Nurturing Spirituality in Children: Simple Hands-On Activities

By Peggy Joy Jenkins

The greatest gifts that a child can receive are an opened mind, a caring heart, and ignited creativity. This fully expanded, illustrated edition of Nurturing Spirituality in Children includes sixty-two simple and thought-provoking lessons that can be shared with children in less than ten minutes each. The lessons are easy to prepare and understand; they use commonly available materials and complement a wide variety of religious perspectives.

Children who develop a healthy balance of mind and spirit are better able to respond to life's challenges when given the tools to think and discover for themselves. Dr. Jenkins gives scores of age-appropriate activities that help children learn empathy, trust, forgiveness, growth, and inner peace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atria Books/Beyond Words
• Release date: Jun 30, 2008
• ISBN: 9781439102701

Peggy Joy Jenkins

Peggy J. Jenkins, Ph.D., is the founder of Joyful Child, Inc., which offers the magazine The Joyful Child Journal, parenting classes, facilitator training, and a mail-order service. She lives in Phoenix, Arizona.

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GUIDELINES FOR

AFFIRMATIONS

An affirmation concludes each lesson, so I suggest you read this section before you begin the lessons.

Affirmations, as used in this book, are positive statements about who we are and what we can become or experience. They are useful as agents of change—as tools for bringing about the change we want in our thinking and experience. This change is in our beliefs about ourselves. We need to bring our self-awareness into harmony with the divine perfection that already exists within us.

Our beliefs are stored in the subconscious areas of our minds. They are made up of emotions, fears, doubts, actual happenings, and the accepted opinions of others. They accept negative thoughts just as easily as they accept positive thoughts, and they create what we feel is true for us. Here is where the tool of using affirmations comes in. Affirmations can help us counteract some of the negatives we’ve told ourselves or accepted from others. Because we are spirit, we are, in essence, perfect. We have a right to call forth that perfection.

Affirmations work very rapidly with young children because children are close to the truth about themselves. They have not had as many years of brainwashing as most adults have. We adults have unconsciously used negative affirmations most of our lives, bringing about many unwanted conditions. We affirm negatively when we say, I can’t do this; I’m so tired; I think I’m getting sick; I’m such a slow reader; I’m lousy at spelling; or My memory is poor. Usually this kind of affirming, or self-negation, is carried on silently in our self-talk (that steady stream of internal verbalization).

Almost anything we really want to change about ourselves can be changed by using positive declarations or affirmations. They help counteract the bombardment of self-inflicted put-downs we experience throughout the day. Affirmations clothed with feeling have the power to impregnate our subconscious minds through the process of osmosis, just like a stalk of celery that turns red when it sits in red-colored water and absorbs it. Other useful analogies are in the lesson The Power of Affirmations.

Affirmations must be believable to our conscious minds before they will be fully accepted by our subconscious minds. The subconscious parts of our minds have formative power. That is, they will give form to what we feel is true for us now. It is the feelings, not the words, that give rise to the form.

Suggestions for Forming Affirmations

Make the affirmation personal by using I, My, or your name. Powerful affirmations begin with I am. I can affirmations are also very effective.

Word your affirmation as if you have already made the change you want to make, as if you are already the kind of person you want to be.

Use present tense, because future tense can destroy the value of an affirmation. The subconscious mind is very literal, and if your affirmation is worded to take place in the future, it will always be in the future. Avoid I will…, I am getting…, and similar