On Clowning and Mindfulness--Meditating with Wide Open Eyes, Part One - CircusTalk

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On Clowning and Mindfulness–Meditating with Wide Open Eyes, Part One

In this two part article by Pete Turner (aka Peanut the Clown), Turner asks himself some essential questions, exploring the connections he has identified between the acts of clowning and meditation and further investigates the power of using both tools to work with children.
Why did you write this, Peanut? For over ten years, I have watched increasing numbers of children in my workshops and shows exhibiting signs of being depressed and often losing self control. At the same time, I’ve seen their natural resilience being undermined by social medias and phone addiction with a proportionate loss of connection to their families and friends. I began looking for ways (as a clown) to help them. I spent several years looking to my own practice as a teacher and a clown seeing how I could help by using circus skills and performance training to raise their self-esteem through performance training and by teaching nonverbal communication skills to improve the quality of their interpersonal communication. That is important work — but it wasn’t enough. Then I took an 8 week...
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Pete Turner

Pete Turner is Peanut the Clown. He was born in New York and lives in Leeds in the UK. He has been clowning for over thirty years. He trained with John Lee and Reg Bolton and somewhere along the way founded Leeds Children’s Circus (which he ran for seventeen years) and found time to perform for over ¼ million children. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1995 and is trained to teach ‘paws b’ (Mindfulness for Primary School Children) ‘dotb’ (Secondary School Children) by the Mindfulness in Schools Project in the UK and ‘Mindful Schools in Essentials’ and ‘Mindful Communication’ Pete comes from a community circus background and believes that circus has the power to transform lives. It has certainly transformed his!