Post # 214

At this moment it is raining, raining, raining. Maybe it rained 4 times this summer, and now the Delaware is rising high, figuring out when and how high its crest shall be. There has been a remarkable amount of energy- good and not so good- at school for the last few days, and it is difficult to avoid tracing some of it to the giant weather turnover. But a month into school and a very interesting year is shaping up, one quite unlike any other. 15 years or so after we started this thing I am still astounded at the variety of human community.

One thing I have noticed over the years is that, generally speaking, the more difficulty a kid is having in school, the more his or her world shrinks around them. For instance, for a long time now behavioral difficulties get shoveled over to special education specialists. There is a logic to this, but one net result is that the pool of children and adults that the kid is exposed to daily gets reduced, interactions become more stilted.

Simplifying the world for a person in trouble is a two-edged sword. Things become more manageable, but the live-giving complexity of genuine and mutual relationships are compromised.

This is one of the reasons that we work very hard at maintaining a very diverse student body- diverse, that is, in terms of ability, experiences, and expectations. The range is a head-scratcher sometimes: a few brilliant students, some kids wild as puppies, others clearly on the autistic spectrum, others still struggling with post-traumatic syndromes, a few others utterly alienated from school, and of course, kids swept up in a family's emotional chaos. A small school with all this variety must return to a basic principal, that of basic needs. And the most basic need is to

speak and be heard, act and be consequential.

Too often it is second of these that is ignored. Schools and special programs all have "groups", and therapists, who excel at facilitating a "talking" arena. But where can a teenager really act, really stretch out and flex their power and direct their energy? Invariably, for the person having trouble, the situation is recognized intuitively: they do crazy things. Action is reserved and approved for kids who get the rules. The rest is pathologized.

At this school, kids do things that effect everybody. That is the virtue of a small community, your own fingerprints are everywhere, and the feedback is instant and natural, whether you want it or not.

This is where self-awareness training comes in. All that feedback is pretty stormy; mindfulness and self-awareness slows the game down, it cuts the reactivity. When a young person can manage much of the input (as it were), the stress of everyday life becomes an experience of efficacy.

Where adults come in is the role of managing the "arena" so mistakes don't get out of hand, but otherwise practicing in themselves being genuine and spontaneous with their charges. Too often, adult control is projected into all the interactions between adult and student. This will drive away the kids who are already rightly questioning the usefulness of adults.

Some Updates From a Busy Week...

Soon I will be putting together (hopefully) an online chat for people involved in teaching and practicing mindfulness in high school. About a dozen people have shown more than passing interest, which really gives me confidence about the venture. My meditation, teaching, and psychotherapeutic practice will deepen with all that input. I sent out an introductory email that might have made a few people wonder about what they were getting into... but I can't help myself. It is a new field and we need to develop the frameworks for productive discussion. Here is the bulk of that email:

Thank you for showing interest in some sort of formal or informal discussion of mindfulness in high schools. Some of you might be aware of the school we have here in eastern Pennsylvania, Tinicum Art and Science, an alternative, private school that has come to be a preferred resource for our area public schools.

The school has 25-30 students, most of whom have had serious emotional difficulty in school due to bullying, teacher indifference, past abuse, and various identified disorders such as Asperger's, PTSD, depression, and so on. A number of students also have significant learning disabilities. We use a combination of zen, a low student-teacher ratio, a liberal arts curriculum, good food, chores, and a strong emphasis on community and basic decency to bring our kids back into their own lives fully.

Mindfulness is big nowadays. I am confident that unlike so many other fads in psychotherapy and in education, the huge research output in this area will make a lasting contribution. My concern is that schools will adapt mindfulness techniques for students without developing the skills among staff in order to facilitate mindful relationships between teachers and students. Unless mindfulness is part of the relationships within the school itself, it is merely another technique imparted to the student. This negates most of the benefit of the practice, as it is really the complex, fluid, mutuality of relating to others that reinforces the sort of behavior associated with the pre-frontal cortex that schools are seeking to cultivate with mindfulness practice.

In other words, you can't "do" mindfulness to someone, and you can't "teach" it. We have to experience it with another. And sadly, this mutuality is sorely lacking in so many schools today.