I started a new group yesterday.  I met with eight ten-year old girls at their recess time to share with them some tools for hearing and honoring their own spirits. We began with a meditation, all of two minutes long, but it took us more than ten minutes to get everyone situated and ready to go.

The problem?

The furniture.

In order to connect your body to earth, you must be standing on the ground. Or, in this case, sitting with your feet flat on the ground.  It was amazing how difficult this was for my students.

These girls were average-sized fourth graders, yet few of them could rest their feet comfortably on the ground while sitting in the rocking chairs, couches, or armchairs in my room. We solved the problem after many wiggles, and did our meditation.

After a mere two minutes of grounding meditation, the girls were yawning, their eyes were watering, and they were settling. Their feet were tingling, and they could feel the connection with the floor—which was of course, their connection with Earth. They felt less stressed. (Ten-year-olds!)

As I reflect on this experience, it occurs to me that perhaps some of the attention problems we have in schools today are due not only to the fact that students have so much more energy that they need to drain, but also because they cannot ground their energy into the earth if their student chairs are too tall for their feet to comfortably reach the ground. Of course, in my school we do have student chairs in several sizes, but children come in yet more sizes, and up until now, I have paid little attention to this issue.

As one of my girls said yesterday, “When I swing my feet, it makes my energy go up.”

Go figure.  Or go, as I plan to, to the kindergarten class to borrow some giant wooden blocks—for footstools!