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

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

In this second part of and 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.
How does clowning address the practice of mindfulness? Could clowning, in return, change mindfulness as a practice? Mindfulness isn’t Buddhism but the prevailing image of mindfulness is someone sitting with eyes closed, cross-legged on the floor with the tips of the fingers touching. That may happen in a mindful practice but mindfulness is about how you behave in your day to day life, in real life situations. That’s why we say we  practice mindfulness— because the regular practice ensures we have it to hand when ...
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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!