” Where is my heart, mamma… Here right?” asked my five year old daughter, Kiara, placing her hand correctly over her beating heart.

“Yes,” I replied.

I had just successfully parallel-parked the car outside the garden that she and her friend had so persistently pleaded I take them to. So here we were…in about a span of ten minutes; starting from their fervent pleas that I take them to the park, to discussing…well…the heart.

“You know,” her eight year old friend added, “Our hearts beat even while we sleep!”

“That’s right!” I affirmed.

“Why do we have a heart, mamma?”asked Kiara.

I decided to offer her a spiritual  explanation, so that the word could become a more potent conceptual unit for her: “The heart loves… When you feel love towards someone, you feel it from your heart.”

I further added: “But to feel love from your heart, your thoughts must be silent…” Gesturing with my hand, I explained: “The heart loves to hear, and it can hear another only when your thoughts stop talking!”

Kiara who had been listening intently, then made an unusual request: “Mamma, can we sit  here only, where we are, for just five minutes?” The jumping monkeys of her mind- who had till now been refusing to relent till they reached the garden- had disappeared. Her friend and I, looked at her, then at each other, smiled and then the three of us sealed each other’s hands as if in a pact.

“Okay!” she said after a minute or so, “let’s go!”

Curious, I asked her what made her make such an extraordinary request.

“I don’t know,” she said… ” My heart told me to  just be there…”

My daughter, I realised, had just received her first lesson on the value of experiencing.