The Family That Meditates Together…
I GET IT. The idea of meditating as a family engenders a dismissive laugh. You can’t even get your kids to hang up their coats or flush the toilet. That’s okay, though. As you flush away something left behind, make way for the fantasy that’s beginning to take shape. You can almost see it… the whole lot of you, sitting together peacefully in the early evening sunlight, breathing in and out.
A foundation for family meditation practice can actually be built upon just three layers: awakening curiosity for meditation, transforming curiosity into sustained practice, and collaboratively integrating meditation into family life.
Like any well-constructed structure, the lower layer supports the upper layers. In order to fully appreciate the importance of our first layer, awakening curiosity for meditation, we might bring to mind a commercial from the 1970s that featured a boy who wanted to know the precise number of licks needed to reach the center of his Tootsie Pop. He asked all the animals he encountered, but none knew. Eventually, a turtle told him, “Mr. Owl will know the answer, for he’s the wisest of us all.”
I was intrigued by this commercial, and curiosity was exactly what the advertisers had been counting on. I didn’t even like Tootsie Pops, but I repeatedly exchanged my nickels for them and took them anywhere and everywhere—to the playground, up trees, and to the pea-green armchair by my family’s television set. Like the boy, I was trying to figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center. Yet, despite my due diligence, I was never able to answer the question any better than Mr. Owl.
But Mr. wise. For he must have known that the true answer wasn’t “three,” which is what he proffered before impatiently crunching his way to the center of the boy’s Tootsie Pop. Mr. Owl was wise to ensure that I wanted to come to the answer on my own.
