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.