutes, or increase to as much as 20 minutes daily.  There are even options for 60 minute sessions.

Now, this may seem very long to sit in silence.  Headspace just added Headspace for Kids.  The Kids section offers meditations on Calm, Kindness, Focus, Sleep and Wake Up.  The sessions range from about 3 minutes in length to 9 minutes.  I have done many of them and sessions are striped down, with a bit more talking by Andy and a bit less involved exercises.  The Focus pack is a lot of fun.

I know my kids go from periods of being very busy to periods where I wonder if they have put on actual clothes in days.  But they are still dealing with the stresses of the real world: they see our drama, hear the news, sense our anxieties and tension, and are plugged into the social and technological world that we now inhibit.  This world is hard enough to navigate as a grown up (or someone faking being a grown up) and I know many of us have a hard time trying to understand the world and how we fit in it.  Mindfulness allows us to slow down, even for a moment, and get truer sense of ourselves and the world around us.  If we can pass this down to our kids it may mean brighter, fuller lives.  At the very least, they may develop some skills to cope with a world that is moving at the speed of thought.

Workout of the Day

Strength/Skill

Front Squat

Use a 20 minute clock.  Build to a heavy single in 15 minutes.  With the last 5 minutes, pick a heavy weight, approximately 80% of the weight you hit, and Front Squat it for a set of 5.

Conditioning

AMRAP 7

10 Thrusters 75/55

3 Bar Muscle Ups