Mindfulness, Community Building, and Improving Well-Being
Think of a time when one of your students made a rude comment in the middle of class and you snapped, possibly responding in a way that negatively impacted you, the student, and the entire classroom.
- Consider a time when you found yourself frustrated with a student who could not seem to understand a concept you have repeatedly explained.
- Image what you were thinking, what you were feeling, and what emotions you experienced.
Instead of acting rashly, regularly practicing and exercising mindfulness can help you better navigate countless situations like these in the classroom. Mindfulness is the practice of paying attention in a purposefully, presently, and tolerant way.
Moment to Moment Awareness. The University of California Center for Mindfulness defines mindfulness as “non-judgmental, open-hearted, friendly, and inviting of whatever arises in awareness. It is cultivated by paying attention on purpose, deeply, and without judgment to whatever arises in the present moment, either inside or outside of us” (Meditation Science, 2008).
Mindfulness and Community Building
Mindfulness is a hot topic, and “mindful community” is an emerging term. The Mindful Life Project partnered with five schools in Richmond, California in an attempt to foster mindful communities. They taught mindfulness once a week to every classroom in each of their partner schools, provided mindfulness classes to parents, and trained teachers how to use mindfulness for their personal well-being and how to teach it to students. Thus teachers, students, parents, and the school community as a whole were all educated on the benefits and practices of mindfulness. They experienced a variety of positive results, including improved self-awareness, self-regulation, empathy, and social awareness; better focus and concentration; decreased stress and improved health; increased empathy and understanding of others; and increased development of natural conflict resolution skills (Mindful Life Project, 2013). The Mindful Schools website has additional information and resources to help you implement mindfulness in your own school.
Cecily Stock, the Head of School at San Domenico School in San Anselmo, California, also addressed mindfulness and community building in her school’s weekly bulletin. She commented on Levasseur’s article on teaching Millennials how to unplug from the current “always on” culture and practice mindfulness to decrease stress and increase patience and happiness. Levasseur notes “A raft of research has clearly highlighted how essential downtime and mindfulness are, and how they’re increasingly becoming so in our always-on world” (2016). Stock shares that she is proud of the way her school and community focuses on quality and the “little moments of connection” in their daily activities.
Additionally, NBC Nightly News (2015) reported on one district in San Francisco that extended the school day by 30 minutes for meditation time, which resulted in a 75% decrease in suspensions and increased GPAs and attendance. Teachers and administrators know that they cannot change students’ home environment, however they can implement mindfulness and meditation activities in school to give students tools to better deal with violence, trauma, and stress in their everyday lives.
Meditation, Mindfulness, and the Brain
There is a solid body of evidence that meditation has remarkable neurological benefits (Walton, 2015). Holzel et al. (2011) found that mindful meditation increased cortical thickness in the hippocampus, a brain area associated with learning and memory, as well as in brain regions involved in emotional regulation and self-referential processing. Additionally, they found decreased cell volume in the amygdala, a brain area associated with fear, anxiety, and stress.
Differential Connectivity in the Brain. Wolkin (2015) noted that meditation can lead to differential connectivity between various brain regions. Meditation can decrease functional connections between the amygdala and pre-frontal cortex, making person less reactive and oversensitive, and it can also increase connectivity between areas associated with higher order functions such as attention and concentration. Additionally, Luders et al. (2015) found that meditation practitioners had less age-related gray matter atrophy compared to control subjects.
Brewer et al. (2011) found that the default mode of most humans is mind-wandering, which is associated with being less happy, ruminating, and worrying about the past and future. They found that experienced meditators had less activation in their default-mode networks (medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortices) and fewer self-referential thoughts.
Improving Attention, Concentration and Well-being. Finally, meditation helps relieve subjective levels of anxiety and depression, and improve attention, concentration, and overall psychological well-being. Goyal et al. (2014) found that mindfulness meditation can reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and pain. Goldin et al. (2013) found that mindfulness-based stress reduction can help patients reduce emotional reactivity and enhance emotional regulation, which can help people with social anxiety disorder. And Mrazek et al. (2013) found that after a two-week mindfulness-training course, participants improved their GRE reading comprehension scores as well as their working memory capacity by reducing mind wandering.
References
Brewer, J. A., Worhunsky, P. D., Gray, J. R., Tang, Y. Y., Weber, J., & Kober, H. (2011). Meditation experience is associated with differences in default mode network activity and connectivity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(50), 20254–20259.
Goldin, P., Ziv, M., Jazaieri, H., Hahn, K., & Gross, J. J. (2013). MBSR vs aerobic exercise in social anxiety: fMRI of emotion regulation of negative self-beliefs. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(1), 65–72.
Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., … & Ranasinghe, P. D. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA internal medicine, 174(3), 357–368.
Hölzel, B. K., Carmody, J., Vangel, M., Congleton, C., Yerramsetti, S. M., Gard, T., & Lazar, S. W. (2011). Mindfulness practice leads to increases in regional brain gray matter density. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 191(1), 36–43.
Levasseur, A. (2016). Teaching Millennials the power of plugging into mindfulness. Retrieved http://mediashift.org/2015/03/teaching-millennials-the-power-of-plugging-into-mindfulness/
Luders, E., Cherbuin, N., Kurth, F., & Lauche, R. (2015). Forever Young (er): potential age-defying effects of long-term meditation on gray matter atrophy. Frontiers in Psychology, 58(4), 30–31.
Meditation Science. (2008). What is mindfulness meditation? Retrieved http://meditationscience.weebly.com/what-is-mindfulness-meditation.html
Mindful Life Project. (2013). “Mindful community”. Retrieved http://mindfullifeproject.org/mindful-community/
Mrazek, M. D., Franklin, M. S., Phillips, D. T., Baird, B., & Schooler, J. W. (2013). Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science, 24(5), 776–781.
NBC Nightly News. (2015). San Francisco Schools Transformed by the Power of Meditation. Retrieved http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/san-francisco-schools-transformed-power-meditation-n276301
Sharaf, E. (2015). Teach mindfulness, invite happiness. Edutopia. http://www.edutopia.org/blog/teach-mindfulness-invite-happiness
Stock, C. S. (2015). News and events — What’s happening in the San Domenico Middle School?. San Domenico Schools. Retrieved http://www.sandomenico.org/page.cfm?p=2662&newsid=1087&ncat=3
Walton, A.G. (2015). 7 ways meditation can actually change the brain. Forbes. Retrieved http://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2015/02/09/7-ways-meditation-can-actually-change-the-brain/#43e0a1317023
Wolkin, J. (2015). How the brain changes when you meditate. Mindful.org. Retrieved http://www.mindful.org/how-the-brain-changes-when-you-meditate/
