Why Children Naturally Get Ayurveda: Reflections from the Cycle of Care Workshop

Last weekend, I had the enriching opportunity to co-deliver a unique mother-and-daughter workshop called the Cycle of Care with The H Foundation, focusing on menstrual health through the lens of Ayurveda

I’ve led many talks, presentations and workshops before but for some reason I was nervous about this one. I realised it was because I would be explaining a subject I’m passionate about (Ayurveda) to children and teenagers for the first time. I wasn’t really sure how it would land. We also pretty much had two distinct audiences in the room – children and their parents. Knowing how to position information so that it was received well by both without boring or losing any of them was at the front of my mind.

Engaged and Curious Learners

To my surprise (and I had to stop halfway to exclaim this out loud), I was pleased to see how quickly the girls were picking up these new concepts – the five elements, the doshas, the different stages of the menstrual cycle and how everything is interconnected.

Having taught this material to adults at previous workshops before, I’m used to being met with mixed views, sometimes perplexed faces and follow-up questions. But, these young girls were absorbing it all intuitively and scribbling down their notes. Spot-checking their understanding was so rewarding with them seeing how quickly they’d been able to apply what they’d just learnt. It was so lovely to see!

Holistic Health For Modern Times

This workshop reaffirmed something that I’ve long believed: Ayurveda is inherently intuitive and accessible, even for children. Its foundation is universal principles – like balance and harmony of opposites – making it easy for children to grasp and relate to.

Not only that, these girls are our next generation and if we can share practical knowledge and tools that come easily to them, they will be more in tune with their body’s needs in a time when much of our attention is outward-facing.

What Adults Can Learn From Young Minds

Watching these girls soak up the ideas we discussed made me realise just how much we can learn from children. As adults, our life experiences and social conditioning might mean we know more but can also restrict and cloud our outlook. We naturally develop biases and run the risk of missing out on new information through the loss of curiosity.

Studies show that children are more explorative and open-minded learners. They are less likely to make generalisations and assumptions, and more comfortable exploring uncertainty and making mistakes. This natural interest is exactly what Ayurveda asks us to do – listen, observe and connect.

What’s next?

As the final workshop of the year, Cycle of Care felt like the perfect note to end on. My mind is now buzzing with ideas for future intergenerational Ayurveda workshops – spaces where families can learn together about topics like digestion, sleep and seasonal wellness – and I can’t wait!

References:

Blanco et al. (2023) The benefits of immature cognitive control: How distributed attention guards against learning traps. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 226

Budiono et al. (2024) How does social learning affect stable false beliefs? Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 46

Gopnik et al. (2015) When Younger Learners Can Be Better (or al Least More Open-Minded) Thank Older Ones. Current Directions in Psychological Sciences

Liquin and Gopnik (2022) Children are more exploratory and learn more than adults in an approach-avoid task. Cognition, 104940

Lucas et al. (2014) When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: Developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships. Cognition, 131 (2)

Rich et al. (2015) The Attentional Learning Trap and How to Avoid It. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 37