We have weekly professional development at my school and one of the priorities we've identified is improving the pastoral/advisory/lifeskills program. Therefore out of a total of around 30 total hours so far this year I have dedicated 2 hours to teaching teachers how to do a two-minute meditation exercise. Here's how to do it, sit in an upright position and breathe, as your mind wanders bring your attention back to your breath. Repeat until the minute is up. That's the recipe. It really doesn't take a fifty-hour course or an expensive subscription to Headspace to develop a meditation practice. It's a habit that requires consistent implementation and routine. Choosing good interventions is hard but let's look at two basic criteria 1) Is the intervention going to be operationalised relatively easy with minimal fuss, stress and cost 2) Does it work?
The evidence around the benefits of meditation is impressive and growing. Although there is a danger that the enthusiasm around it outweighs the evidence (just google "benefits of mindfulness meditation" for an overview of the claims it makes from weight-loss to improved academic results to better sex-life) there is a "consensus" in even the more skeptical literature that developing a disciplined meditation practice over time materially changes the brain creating new neuron connections that didn't exist previously in ways similar to learning how to play a musical instrument. These changes are associated with reduced anxiety and depression when used in a clinical setting. You can use your mind to change your brain and increase your wellbeing. All from something as easy, relaxing and enjoyable as silence and deliberate awareness of breath carried out systematically over an extended period of time.
The evidence around the benefits of meditation is impressive and growing. Although there is a danger that the enthusiasm around it outweighs the evidence (just google "benefits of mindfulness meditation" for an overview of the claims it makes from weight-loss to improved academic results to better sex-life) there is a "consensus" in even the more skeptical literature that developing a disciplined meditation practice over time materially changes the brain creating new neuron connections that didn't exist previously in ways similar to learning how to play a musical instrument. These changes are associated with reduced anxiety and depression when used in a clinical setting. You can use your mind to change your brain and increase your wellbeing. All from something as easy, relaxing and enjoyable as silence and deliberate awareness of breath carried out systematically over an extended period of time.
I'm being pretty directive about how we implement this, from the beginning to the end of the next quarter in each advisory session kids will sit and do two minutes of meditation. We do it in our advisory sessions so it doesn't take up class time although eventually, I hope teachers will begin classes with this practice. We're going to send out a pretty unscientific set of pre and post surveys to see if the kids think it helped them at all. Ask me if you want and I can share with you. The idea is to teach kids how to do this but also give the teachers the experience and let them apply it to their own lives if they want to.
Unfortunately, there is a pattern of poorly enacted wellness sessions encouraged and run by people who think a couple of hours of incense and whale sounds compensate for endless accountability processes, bureaucratic hoop-jumping and poor student behaviour that they are expected to deal with on their own. This happens. However, the cognitive dissonance produced by these ironic sessions isn't in itself a good argument against teaching wellbeing strategies to teachers that they can teach to their students.
"Mindfulness" (as opposed to meditation) is about forgetting and remembering as you go about your daily activities. You forget what you are thinking and remember to be aware of the present. To use an analogy, if your mind is the sky and thoughts are clouds, breath is the wind that gently blows thoughts through. Your mind is not identical to your thoughts so developing a meditation practice, training yourself to let go of thoughts, allows you to be more mindful in your daily life. Mindfulness meditation specifically adds "non-judgement" specifically but all meditation practices sharpen your attention to overcome the scattered nature of conscious experience.
"Mindfulness" (as opposed to meditation) is about forgetting and remembering as you go about your daily activities. You forget what you are thinking and remember to be aware of the present. To use an analogy, if your mind is the sky and thoughts are clouds, breath is the wind that gently blows thoughts through. Your mind is not identical to your thoughts so developing a meditation practice, training yourself to let go of thoughts, allows you to be more mindful in your daily life. Mindfulness meditation specifically adds "non-judgement" specifically but all meditation practices sharpen your attention to overcome the scattered nature of conscious experience.
Teaching kids to meditate doesn't need to be hard but sometimes it's necessary to convince kids of the benefits. Showing them pictures of the brain can help here, they find that fascinating. There are also plenty of celebs out there that love to meditate and this can be useful in persuading them that meditation is actually quite cool.
Is it another fad that will die out when people realise it is not having the impact they hoped? Maybe, but I don't think so; it is an ancient form of wisdom. There have been quite a few quite high profile people coming out recently and saying wait, be careful, saying it "definitely, absolutely, works in all contexts" is overblown. Don't be overly enthusiastic because you might be disappointed. The studies so far in schools studies in schools are of a lower quality than those in a therapeutic context. Gold standard RCT interventions are hard to come by in education but it's reassuring to me that they are currently being sought out in this field. It seems promising that very high profile people who study the benefits of meditation are urging caution. Sometimes academics who have a specialised area to promote tend to say it's "definitely been proved" and everyone should do it. cognitive load theory is one example of this; Growth Mindset is another. I'm not saying cognitive load theory isn't incredibly important and helpful. It definitely is, is for no other reason than the foregrounding of knowledge and its importance to cognition does dispel a misguided emphasis on generic thinking skills. However, statements like "generic skills definitely don't exist" should be "generic skills probably don't exist so knowledge is probably a better option but the jury is still out as it probably always will be". This isn't very good for selling books or furthering careers.
Can Mindfulness be operationalised relatively easily with minimal fuss, stress and cost? Yes. The approach is the same as it would be for any successful school intervention, well organised, well-explained, minimal-fuss with good follow up and adjustment based on feedback. There is no expectation that the teacher has to meditate and become all mindful (they can if they like it) but they do need to teach the kids how to do it as it is now part of our curriculum.
Is it religious? It definitely has roots in religious practices. That plural is important, it's common to many monotheistic, multitheistic and non-theistic religious practices. Denying that is fooling yourself. I have become very interested in spiritual matters since taking up meditation regularly and if anything I've grown closer to a kind of universalised sense of ,"this isn't quite all there is". If we think about meditation as sitting in silence and putting your attention on something internal then you are by definition distancing yourself from the external world. As soon as we start talking about something internal we move more into the realm of consciousness and what we "are". The mysteries inherent in this process are why the science of psychology has a spectrum from esoterics like Jung to the harder version of cognitive science. We cannot directly measure the quality of our own experience. This is why it's called the "hard" problem of consciousness. Spirituality has always filled the ontological gap created by the complexity of lived experiences. If we are doing something that is not strictly an "A-posteriori" way of encountering the universe, if we are looking "inwards", then it will be accepting of and compatible with some kind of generalised spiritual practice AND any specific religion. For me this is inescapable. However, using this as an argument for why it's "religious" uses a definition of religion that is so incredibly wide as to make it almost meaningless.
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