Meditation with the Kiddos

People of almost all faith traditions practice some form of meditation. Why? Meditation is a super power!

Light Watkins, says, “Common side effects of daily meditation are increased energy and feelings of contentedness and inner happiness.”

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to sit silently and empty your brain to meditate. Meditation can include any number of practices that help you strip away distraction and encounter your innermost being. This can start with something as simple as focusing your eyes for a period of time on some object like a bird or a flame, and when your thoughts start to wander, notice, and then return your attention to your focal point. You may be wondering how on earth that helps you encounter your inmost self, but do this enough and you’ll start to identify patterns in what’s tugging at your attention. When we hurry and scurry, distract and scroll, it’s possible for us to live any number of days without encountering ourselves. Meditation is a way to reconnect to what is present within us.

Start with Guided Meditation!

Guided meditation is a great starting point for children and new meditators alike. You don’t have to be an expert, or have studied some ancient practice. All you have to do is close your eyes and visualize what you’re hearing.

When my children were younger, we started every day with a guided meditation, often the one linked on the left. Those are my two older kids, about fifteen years ago when we had family meditation time every morning. It was a great way to settle and center before getting into the work of the day.

Try joining your kids for a guided meditation, and discussing the experience over breakfast!

Make a Calm Down Jar

Calm-down jars are a mesmerizing way to help our brains step out of a stressful moment and settle like glitter.

Supplies:

  • 1/2 C hot water
  • 1/2 C corn syrup
  • 1 Tbsp glitter
  • 1-4 drops dish soap
  • jar

Mix water and corn syrup in the jar. Add glitter and shake. Dish soap will help the glitter clump less, but will also make it settle faster, so add a drop at a time and test before adding more.

Next time you’re stressed, give it a shake, and envision your feelings settling with the glitter.

Meditation Spaces Around the Valley

You can meditate absolutely anywhere but the Willamette Valley is rich with excellent places to help you flex your meditation muscles.

If the great outdoors is your thing, Starker Arts Park is a lovely place to sit for a nature meditation beside the pond and focus your attention on a dragonfly or the surface of the water. If you prefer gazing across the distance, Fitton Green is a delightfully short hike out to a bench that’s just perfect for observing the horizon and tracing the line where the sky meets the mountains.

Maybe insulated silence is more your jam. If so, check out the Grotto’s cliffside meditation chapel next time you’re in Portland. Pictured in the higher image on the left, it’s open to the public during operating hours and is a beautiful space for quiet contemplation in a warm and protected silence.

A little closer to home, you can enjoy a walking meditation in the Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan’s courtyard labyrinth, shown in the lower image to the left. This space is always open to the public, though during office hours, you’re likely to have an audience of church administrators. And while I haven’t seen it myself, I’m told there’s a second labyrinth that’s open to the public behind the cancer center near the hospital.

Homework for Caregivers

Just being with ourselves is getting harder and harder as the world fills with digital distractions and opportunities for immediate gratification. It’s easy to want better for our children than we demand for ourselves, but role models are the best teachers. If you’ve been particularly stressed, or self-medicating with social scrolling, try setting aside a mere five minutes a day to try on of the techniques above. Notice how you feel in your body before and after your five minutes. Once you’ve tried it yourself a few times, consider inviting your kids to join you. Tell them why you wanted to try meditating, and how it’s going, and see if they’d like to try with you.

Meditation might seem weird to your children at first, but many children feel a sense of inner control that is comforting to them after a very short amount of time developing their meditation muscles. When so much outside of ourselves seems big and scary, knowing that we can turn inward and trust ourselves can be a huge source of security for the smallest members of our families.

Happy meditating!

Child Dedication 12/24

The members of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Corvallis ceremonially welcome babies and older children into this world, and into the community which holds them, offering our lifelong commitment to the nurture of each child. This dedication is a joyful ritual which affirms that each young soul is a gift, and which celebrates the covenant of family and community.

Contact Skyla by December 21st if you would like for your child to be dedicated during the morning service on Christmas Eve.

Free Mental Health Film Screening 1/18 @6:30

The Religious Exploration Staff is aware that our children, youth, and young adults are facing an unprecedented mental health crisis and we acknowledge the lack of mental health resources available to families in our community. As such, we are elevating our commitment to educating ourselves and expanding our program’s capacity to hold space for children, parents, and caregivers to connect with one another in mutual support.

One of the first offerings we present in this a screening of What I Wish My Parents Knew, a film by Tell My Story, designed as a mental wellness tool to help parents better understand how to support the mental health of their children.

The event will be a two-part, 90-minute experience with a group viewing followed by a discussion facilitated by a licensed mental health professional. Pre-registration is requested.

This film is not available for general public streaming, but this event is open to the public. We ask that viewers be over 18. On-site childcare will be provided free of charge by a team of experienced and background-checked adults.

