I recently listened to a radio program which featured Tim Ryan, author of “A Mindful Nation” and the U.S. Representative from Ohio’s 13th congressional district since 2003. He was promoting the practice of mindfulness. According to Dan O’Brien’s article “Tim Ryan brings mindfulness to Ohio schools” in The Business Journal, deep breathing exercises, meditation, instructions on how to think before acting and methods on how to talk through a problem are all part of a curriculum being implemented in specified kindergarten and elementary classes in the Youngstown and Warren school districts. The Skills for Life program was made possible by a $982,000 earmark secured in 2009 by U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan for the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning. Ryan is a champion of the effort and a strong advocate of developing mindfulness for personal and institutional growth in the United States.
Per Caren Osten Gerzberg’s article “Best Practices for Bringing Mindfulness Into Schools” in Foundation for a Mindful Society, with heightened academic pressure trickling down to kids as early as kindergarten, resulting in less time for play and the arts, children today are faced with an unprecedented amount of stress and anxiety — 25% of 13- to 18-year-olds will experience an anxiety disorder according to the National Institutes of Mental Health. Such early stress levels can negatively impact learning, memory, behavior and both physical and mental health, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. Escalating stress and pressure continue into middle and high school — a survey of 22,000 high school students conducted by the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence found that, on average, students reported feeling negative emotions, such as stress, fatigue and boredom, 75% of the time. An antidote to all this stress has never been needed more.
According to Lauren Cassani Davis’ Aug. 31, 2015 article “When Mindfulness Meets the Classroom” in The Atlantic, education reformers have long maintained that there is a fundamental connection between emotional imbalance and poor life prospects. As Paul Tough argued and popularized in "How Children Succeed," stress early in life can prompt a cascade of negative effects, psychologically and neurologically — poor self-control and underdeveloped executive function, in particular. The U.S. education system’s focus on cognitive intelligence — IQ scores and academic skills like arithmetic —undermines the development of equally vital forms of non-cognitive intelligence. This type of intelligence entails dimensions of the mind that are difficult to quantify: It is the foundation of good character, resilience, and long-term life fulfillment. It is this part of the mind that mindfulness seeks to address.
The first major effort to use mindfulness in schools began in the United Kingdom in 2007 with a series of fixed lesson plans delivered in classrooms across the country. Interest in the movement has picked up pace since. In July 2015, Oxford researchers announced plans to launch a large-scale, seven-year, $10 million study on mindfulness in education in 2016. More than a dozen similar initiatives have sprouted in the U.S., grassroots programs that train teachers in mindfulness and generate their own curricula. Among the two largest are MindUP and Mindful Schools, the California-based nonprofit, which continue to spearhead the country’s steadily growing, but piecemeal, mindfulness-in-education movement. Since its founding in 2010, Mindful Schools has trained thousands of teachers through its online programs — most of them in California, New York and Washington, D.C., who are said to have a total reach of 300,000 students.
Not all mindfulness programs are in schools where large numbers of students have been identified as disordered or disruptive, or struggle with mental-health problems and unstable living situations. Middlesex School, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, requires that all incoming freshmen take a mindfulness course. The program, which was founded by an alumnus who used mindfulness to cope with both sports-related performance anxiety and T-Cell lymphoma, has proven popular among students. A vast majority — 97 percent — of students surveyed in 2014 said they would recommend the course to others, reporting benefits ranging from better sleep and diminished stress to increased focus on schoolwork.
In the Bronx, after a minute or two of the day’s mindfulness exercise, teacher Argos Gonzalez’ own eyes also closed, he runs through a list of emotions: Happy. Sad. Excited. Mad. Bored. Loving. Worried. Jealous. Silly. The second item on this list seemed to especially resonate with an 18-year-old at the front of the classroom, a young woman with dark skin, shimmering pink lip gloss and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Sitting up straight with her hands in her lap, her composed posture belied the challenges she faced shortly before transferring to Arturo A. Schomburg Satellite Academy two years earlier.
“I didn’t know anybody. I was very depressed. I didn’t want to be in school,” she told me in a hushed voice at the end of class. Shortly before transferring to this school, her favorite big brother had been hit by a car. She said she’d watched him fall into a coma and sat by his side until his heart stopped; soon after that, she’d seen one of her friends get shot in the head and bleed to death in the street. During the quiet minutes set aside for mindfulness exercises in class, she would often cry.
Now, she writes in perfect, neat script as she fills out a worksheet to accompany the day’s mindfulness exercise. But she told me she wasn’t always so eager to participate. “I used to write, ‘I hate this, I don’t want to do this.’ I ripped those papers up,” she said. But one day when she was in a particularly dark mood, something clicked. “Mr. Gonzalez told me to close my eyes. Then he said, ‘Connect to your breath.’ He always used to say it, but I never really did it until then.” Gonzalez told me that his Mindful Schools training had specific segments dedicated to working with trauma.
“I noticed that I could feel [my breath] in my chest,” she told me, “And at that moment, I felt so relieved. The only thing I could think in my mind was, ‘I’m OK.’ And, I don’t know — from that day on, it just didn’t hurt anymore.” She told me she hadn’t been in fights the way she once used to. Her four other brothers are in jail, and she is convinced it’s because they didn’t get the mindfulness training she now has. “Your emotions drive you mad,” she said, but escaping them is possible by “focusing on now.”
“Those feelings [of pain and grief] are there, but they won’t kill me,” she said. “I still have my days where it’s not easy, but mindfulness helps me a whole lot. Honestly, I feel like if I’d had this before, it would have been easier.”
Gonzalez ultimately thinks that mindfulness may go furthest if applied to teacher education as a way to help prevent burnout — a major issue, given that 20 percent of teachers in high-poverty schools leave within their first year. One of the ongoing research projects he and his colleagues are involved in is the Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, that focuses on the well-being of the teacher and instructs teachers on emotional awareness, techniques for emotion regulation, and ways to apply these skills to teaching. In its annual surveys, Mindful Schools has found that a majority of the teachers it has trained experienced lowered stress, more connection with students, and higher job satisfaction.
Military veterans can also be helped by practicing mindfulness. They experienced improvements in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder following mindfulness-based stress reduction treatment, according to study data published in Psychiatric Research and Clinical Practice.
The report “Suicide Among Veterans and Other Americans 2001-2014” issued by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs showed an average of 20 veterans commit suicide per day — truly crisis proportions. Many veterans turn to mindfulness and meditation to help them confront these issues and find relief.
“It can be incredibly effective,” said Gail Soffer, of the Mindful Warrior Project, a nonprofit organization that teaches mindfulness to veterans. She encourages veterans to pay attention — observing thoughts, feelings and sensations without judgment or control. Over time, she explained, practitioners can make more grounded decisions rather than knee-jerk reactions.
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