Meditation

learning experiences inspired by a trust in intuition and the power of inner peace

Photo: Mykal Hall, www.mykalhall.photography

learning experiences cultivating stillness, articulating purpose, differentiating self.

It’s a week before the end of the semester and my daughter is madly writing her final papers.  She has headphones on and all kinds of windows open on her laptop as she researches her topic.  Her phone bleeps constantly as her friends log facebook, snapchat, instagram and text messages. My daughter struggles with anxiety, and it pains us that this distracting, multi-tasking environment may be fueling it.

Question: do you see that in your students, a high level of anxiety?

Question: do you feel any culpability or responsibility to address the issue?

Stillness would be an incredible gift to her. Brené Brown at the University of Houston in her study of shame identified people who live what she terms “wholehearted” lives.  She describes “cultivating stillness” as an important practice for these subjects. Stillness, she says, “is not about focusing on nothingness; it’s about creating a clearing. It’s opening up an emotionally clutter-free space and allowing ourselves to feel and think and dream and question.” In stillness, “anxiety loses its hold and we gain clarity about what we’re doing, where we’re going, and what holds true meaning for us.” (Brown, 2010, p.78).

If school is wholly predicated on student “improvement”, then we might forgive our children for internalizing the highly anxiety-inducing corollary: “You are not (yet?) good enough”.  From that perspective, is it surprising schools struggle with anxiety, discipline, motivation, and a wide spectrum of emotional pathologies? What if, instead, we were to teach joy?

Author and activist Marianne Williamson is credited with the statement: “Joy is what happens to us when we allow ourselves to recognize how good things really are”. Joy, in other words, ties directly to consciously feeling gratitude. Brené Brown describes this linkage, further defining gratitude as a practice: a state of mind achieved not by waiting passively for it to happen, but by consciously creating it over and over again in our minds. (Brown, 2010, p.78) Meditation makes a space to consciously create a pathway to joy. With meditation, school becomes a locus for joy.

Question: Do you see yourself as an agent of joy in school?

Question: Do you consider joy irrelevant to what you teach, or even an impediment?

Question: Could modelling joy improve your success as a teacher?

Meditation also opens avenues to intuition. School has historically focused on logic and reason, on critical thinking, addressing the power of intuition barely.  Yet, from Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs we learn that intuition was at the very foundation of their achievements.  If we are teaching our students how to think and to succeed, it seems logical to cultivate their intuition: to help them hear themselves.

Asta Raami at the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, in her paper “Intuition Unleashed”, offers the following diagram to describe the three steps and the environment required to develop intuition (Raami, 2015, p.190): 

Both Brown and Raami use spatial analogies to make their point. “Expanding the Boundaries of the Mind” sounds like divergent thinking, giving yourself the freedom to adventure without a map. What Brown calls “Creating a Clearing” sounds more like a pre-condition to intentional thinking, something akin to cleaning house, or creating what Raami calls “an atmosphere of trust and support”or what Zen Buddhism calls “sunyata” or “emptiness”. Raami emphasizes the important role of teachers in breaking down student bias against the process. More important still is “Intention”, at the heart of Raami’s process. Brown noted this about stillness: it’s how we gain clarity. It’s how we build intention. Crucially, Raami calls us to “Action”. What is intention after all without follow-through?

Question: What is your role as a teacher? Do you accept helping your students to broadly “build intention” as integral to your job, or does this strike you as beside the point? For example, you may see your role as more focused on fostering subject-based knowledge and critical thinking within that realm.

Question: Does this not also benefit from a well-developed intention?

Intuition is a key component of creativity, one key “C” of 21st century education too often denatured to rote problem solving: problem definition, brainstorming, choice, implementation, testing and refinement. Creativity finds its real juice however in the quality and originality of the solutions, where meditation again has been shown to improve acuity. Meditation invites a state of mind that’s been called “Presence”: not just a “letting go” of preconceptions and historical ways of making sense and old identities and the need to control, but also a “letting come” of an emergent future. Presence is a way to suspend habitual ways of seeing and thinking and redirect attention to the whole, authentic present reality and what is generating it.

“If we can simply observe without forming conclusions as to what our observations mean and allow ourselves to sit with all the seemingly unrelated bits and pieces of information we see, fresh ways to understand a situation can eventually emerge” (Senge, 2004, p.31)

What kind of meditation builds pathways to joy, liberates intuition and enhances creativity?  A study from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands (Colzato, 2012) found that one type of meditation, Open Monitoring (OM) indeed enhances “divergent thinking” (the practice “opens” the mind). OM invites the practitioner to monitor all aspects of their experience without judgment. It is an expansive frame of mind.

Focused Attention (FA), a second type of meditation, asks the practitioner to focus for the duration of the meditation on their breathing or a mantra, teaching strategies to resist distraction. Accomplishment may be better served than imagination with this more restrictive frame of mind (Dienstmann, n.d.).