If you plan to attend, we recommend watching this talk by the creator of the film to prepare. PLEASE NOTE: themes of self-harm and suicide are present in both the talk and the film.

Direct questions to DRE@dreuucorvallis-org

Post-Holiday Break! 12/28 @1PM

This time of year can be a lot for the ritual keepers known as parents. To honor all you do, we’d like to offer you a break! Drop off school-aged children in the social hall from 1-4 on December 28th. We’ll have a thank you card writing workshop (with helpers for those who haven’t mastered the pen yet), make snacks, and settle in for a movie while you take a few hours to recover from the holiday hustle. To make the most of the thank you card workshop, please send your child with a list of specific people & gifts for which to offer thanks. Pre-registration is requested at bit.ly/postholidaybreak

Spiritual Practices Workshop Collective Lectionary

The Spiritual Practices Adult RE workshop has wrapped until April. Thanks to all who participated – we learned a lot together!

Check out the RE new page to see our book recommendations for your personal lectionary and some of our art journaling commitments for practice.

We recently completed Part 1 of the Adult RE Spiritual Practices workshop and it was a true delight!

In our time together, we discussed and defined spiritual practice, explored how to pray (even if the G-word makes you itchy), experienced various forms of meditation, mindful walking and eating, tried our hand at the ancient practice of devotional reading called lectio divina, and practiced art journaling our commitments to daily-ish spiritual practice that we will work on individually until we come together for Part 2 of this series in April.

Several of you have expressed interest in attending this workshop during the day so that you don’t have to drive at night. If you would like to see a round of the Spiritual Practices workshop offered on Mondays at 9:30 AM, email me (dre@uucorvallis.org). If enough people are interested, we’ll launch a day-time workshop in February.

As a gift from our Spiritual Practices graduates to the wider Fellowship, we offer this list of book recommendations that you might choose to add to your own personal lectionary. If you don’t have a personal lectionary, or don’t even know what that means, you should consider joining the next round of the Spiritual Practices workshop!

Meditations of the Heart by Howard Thurman
recommended by Sherri Argyres


Love Poems from God by Ana Huang, Eden O’Neill, Ghassan Zeineddine
recommended by Sherri Argyres


Heart to Heart by the Dalai Lama and Patrick McDonnell
recommended by Bonnie Morihara


Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God by Anita Barrows & Macy
recommended by Rebecca Bedell


Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
recommended by Heather Thomas


Untamed by Glennon Doyle
recommended by Heather Thomas


Beauty by John O’donohue
recommended by Jay Coffman


A Religion of One’s Own: A Guide to Creating a Personal Spirituality in a Secular World by Thomas Moore
recommended by Skyla King-Christison


An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith by Barbara Brown Taylor
recommended by Skyla King-Christison


The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices by Casper ter Kuile
recommended by Diane Weisner


Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by adrienne maree brown
recommended by Anya Ballinger


Torah Journeys: The Inner Path to the Promised Land by Rabbi Shefa Gold
recommended by Melinda Sayavedra

Adult Coming of Age

Adult Coming of Age is returning to UUFC on Monday evenings, January 8th-February 12, from 5:30 to 7 in Room 7. Unitarian Universalism requires you to be an active participant in building your own identity, a task that sometimes requires letting go or “unlearning” painful lessons from our past. What does it mean to “be you?” What role does your community and lived experience play in constructing a religious identity that matches your unique journey? Together, we’ll explore these topics and more. All are welcome. Pre-registration at bit.ly/AdultCoA is requested.

Prayer with the Family

November’s tool in the Family Faith Formation Toolkit is prayer! Pop over to the RE news page and read about the importance of prayer (even when you’re not cozy with the idea of God), a short and easy formula for prayer (in case you’re feeling rusty), and links to inspiring resources, all to help you grow in strength as the spiritual leader of your family!

Prayer can feel like a loaded word, especially if you have an itchy relationship with the term “god.” Still, children have an innate desire to connect with something bigger than themselves, and parents and grandparents are their best spiritual guides. Even if you’re not a fan of the G word, you can teach your child how to pray.

Why pray? Many studies by secular scientists find that prayer can result in reduced anxiety and increased calm and well-being. It’s a great tool to have in your family’s spiritual toolbox!

Not sure how to get started with prayer? Back in the Summer, Reverend Jill McAllister gave us a simple formula for prayer that anyone can use.

  • address your source of strength
  • name your complaint
  • confess your trust
  • add a petition
  • express praise & gratitude

EX: Dear Spirit of Love, this world & it news cycles are too much to bear! Love is the only thing I know that can fix this. Please blanket this world in your healing power. Thank you for being a force for good that’s always available.

