A Helpful Guide to Teaching Presence to Teens | Eckhart Tolle on Mindfulness

Teach the child to be aware of their pain body. Not while it happens, because nobody will be listening to you. You cannot make up even an adult. You cannot make them aware of their pain body in the middle of a pain body attack. That does not work. The human ego has to. At that point, the human ego has to develop and grow. Unfortunately, the way it is for most humans on the planet so far is the human ego should be a limited time period when it grows in a human being. Let's say up to the age of 20, 25, at the most 30, let's say mid-20s. Then you cannot prevent the arising of ego in a child and an adolescent, nor should you want to prevent it. It's not possible. They need to develop a sense of separate identity that is part of the evolution. The tragedy is, unfortunately, if people get stuck with that ego for the rest of their lives, they never go beyond it. So for a parent, to begin with parent, it's to observe the growth of the ego in the child, which already starts with. May start at the age of two or three when the child begins to. Well, the child learns his or her name. And then the child learns that it is possible to possess something. It learns the concept of mine fairly early. And so it possesses a toy and it learns the concept of my toy. That's the beginning of ego. And then also the beginning of the suffering that comes with ego identification. Because if the toy is lost or disappears or somebody takes it, enormous suffering arises. Oh, oh, my toy, mine. This is the early suffering of egoic consciousness. The next step would be for the child to assert that it is better in some ways than another. I can jump higher than you. Can you? Can you dump this high? No, you can't. Look at me. I can do it. And parents say, you're great, you're doing it. And that's fine if you don't overdo the praise. Give praise when praise is deserved, but don't just praise anything, because there comes an inflation of praise and that can create a narcissistic personality, which is an overblown ego. Married parents these days do that. They say, everything you do is so great, you're the greatest, you're wonderful, it feels good for the child. But when you print money, continue to print money, it loses its value. It's called inflation. I know that, but many politicians these days don't seem to know it. And they probably have degree in economics, but that's on the side. So you are there to gently guide them. You observe the growth of their ego, as has to gently guide them. And school ideally should prepare children for adulthood and should also prepare them perhaps for the transcendence of ego. Perhaps they can even just when I said 25 years old, just number came to me. Could already be a 21. Ego is something that needs to be overcome, but something that is necessary for certain stage of human development. So schools should encourage children not to excessively identify with concepts. And there are a few alternative schools, I believe that already to some extent do that. There are perhaps, I don't know, Montessori schools or Rudolf Steiner schools and so on. To some extent they encourage children not to be excessively drawn into conceptualization at an early age. That is very dangerous. Also, to be given the devices at a very early age has a very detrimental effect on their development. I know it's an easy thing to do for parents to keep them quiet, but it is not good for the growth of their consciousness. Children need to remain in touch for as long as possible with nature. Some way. They need to be taken out into nature, even if it's just a park, but preferably out of the city periodically, where they are encouraged to interact with nature. Leave their. Leave all the devices behind. Every school should do that. Take them out in groups where they spend time connecting with nature without their devices. These are all important things. Also to teach, even abstract subjects like mathematics and so on at too early an age is also detrimental for their development. So there are many things that I know. I have met quite a few teachers over the years who are already bringing that into their classrooms. But so far mostly on an individual basis. It's rare that it has become for it to become already part of the official curriculum. That's still relatively rare, although there are some schools now also. I don't know what schools they are, whether they are. They may be private schools. They teach mindfulness, so called. I don't often use that term, but basically mindful is to be present in what you do. I don't use that term because it implies that your mind is full. So I'd rather not use that. But they teach mindfulness. So for a parent to encourage the child not to get lost in conceptualization, to encourage the child to continue to interact with nature. If you can't have an animal in the house, that is nature too. A cat or dog. Encourage the child to look after the animal, to relate to the animal. Very important. Animal presence can be very important in a home, especially for children. So it requires teachers to finally establish the teaching of presence as part of the curriculum. And that implies Also it signifies, help children to become aware of their emotions, that one of the most vital things, and if it's not taught at school, the parents have to do it or the parents should do it anyway. Help the children to become aware of their emotions. Because the emotions can wreak havoc with a child's life and sometimes they get amplified in the teenage years, when many adolescents become very hostile and they are consumed by negative emotions, by self hatred, by hatred of others, by hatred of everything very destructive emotions. So the most vital thing that a child already at an age of four or five needs to begin to be taught to be observed here his or her emotional field, rather than being always taken over by it. Many children, almost all children already have pain bodies, some stronger than others. And that's another important point here, where when you observe the tantrum earlier in the previous session today, somebody said their mind sometimes feels like a toddler's tantrum taking place in their mind. Yes, the tantrums of toddlers can be quite violent. They may throw themselves on the floor and scream or throw, and that is the pain body. So I would highly recommend, and this should be done at schools as part of the curriculum and there should be children. There are a few children's books that teach, that also teach the child to be aware of their pain body. Not while it happens, because nobody will be listening to you. You cannot make even an adult, you cannot make them aware of their pain body in the middle of a pain body attack. That does not work because the only person you'll be speaking to is the pain body. And the pain body won't like it. But afterwards, the next day you talk to the child. What happened yesterday when you threw yourself on the floor? What was that? What was that thing that got into you? Do you remember that? What was that thing? What did that feel like? If you had to make a drawing of it, what would it look like? That thing that got into you, what would that look like? What color is it? Encourage the child to place attention on the emotion. In other words, there's a presence there. Instead of being the emotion, the child can begin to become aware of the emotion. This does not necessarily prevent the next pain body attack. But then you do it again. Next pain. And then next day you say that happened again. Was it the same thing? Did it feel the same as before? Was it the same little gremlin there? If it's. But let the child use the terms, yes, it was okay, encourage perhaps a child to make a little painting of it. And the next time it happens Then you can say in the middle of it, or at the beginning of the tantrum is starting to happen. Then you can say, ah, there it is again, isn't it? And that can bring in awareness even while it's happening. But you need to prepare the child first, otherwise it won't work. And that may not necessarily stop it. It will probably continue, but at least a little bit of awareness will have come in. There it is again, isn't it? No, it isn't. It's so. I also remember as a child there was a time in my early teens I had very negative emotions, very self destructive, violent emotions. I didn't act them out unfortunately, but I was almost consumed by very destructive emotions. And of course nobody had any idea of presence or mindfulness at that time. Anywhere would have been unheard of. And virtually all parents were very unconscious. At least nowadays there are. There's a certain percentage of parents that are relatively conscious and bring up their children consciously as much as possible. But even then you will find the difficulty of dealing with the child's emotions so very important. At an early age, begin to teach the child to be conscious of their emotions rather than being taken over by the emotions. The worst thing you can do is when the child has a pain body attack, allow it to trigger your pain body, which unfortunately happens quite a lot too, because the energy of the pain body is so raw and so there's such aggression in it that an unconscious parent will be drawn into deeper unconsciousness and then react and start shouting, stop it, stop it. Of course it won't stop it. So the pain body has spread even to the parent. So these are all important things to bring presence so that the teenage years and become a little easier. Another important thing that also should be practiced at school. But home environment is very important. How do the parents live when you bring up children? The greatest teaching is how the family relates to. To how the parents relate to each other and so on. That's what the children absorb rather than what they are being told. That there should be the household, there should be presence in the household, in the family environment. And a very important aspect of that is to listen to the child. It's amazing that this should be practiced also at schools, but more importantly at home for the parent to listen to the child. And you would be amazed how many cases it doesn't happen at all because the parents are so lost in doing. They have a busy life, they are lost in doing. And the only way they interact with the child is either telling the child what to do or what not to do.