It is very difficult to protect children from news coverage of such appalling events as the war on Ukraine; all the more so if your school takes in refugee children over the coming weeks. What we can do, however, is emphasise what we can do to make things better. And meditation is something every child can do.
       It is a constant refrain of mine that meditation makes us kinder. If you have been meditating regularly with the children in your class, both you and the children will have discovered this personally, in their own lives and in the life of the school.
       Meditation mysteriously changes our way of seeing the world; and that in turn changes our way of being in it. So children find that meditation helps them to let go of all the drama of their lives and that is an important benefit. But they also discover that meditation helps them to feel what they called 'the goodness inside.' They get a real sense that they are more than the drama in their lives, more than their needs and desires. They discover that we are all intimately connected with one another.
       One of the fruits that I discovered though my research is that meditation builds community in the school setting. The children appreciated that they are all one in the silence.
       So, the next time you meditate, why not say to the children beforehand that when they meditate together they generate so much love in their hearts that it flows out into the world, in their homes, in their school and all over the world. Ask them to imagine that love floating up from their classroom and school to the sky, creating clouds of love that are blown by the wind and eventually fall as rain in another part of the world, spreading love everywhere it falls. Not alone does meditation make them kinder, it can make the world kinder too.