When someone thinks of mindfulness we are often pushed towards thinking of yoga, meditation and things of this nature. However, mindfulness is much grander than this. These are practices one can take in order to work on mindfulness but they are not in themselves mindfulness.
Mindfulness to us we first think of ego states of mind but that also ties into different levels of thinking. For children this isn't something that has necessarily set in yet and that makes a lot of sense because they haven't had the life experiences to date to give them each different ego state of mind or all levels of thinking.
In my prior career I focused a lot on ego states of mind and different levels of thinking and the reason for this is because I worked in a highly stressful industry that required me to understand and better yet explain to adults some very difficult things that they had to process. And today, if I bring that very same thing forward and look at trauma, the understanding of trauma or an over-stimulated nervous system (in my opinion) it requires us to understand ego states of mind and different levels of thinking. This allows one to uncover what has been programmed into your nervous system and from there you can choose to consciously work on things or not - we highly suggest working on things. Why? For yourself. And, it could go deeper than that. For your children if you have children and for the people around you.
So what about your kids? How do you help your kids understand their busy mind, especially if our kids are neuro kids? Well again, in our opinion, you do it with fun and this book does that well - perfect for before bed reading. Kids can visualize their busy minds in a different way and can even take the opportunity to name the puppy in their head. For adults, they can choose to see things differently as well. When it comes to what ego states of mind are they could look at this book in the perspective of a child and likely relate to it too as the adult mind jumps from different ego states just as quickly. Great! Yeah, we think it's pretty great.
If you are looking to build on mindfulness and want to have a little fun with it too - Puppy In My Head by Elise Gravel is a great book. Come up with a fun name and let your imagination run wild visualizing how your furry friend would look!
~ The Lakunakai Team