Finding Happiness at Home

Welcome to this 10 session series on finding happiness at home. My name is Sam and I'll be your teacher throughout this series. With all the ups and downs of life recently, it may be difficult to manage the waves of emotion that have come along. Whether it's being home from school for so long or feeling out of touch with friends and family. We can all benefit from some tools that help us deal with difficult feelings, lift our mood and boost feelings of connection and gratitude. You can always practice this series alone or with a caregiver or child. If you're practicing with your child, allow yourself to practice with them without correcting them. Your child may be squirmy or unfocused on some days and that's okay as children don't have the same capacity to regulate their bodies and attention as adults do. By continuing to practice when they're distracted you're modeling the ability to stick with it even when urges arise. let's get started. Has anyone ever told you to pay attention? Now, has anyone ever taught you how to pay attention? Being able to pay attention on purpose is important for many reasons. Paying attention allows us to learn, build relationships, manage our feelings and fully enjoy the moments of our lives. Being able to pay attention on purpose is the foundation for managing emotions like agitation and frustration that you may be experiencing from being cooped up in the house together. So today we'll be using our floodlight and spotlight of attention. If you've ever been on stage you'll likely know the difference between these two lights. A floodlight lights up the whole stage allowing you to see everything at once and a spotlight focuses on one thing in particular leaving the rest of the stage dark. We have two types of attention just like these lights. Our floodlight of attention allows us to take in many things at once. So now we'll try practicing the floodlight of our attention. So let's start by getting comfortable where we're seated and if you're comfortable you can close your eyes and let's take a deep breath in through our nose and breathe out through our nose and then just breathe naturally letting your breath be just as it is. And we're going to expand our attention outward just like that floodlight. We'll start by noticing sounds in our environment. Just see what different sounds are happening around you. And then as you take your next breath in see if you can notice any sense in the air anything you can smell. And then see if you can notice anything happening in your body. Maybe you feel hungry. Maybe you can sense your heart beating. Maybe you can feel your breath. And then finally we're just gonna notice the surface we're on. So just noticing that your body's being held up by the chair or the couch or wherever you're sitting. And you might notice the ground underneath...