Hi. This morning you talked about perhaps reaching the businessman or the person earlier in life, before the habit energy is too strong, to find the mindfulness training. And I was wondering, how about even going earlier? Because in elementary school and high school, where the future children will be politicians, as well as business presidents, and also doctors.

Have you had any thoughts about offering mindfulness training in schools? And the window of opportunity in the US right now, with the shootings, would it be more successful? I look at mindfulness training and compassion as really a very effective way to combat that. And I was wondering what your thoughts were.

Well, it is our intention to offer mindfulness practice to young people and children, and we have done that. Every summer, children come to Plum Village in great number from many countries, and we have a special program for children. These programs have proved to be very effective; the children love it, and sometimes they help the adults to practice.

We have also organized mindfulness retreats for children. In Santa Barbara, we organized two times already a practice of mindfulness for children. Parents can come to support and profit from the practice, but the main Sangha is children. We were able to succeed in these retreats for children because we had already trained a number of children in retreats and in Plum Village.

If you want to organize a mindfulness retreat for children, you have to get a core community of children who know already the practice and who are happy with the retreat. Even if they live far away, you have to fly them in in order to constitute a core Sangha we call seed children. Seed children.

And when we have twenty or thirty of them, then the other children come, they will just follow, and the teaching and the practice will be very easy. So without constituting a core community of children, organizing retreat for children will be very difficult. And one day we may be able to organize retreat for children a little bit everywhere in Europe.

We have done that one time in Karma Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist center near Montpellier, and the children love it also. The new children, when they first came, they say, "Why do we have to come here?" because there is no television, there is no electronic games and things like that. But after five or six days of retreat, they love it so much. And on the day of departure, they say, "Why do we have to go?"

So it has proven to be possible to offer mindfulness practice for children. We have a Dharma teacher who lives in Toronto; he is a professor of mathematics. And after his retreat from Plum Village, he came home to his school and began to apply the techniques of mindfulness practice in his class. His students love him very much.

The day he went into his class, he was walking mindfully. And he picked up the sponge and he wiped the blackboard mindfully, slowly, and that surprised many school children. They said, "Papa, are you sick?" "No, I am not sick. I am practicing wiping the blackboard with mindfulness." And he took the chance to explain to the children what is mindfulness practice.

And then he proposed to the school children: every fifteen minutes, a boy would clap his hands two times like this, and all of them will practice mindful breathing and smiling. And in just a few months, the atmosphere in the class changed drastically. They are very happy, so that in other classes people begin to adopt the same kind of practice.

He used to get angry very easily. I heard when he was able to throw a piece of chalk to the head of the student when he got angry. And when he checked the exercises, and sometimes he was angry because the young man was so stupid, he said, "You are stupid!" But after that, he changed drastically. He did not do these things anymore.

Instead of writing down "You are stupid," he wrote like this: "You do not understand. It is my fault. I did not explain it to you clearly enough." And after the time when he wanted to retire, the principal of his school asked him to stay on for another three years. He is a Dharma teacher who lives in Canada.

[One sound of the bell.]