Hamilton County School System literacy coach Jennifer Knowles followed the signs: a conversation about yoga, another about a mindfulness app, reconnecting with an old friend and a personal desire to more fully experience the present moment. It all led her to a new “secret passion” of teaching mindfulness at a couple of local public schools.
Sebastopol Primary School pupils all have Smiling Minds this year. Every day, between lunch and maths classes, all the pupils and teachers spend six minutes doing mindfulness exercises via the popular Smiling Minds app. Stretched out on the classroom floor, the pupils do deep breathing and relaxation exercises which principal Michelle Wilson said promoted clearer thinking and calmer playground conflict resolution.
Mindfulness and meditation techniques are being used in schools across the country. A recent study by the University of California-Davis and the non-profit organization, Mindful Schools, shows mindfulness triples students’ ability to focus and participate in class activities. It’s not a big deal to see fourth graders meditating and kindergarteners practicing mindful breathing at a mindful elementary school. Every class here has students doing the same thing. Heidi Palmiero-Potter, a 4th Grade Teacher at Harris Hill Elementary School in Buffalo, New York admits students, “They’re less impulsive with each other, they think about their words before they speak so it definitely spills to into the daily routines.”
Mindfulness@Umich is a program that is available to all University of Michigan students, faculty, and staff. The sessions are 30 minutes long, flexible, and free.
The sessions are led by a group of students and staff who have received training to lead the 30 minute sessions. They also have personal practices.The meditations are guided (which means there will be speaking throughout the meditation) and they last for 25 minutes. We typically sit in chairs. We often end the practice with a short metta or gratitude meditation. At the very end of the session, we’ll spend a few minutes talking about issues that may have arisen in your meditation, recent research, or ways to practice outside of the session.
These days, children engage in a variety of things. Besides studies, kids are also into a number of other extracurricular activities and this leaves them with little or no time to relax and play. In order to help children to cope with the mounting pressures of being in a competitive world, parents must inspire them to meditate. Meditation has healing qualities both mentally and physically. If the habit of regular meditation is inculcated in children, then they evolve better and this helps them in the long run too.
On Monday, students buzzed into C. Sara L. Minard’s “Impact Investing and Social Finance” class and chatted animatedly about the Super Bowl the night before, or opened their laptops to dash off an email, or scrolled through their smartphones. It was a scene perhaps familiar to anyone who’s spent time in a university classroom. But then something different happened. Minard, executive professor in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, quietly raised her hand to signal the attention of her class and said in a conversational tone, “Let’s anchor ourselves. Feel your feet rooted into the earth, feel your wing bones on the back of your chair, and we’ll start when you hear the gong.” Her class, noisy and active a moment earlier, fell quiet, as students closed their eyes and breathed deeply. A gong sounded quietly from Minard’s phone, thus beginning the five minutes of mindfulness that Minard leads at the start of each of her classes.
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