My Unhelpful Thoughts

I also like to call it the Byron Katie for children
Children, like adults, are too faced with so many unhelpful thoughts relative to their life situations. This gentle meditation is a beautiful guide for children to manage and dispell their unhelpful thinking patterns.
Using Byron Katie's 4 questions as a guideline, unhelpful thinking patterns is disrupted through gentle visualization and anchored by self-compassion.

Music by Lesfm

Transcript

Hello my dear friends. Today I'd like to talk to you about our thoughts. Do you feel that your thoughts can be demanding and keep interfering with your ability to stay focused? Picture the scene out of a movie where your thought is a whole other person. Have you seen one of those yet? It's crazy and this annoying person keeps showing up when you least expect it. It pops up during class time or at night when you're trying to sleep. It pops up when we're out with our friends, While you're watching a movie or eating a meal. It can be really annoying and so unhelpful. These thoughts can become so loud that we're unable to hear anything else around us. It can really stress us out and cause us to worry way more than we usually do. We can lose out on sleep, Miss out on important things during school or stop having fun with our friends. We could even come across as being distracted or unfriendly. How can I beat these thoughts? Do you perhaps have a friend who may be experiencing some of these unhelpful thoughts or going through a really tough time? Maybe they're worrying about an upcoming test or about a game or about their grades or they've had a fight with their mom or dad or another friend. What are some of the helpful things that you would say to this friend to help them calm down or to reassure them? As we do with our friends when they're going through hard times, We try and reassure them, Right? How would you calm them down? Think about this for a minute. I would tell my friend that their thoughts are perhaps not true. I would say things like, You're strong, You're beautiful, You're brave, You're amazing, You're clever. I would reassure them and say, You've got this. Or I could say, Would it really matter if you don't get the grade that you want? Or would it matter that you're not hanging with the cool kids? Or that you missed out on a party or a soccer game? My words of comfort would be around reassuring my friend. We work so hard at helping our friends feel better and finding the best possible solutions to their unhelpful or worrying thinking, Right? So here's the thing. Can you turn all those amazing words of comfort, Reassurance and confidence around and say these kind helpful things to yourself when you have unhelpful pesky worrying thoughts? What do you think would happen? Would this help you? Sure it will. Comforting and helpful ways of thinking is always, Always more beneficial to us than those pesky unhelpful ones. This my dears is called self-compassion. Self-compassion is when you care as much about your own thoughts and feelings as you would for a friend. We all have thoughts that go wild. Yep, Even us grownups, We have them too. But my darling precious, If there is one lesson out of all of this, It's this. Thinking happens to all of us, But it's what we do with these thoughts that can get us through these really, Really crushing times. We always, Always have a choice. Can you be brave enough to practice some self-compassion with yourself during times of unhelpful worrying thoughts?