“I’d go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep woods and I’d look up into the sky…up…up…up into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness and then I’d just feel a prayer.”

That’s just one way to pray. I was twelve the first time I heard Anne Shirley’s ideas about prayer. I knew immediately, “That’s the right way to pray!” For me, anyway.

Some people like to pray with ancient language written in far away places. Some prefer to chant prayers or sing them out loud. Some people like blessings, like those written by Kate Bowler in her book Bless the Lives We Actually Have.

Do you remember how you learned to pray? Who taught you? How did you feel? Consider sharing that experience with your children or grandchildren. Remember, there’s no wrong way to connect with the sacred.

A member of our recent Spiritual Practices workshop found their way to my inbox with a request. “Can we take the word sacred out of the workshop so that people who don’t believe in God will feel welcome?” I want to share with you what I shared with this kind-hearted soul. One definition for “the Sacred” is God. Yes. But another definition I’ve seen used is that sacred refers to anything worthy of awe and wonder. You don’t have to believe in God to experience things that are larger than yourself and inspire a sense of awe. Awe is part of the human experience, and prayer is a way to commune with that. What better gift could we give our families than a framework they can use to regularly connect with the sacred?

Homework for Caregivers

If it’s been a while since you prayed, try out Jill’s 5-step plan for prayer and see how it goes. Pay attention to how you feel in your body when you practice prayer. Do you feel tense? Do scratchy feelings well up reminding you of ways that prayer has been weaponized against you in the past? Are you reminded of people who treat prayer like a divine vending machine, always asking for things to be just the way they want them? Or maybe you feel a melting sense of relief when you connect to something that makes you feel small. Maybe it’s comforting to be reminded that you’re not responsible for everything. That something or someone else can handle some of the care of the world and its people.

As you weigh how things are within you, consider your hopes for the children in your life. Are you hopeful that they can connect with their smallness as well as their power? Are there ways you can help your child voice their needs and wants without the entitlement that comes from the ATM-style prayer? Is there a value, to you, in this kind of practice?

These big questions are best when explored with a parenting partner, a friend, or a mentor. Consider calling up someone in your circle of support and asking them to discuss them with you. When you feel ready, discuss them with your kiddos. You might be surprised what you learn.

And, as always, if you want to pop in and discuss prayer or anything else, my door is always open!

Young Adult Pizza Hour

Every 4th Sunday of the month, the young(er) adults of the UUFC are invited to gather after the service to enjoy pizza and conversation together, to deepen social connections between the two newest adult generations of our culture. The term “young adult” is a wiggly one, especially in today’s social climate, where some Millennials identify more with the elder Gen X, while others find they have more in common with the younger Gen Z. As such, our Young Adult Pizza Hour attracts quite the spectrum, a delightful mix of 18 year-old college freshmen all the way to elder Millenials who are starting to inch into their fourth decade. All of these age brackets are welcome!

Every month, regular attendees receive a reminder email in the week leading up to the fourth Sunday with an evocative quote and a few discussion questions to ponder for that month’s meet-up, and then when we get together for pizza (including GF and vegan options) to chat, learn from one another, and commiserate about the struggles of adulting in the world in which we live.

Wheel of the Year Services

Every six weeks or so, we gather at each of the eight points on the Wheel of the Year as an intergenerational community to celebrate holidays from nature-based neo-pagan tradition with story, song, and ritual. Some of these holidays are widely known, like Yule, the Winter Solstice. Some, like Lughnasadh, are not as well recognized. The eight sacred days on the Wheel start with Yule in December, then proceed to Imbolc in February, Ostara in March, Beltane in May, Litha in June, Lughnasadh in August, Mabon in September, Samhain in October, and then right back around the Wheel to Yule. This cycle of celebration echoes the cycles of the changing year, and it honors the interdependent web of which we are all a part,

The stories we tell as part of these services are told together, with an ever-changing cast of voices. Congregants of all ages can volunteer to take roles in these services, bringing the tales alive with costumes, props, and lots of fun congregational interaction. In addition to the services themselves, each point on the Wheel has been recognized as a holiday throughout human history, and so we honor some of these occasions in extra ways, too! A May Pole for Beltane, Hallow’s Eve costumes for Samhain, sing-a-longs for Yule… Honoring the Wheel of the Year calls for celebrations of all kinds! In addition, each point on the Wheel is accompanied by a Celebration Week — a handful of self-guided activities that are appropriate for all ages that deepen understanding and interaction with the truths of each seasonal celebration.

We hope you’ll join us!

YRUU Values Scavenger Hunt

Last Sunday, the YRUU participants went on a scavenger hunt around the building to see if they could find evidence that UUFC members act on their values. Thanks to your awesomeness, they found plenty of clues that the adults in our congregation are actively living into our faith! Thanks for being such excellent UU role models!