Best Place to Meditate? How About Your Minivan!
I was reading an article about the best places in the world to meditate — the article listed exotic locales around the world where you can supposedly reach the height of spiritual enlightenment. I have no doubt that I could also find my inner being and place of peace if I were granted an all-access meditation retreat package that came with turndown service and a mint on my pillow. Sign me up.
Oh, wait, I would totally go, but I have to drive two kids to lacrosse practice and one to triathlon training (yes, there is such a thing for children, it’s for this fantastic charity. Go check them out.) Sorry, no time to hop in my private jet and sail the skies to a remote destination of quiet tranquility. I’m not too worried about it, however, because just like finding true happiness, you have to realize that what you need is already in you. It’s not some perfect location or special pillow that makes you a great meditator.
The Best Place for Me to Meditate is my Minivan. Moms, I Think You’ll Relate.
I use my dirty minivan (or as I prefer to call her, the swagger wagon) as my powerful mindful peace mobile and if you are a mom (or dad) who is currently rocking the drive kids all around this green earth, I think you should too! Honestly, you are in the gosh darn thing for the majority of your life at this point. You might as well look forward to getting into it and have some self-fulfilling purpose in being a kid taxi. It will actually make you like driving more and resent the zipping around town less.
So how do you make your minivan a zen den? Here are some tips to get you started.
MINIVAN MEDITATION BY YOURSELF
Best place to meditate? Your Minivan!
What? You lucky duck. You somehow managed to get a moment in the car by yourself? Well, don’t waste that precious time letting your hamster wheel of thoughts fly off. Make that car time work for your mental health. Here are tips for solo driving. This should go without saying, but for goodness sake, DO NOT close your eyes while driving. These are open-eye suggestions.
Acknowledge the Moment: No matter where you are headed (grocery store, picking up kids, work, etc.), take a big grateful breath that you have a moment to yourself. Just recognize the feeling of breathing in and out and feel grateful that you were able to take a moment to connect with your breath.
Radio off, cellphone away. If you are someone who immediately turns on the radio, this may be hard for you to sit in silence, but that is actually what we really need. We are bombarded with stimulus all day long, our nervous system and brain thank us when we take a break from being barraged with the noise and chatter of life (including auditory radio ones). It helps calm and regulate our systems and lowers our stress level. I am not saying don’t ever listen to the radio again, but maybe take a week off and be mindful of when your body and brain crave silence.
Count your breaths. This is a good place to start for beginners. Just see how many breaths it takes for you to get from point A to B. If you get distracted by your thoughts in your head and lose count, don’t sweat it, just bring your focus back and start again. The more you do this, the better your brain will be able to focus.
Send out some gratitude. Think of all the people in your life and send them gratitude and love. Breathe in with the person’s name, and on the breath out, think about why you love and are grateful for them. This is not only a mindful brain boost, but incorporating kindness/gratitude is like a supercharge of positive neurotransmitters releasing in the brain such as serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. This helps us feel better mentally and physically.
Play the Gratitude Alphabet sign game. Remember when you were little and you used to look for letters on signs and try and make it through the alphabet? This is the grown-up version (I do play this with my kids, too). You don’t have to go letter by letter, but every time you see a sign think of something you’re grateful for that starts with that letter. Just breathe the word deeply in and out.
Red light, green light. Every time you go through a street light, if it is green, breathe in and out a blessing or a wish of good for someone. Red lights can be either breathing in and out blessings or wishes for yourself OR breathing in and out positive self-affirmations.
MINIVAN MEDITATION WITH THE KIDS
These are more like mindful moments then full meditation, however, this time will have some major mind boosters going on for both you and the passengers in your van. Not only that, you’re teaching your kiddos that drive time is mindful time and what an amazing gift that will be when they’re old enough to be driving on their own.
