As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.Participants of my coaching programs and even my other projects have experienced mindfulness techniques for themselves -- or commented how the techniques work for me.
Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. [...]
The techniques, among them focused breathing and concentrating on a single object, are loosely adapted from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 to help medical patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety and depression. Susan Kaiser Greenland, the founder of the InnerKids Foundation, which trains schoolchildren and teachers in the Los Angeles area, calls mindfulness “the new ABC’s — learning and leading a balanced life.”
...“Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a researcher. “But we never teach them how.”
...“If we can help children slow down and think,” [Principal] Dr. Haick said, “they have the answers within themselves.”
...Tyran Williams defined mindfulness as “not hitting someone in the mouth.”
“He doesn’t know what to do with his energy,” his mother, Towana Thomas, said at a session for parents. “But one day after school he told me, ‘I’m taking a moment.’ If it works in a child’s mind — with so much going on — there must be something to it.”
Mindfulness is simply the state of "being aware". It's not magic. It simply allows a person to stop living in his or her habit reactions. "Habit reactions" is what prompts a child to 'hit someone in the mouth' (as the child in the article mentions) - or makes us indulge in addictive and sometimes self-hurtful behaviors.
Mindfulness also allows us to clearly see repetitive problems in our lives. To stop and feel our problems allows us to recognize them as problems; intsead of responding in a way we've always responded (habit reactions), we can see the actions as they unfold. Mindfulness even allows us to step back from ourselves like observers - we give ourselves 'space' to watch ourselves, and possibly make a new (and better) choice for our actions.
There is a freedom in mindfulness: our emotions or habits don't have to lead us anymore. We are free to make a new choice or to even choose a new emotional response. In this world of people killing others simply for supposed ego-infractions, a little mindfulness taught in the classrooms may go a long way to starting a new society of free-thinkers and calm lives.
I agree with the schools - most parents and teachers don't teach children how to 'be aware'. Perhaps mindfulness-education will have its detractors, but every great innovation had its detractors. We'd still be 'watching' the sun circle the Earth if someone didn't innovate a better idea.
