Coooool Meditation in Costa Rica

For a long time, our two-year-old, "Smiley", had a thing about Buddhas. He would react to any Buddha image or statue with an intense mixture of fascination and fear. His attention to Buddhas did not strike me until we began packing up our house in Davis to embark on our worldschooling life. There had always been a tabletop Buddha statue in a quiet corner of our master bedroom—a beautiful steel sculpture of the “Saturday Buddha” that I had brought back from my years in Thailand. Although that Buddha had never been the subject of any particular conversation that I recalled, Smiley noticed immediately when it disappeared.

One day when he was busy or napping, I had packed up the Buddha for storage. The second he walked into the room some hours later, he stopped in his tracks with a panicked look on his face. “Mama, where is the Buddha?” he asked, wide-eyed. I explained that I had packed it up in a box and put it in the garage. He had many detailed questions about the Buddha’s packing (how accessible was the box, was the Buddha alone in the box, was it taped, could it be opened, could he see it?). I asked if he liked or missed the Buddha, and he shook his head emphatically: “No.” After that, Smiley checked with me almost daily about the whereabouts of that Buddha—as if it were an untrustworthy, animate object that could pop up anywhere and frighten him at any time. I felt badly that the Buddha had apparently been a source of secret anxiety for Smiley for some time. Apparently, having it gone was even worse, because he could no longer keep a close eye on it!

After the Buddha went “missing” at home, Smiley became more obviously attuned to Buddhas out in the world. He started checking with us before going into stores, restaurants and other people’s homes: “Will there be a Buddha inside, Mama?” We tried to answer honestly, but once I started paying attention, I noticed how ubiquitous Buddha statues and images can be. We tried imparting to him the peace, calm and kindness of Buddhas. We told him that the Buddha was meditating and breathing and feeling happy, and that the Buddha could remind us to do that too. We tried sitting together cross-legged like tranquil Buddhas. We talked about the real Buddha’s life and how I had once visited a tree in India where the Buddha used to meditate. Together with Smiley's older siblings "Big Eyes" and "Sashay", we admired the various postures and styles of Buddhas we discovered on our summer travels, and we tried some simple meditation. Smiley was thoroughly unimpressed.

After the weeks of summer camp and private Spanish lessons in Costa Rica, and as their friends were returning to school back in California, I decided it was time to introduce a bit of academic structure to our days. I made a sort of bingo card to guide Big Eyes and Sashay’s “homeschooling,” covering Math, Spanish, Reading and Writing, among others. I also decided to try and institutionalize 10 minutes of guided meditation several times a week, and added this to our chart.

Using a meditation app on my phone, the kids and I generally checked off meditation when Smiley was at preschool, but “meditation” (or in our case in French: “la méditation”) became a frequent topic of household conversation. Meanwhile, another somewhat new term for the kids had also been cropping up: “la climatisation”—air conditioning. Every evening (and sometimes for a while in the afternoon), we would turn on the air conditioning in our family bedroom for a welcome, calming reprieve from the intense heat. There was a remote control for the air conditioning unit, and Smiley loved to push the button. Air conditioning was a new phenomenon to Smiley, since we rarely used it back home, and it certainly did not involve a magic button.

One afternoon, as we were all reading and resting at siesta time, I was surprised to hear Smiley announce that it was time for meditation. He must be turning over a new leaf, I thought. And: what luck (combined with motherly prowess) that I had managed to instill in my young children an appreciation for the powers of meditation! Big Eyes and Sashay were also surprised, but our last session had ended with a round of positive reviews, so they must have thought that “la méditation" sounded like a pretty good plan. We agreed and followed Smiley, who insisted we go upstairs to the bedroom this time. “Attendez!” (Wait!), Smiley said, as he looked for something. I was searching my phone to start the app. “Voilà!” he said triumphantly, as a blast of cool air whooshed over us. I looked up to see him standing with the “la climatisation” control in his hand. “La méditation!” he exclaimed with a victorious smile. And in a sense he was exactly right: pressing the button on the cool air made us all as calm as Buddhas. After we’d stopped laughing.