Set it up from the beginning. Tell yourself and everyone getting into the car with you, that once they get in, before even talking, they have to take three deep breaths. This is good for setting the tone of the ride. It also stops the stream of mindless yelling at each other about the stressful minutia of trying to get someplace on time with all of your required belongings.
Checklist Time. After you and everyone have taken three deep breaths, you can calmly go through a checklist of what everyone should have or have not bought and adjust accordingly. I have a sticky note that says: shoes, water bottle, epi-pen (for my daughter) stuck to my dashboard. I simply raise it in the air after breaths, and since everyone is centered, they can read it and double-check that they have everything needed for the journey because nothing will cause you to lose your relaxed state more than a kid panicking from the back seat that they forgot their mouth guard.
Animal Breaths for the win! I also have a second one that says: snacks, homework, sports bags for a different evening in our lives. If you have younger kids, ask them what animal breathing they would like to do and let them have a say in how we breathe once all buckled. Every animal breathes so deep breath in, and animal noise breath out makes getting the calming breath in easy and fun. You can even play it as a guessing game.
Drive without the radio on and no movies or electronics. Yes, turn it off even if that makes the tween roll her eyes — also, no phones. You really shouldn’t be talking or texting while driving anyway, and monkey see monkey do, applies here. If your kids see you doing it, then they will do when it’s time to get their driver’s license no matter what you tell them, because they have watched you do it time and time again.
Talk to each other. This is a great connection time to talk about what kindness everyone saw that day or what they are grateful for. Notice what is going on in the world outside your dirty minivan windows. We like to choose something that we can mindfully observe (and count). My middle kid always has to make it a math game, which is awesome. I just always have the rule that we are earning points cooperatively not competitively, so he usually sets an arbitrary number for us to reach based on how far we are driving). How many people walking their dogs? How many cardinals? We love to notice kindness (a car letting another car in, someone stopping to let someone cross, etc.), and we all count those as major bonus points. We also change up the rules and play that every time we see the thing we are mindful of, we take a grateful breath.
MEDITATION BONUS: BEING MINDFUL IS TRAINING BRAINS TO FOCUS
How often have you seen kids glued to a phone or screen, and they have NO awareness of the world around them? How about grown-ups? ALL. THE. TIME. That level of unawareness is not good for us. The average attention span is now 8 seconds and dropping. 8 seconds! I am guessing you would like your child to pay attention to you, school, tying their shoes, listening to directions, etc. for more than 8 seconds, correct? Well, then you have to help those cuties train their brains to observe themselves and the world at large. You literally have to help them learn to pay attention.
Just like Ferris Bueller says, “life comes at you fast” and we have to teach ourselves and our kids that we need to control the pace that is right for us. They can CHOOSE to slow down and focus. The earlier you start training their brains to take a moment to pause and be mindfully aware of themselves and the world around them, the better their ability to self-assess and focus.
When we train our brains to observe and then decide how we feel about those observations, we can make decisions that serve us in a way that helps us feel a connection. When children start constantly disconnecting from themselves and the world, major mental and physical health issues begin to set in. It starts small, but over time it has an immense impact on well-being. Scientists, doctors, and statistics agree that just floating along with the current standard American lifestyle without taking time to observe and reflect upon our choices and actions leads to unhappiness and health issues.
CAN YOU IMAGINE IF EVERYONE DID THIS? ROAD RAGE WOULDN’T EXIST.
Try it for a week. Don’t give up on the first eye roll from the kids. Start with just you and work your way up to the kids. This life hack makes a difference in ways you might not have considered. Decreasing our stress level throughout our day could help us stay healthy, not gain weight, sleep better at night, have better communication and relationships with others and lessen our chances of depression.
At the end of your life, when you think about all the time you spent driving around town, are you going to say, “I wish I would have paid less attention and been distracted?” I sure hope not. I hope you get to say, “I’m glad I used those small moments to make sure I took care of myself and my kids’ mental and physical health and taught my children to pay attention to the world.”
Learn more about incorporating mindful moments into your day.