Children’s spirituality and the practice of meditation in Irish primary schools

Abstract

This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the child’s experience of meditation in Irish primary schools and its impact on children’s spirituality. Using a phenomenological, hermeneutic, mystagogical methodology, it describes how children experience the practice of meditation, the benefits they consider they gain from it and the nature of its impact, if any, on their spirituality. Seventy children, aged 7 to 11, were interviewed. The study is original in that the interview protocol contained novel processes designed to elicit from children their experience, if any, of the transcendent in meditation and in its depth of analysis of the spiritual fruits of the practice. The study concludes that meditation does have the capacity to nourish the innate spirituality of the child. It offers a heuristic model outlining the key elements of the child’s experience of meditation, stresses the importance of personal spiritual experience and supports the introduction of meditation in primary schools.

Keywords:

• Children
• Christian meditation
• spirituality
• nurture
• primary school
• personal spiritual experience
• silence
• nourish

Notes

1. Ethical approval was granted by the Research Ethics Committee of Waterford Institute of Technology.

2. All names are pseudonyms.

3. There is inevitably some overlap in the themes that arose in respect of the experience of the practice of meditation and in respect of their experience of its benefits and fruits. For example, the serenity experienced by the children as they meditated was also experienced as an ongoing consequence of meditation because it results in the practical, ongoing benefit of being calm and relaxed and feeling restored to wellness of being.

4. Teachers in the denominational schools were advised, during the staff in-service, to introduce the practice to their classes, in the first instance, as something that would help them let go of worries and help them become calm and relaxed; and a little later to let them know about its place in the major world religions, including Christianity where it is seen as a silent, wordless, imageless way of simply sitting in God’s presence. However, the project had no way of ensuring that the practice was introduced to the children in that way and the interviews with the children and their teachers would suggest that, having started the practice from a secular perspective, many teachers failed to give children a rich account of its spiritual potential. On the other hand, while meditation was also introduced to the children in the non-denominational school primarily for its practical benefits, they would have learned – through the school’s ‘Learn Together’ moral and ethics programme – that it was a spiritual practice common to many world religions.