A discursive mind restricts a child’s capacity to concentrate, to attend, and to be fully engaged …

Abstracted from an article by Dr. Patricia Jennings, Director of the Contemplation and Education Program at Garrison Institute.

What is the prospect of our educators using contemplative and mindfulness-based approaches to teaching? In using these approaches can our students and teachers alike mindfully learn to reduce their stress; improve and enhance relationships in the classroom; help students to become more aware and to calm their bodies & minds; to focus and concentrate their attention; to cultivate positive psychology and adaptive resilience? A young mind offers expansive opportunity to develop and refine skills for awareness and well-being before conditioning, habitual patterns, and internalized messages become deeply and intricately woven into the individual “self”.

As we develop, our memories of past experiences tend to form an undercurrent for potential “automaticity”. Our automatic reactions arise, habitually, from emotionally difficult experiences in our pasts. When we take time to experience our thoughts and feelings with presence of mind, openly and objectively, we begin to see such patterned behaviors for what they are and they naturally subside as events of consciousness, rather than drive us to react in ways we may later regret.

Many studies in neuropsychology suggest that regular mindful awareness practice has the capacity to change how our body and brain respond to stress, possibly strengthening connections in the prefrontal cortex and reducing reactivity in our limbic and extended nervous systems. A routine mindful awareness practice also supports and sustains our capacities for self-reflection and self-regulation. These functions can play a critical role in education. To learn, the student must engage their prefrontal cortex to focus and to monitor their attention, as well as to inhibit impulsive tendencies towards distraction. Today we are faced with a growing number of children who have maladaptive nervous systems that are inadequately prepared to learn.

Our young students inhabit a very busy, fast-paced, hectic, and often confused time. Constant streams of real-time information and energy are difficult for any person to effectively attend and to regulate.  It’s not surprising to find “attention disorders” to be growing at an alarming rate- and the number of undocumented yet statistically significant cases that go unnoticed- students flowing through the system with highly discursive minds and very temperamental nervous systems where fight-flight-freeze response can make learning more difficult. Furthermore, when the human limbic system is hyper-reactive, it’s difficult to engage the prefrontal cortex—making it difficult to absorb and process new information. As we now know, neuroplasticity allows us to make profound changes in the way our bodies and minds function at any age, but especially during a child’s development (e.g. K-12). Thus, helping students learn to calm their bodies and minds through the use of developmentally appropriate mindful awareness practices, which can be skillfully integrated into curricula, can make a real difference, not just in individual children’s lives, but educational reform on the whole.

Mindful awareness practice can provide a learning and developmental platform on both formal and informal levels. Exercises and insights can easily be integrated not only in the school’s curricula, but in the student’s everyday life. Mindful awareness training can positively impact the school and the home setting as our young people can cultivate their individual capacities for attending difficult and challenging situations with sustained concentration, stability (equanimity), and objectivity- skills for reflection, resilience, and relationships can be improved and enhanced on a variety of different levels. The informal but essential practice of living mindfully also involves keeping one’s mind & heart open to possibilities and maintaining the recognition that the level of our awareness at any given moment is mediated by our thoughts, emotions, and past experiences. This meta-awareness helps us to live in a way that is more reflective and accepting of diverse views, qualities that are critical in a world of growing global integration and communication.

As radical as it may seem, there is real value in learning from the inside out- and in tapping our children’s own “natural intelligence”. It is in the space of awareness where there can be a healthy confluence of intellect and intuition- of creativity and insight- of attention and connection. With this refined capacity for meta-awareness or mindful awareness, we may find our students to be more fully engaged… Reference the Garrison Institute for more information on this significantly profound movement… http://www.garrisoninstitute.org.

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