These two modes of meditation, restrictive and expansive, are sometimes characterized as different levels of the same practice. Concentration is the first level, in which reactivity and agitation diminish and we begin to pay attention. Mindfulness is the second level, in which perception expands and awareness deepens. As for Joy, it comes when we consciously lead that deep awareness to gratitude.

One other type of meditation bears mention. “Hara” breathing is a manner of using your muscles to breathe into your lower abdomen. It is a way of shifting your center of gravity to just below your belly button, and taking the focus of your being from head and heart, thought and feeling, to something more fundamental and stable. As an oak absorbs carbon dioxide to build an immovable trunk, so the student of hara builds strength and solidity through conscious breathing. Japanese culture finds leadership qualities in the solidity, steadiness and conviction demonstrated by hara awareness. Teaching that practice, building students of conviction and strength, would be of inestimable value.

Question: Are you feeling resistance to the idea of leading your students in meditation, or allotting them the time for it? Why?

Question: Are your preconceptions about meditation presenting roadblocks?

Question: For the sake of your students, could a transition from critical thinking (escalating expectations for evidence) to generative thinking (creative exploration of possible utility) be worth a try?

Does meditation make school visceral? Here’s the crux of the idea: action without intention and conviction simply burns empty calories. Meditation is one powerful way to enrich action with meaning. It shifts students from passive recipients to agents on a mission. That is why meditation starts this book. The point in meditating is not to obliterate the self in some mindless swoon, but to articulate purpose and differentiate the self in an act of radical liberation from shoulds and others. This is work, not relaxation.

Three critiques of meditation deserve attention:

1.       Is meditation a good use of the limited time available in school? In San Francisco, the Unified School District lengthened their day by 30 minutes to make time for meditation, and efficacy improved dramatically: the students found more focus, happiness, and self-confidence, and felt less psychological distress (stress, depression, and anxiety). Meditation reduced teacher burnout and improved teacher retention as well (Lynch, n.d.).

2.       Does meditation teach passivity? The argument hinges on the idea that meditation teaches acceptance, thus stifling urgency and activism (Purser, 2019). This strikes me as a misunderstanding or misuse of meditation. The practice offers time and space for perception without judgement, but the intent is to identify intention, not give up on it. Meditation may be a respite from action, but it is not the death of it. The result should empower activism, not discourage it.

3.       Can meditation expose students to that “Dark Night of the Soul” (Rocha, 2014), (Saint John of the Cross, 1959)? The fear here is that students may succumb to depression, anxiety or some bottomless psychological abyss by introspection. Though the opposite of what San Francisco USD has demonstrated in the aggregate, examples of meditation’s potentially dark result aren’t hard to find (Shapiro, 1992, pp. 62-67). As a survivor of just such an abyss, I will say that dodging it is useless: better sooner than later, better embraced than forever avoided in fear, better supported than alone. You, teacher, are their guru: weighty in wisdom, dispeller of darkness (Kazlev, n.d.). No liberation beckons, but out the other side.

Meditation is no panacea, to be sure. Awareness, clarity, a moment of pause and access to intuition: these are the acknowledged benefits of relaxed contemplation.  Mild improvement in anxiety, depression and pain were demonstrated in a 2014 meta-analysis of meditation programs, covering 18,753 citations, 47 trials, and 3515 participants (Goyal et al, 2014). No evidence for improvement in positive mood, attention, substance use, eating habits, sleep, and weight was reported, nor evidence that meditation programs were better than any active treatment like drugs, exercise, and other behavioral therapies. For magic, search elsewhere in this book.

In contrast to a regular meditation practice, I recall the “moment of silence” occasionally invoked when I was a student, a memorial usually to someone important. That minute interrupted the frenetic flow of feelings, but yielded no self-reflection.  Too inconsistent to constitute a strategy, too short to go deeply into thought, the purpose was defined as “remembrance”, but that was a lie. We had no experience with the deceased from which to form a memory. Stillness practiced with commitment and consistency, however, breathing deeply into your hara:

“Sitting like a mountain let your mind rise, fly and soar.” – Sogyal Rinpoche

References

Brown, B. (2010). The Gifts of Imperfection. Hazeldon.

Colzato, L., Ozturk, A. & Hommel, B. (2012, April 18). Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent & divergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00116

David Lynch Foundation (n. d.) The Quiet Time program: improving academic performance and reducing stress and violence [website]. http://www.davidlynchfoundation.org/schools.html

Dienstmann, G. (n. d.). Types of Meditation – An Overview of 23 Meditation Techniques. https://liveanddare.com/types-of-meditation/#Types_of_Meditation_PDF

Gafni, M. (2012). Your unique self: the radical path to personal enlightenment. Integral Publishers.

Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M. S., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., Berger, Z., Sleicher, D., Maron, D. D., Shihab, H. M., Ranasinghe, P. D., Linn, S., Saha, S., Bass, E. B. & Haythornthwaite, J. A. (2014). Meditation Programs for Psychological Stress and Well-being. A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. JAMA Intern Med.;174(3):357-368. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018. Published online January 6, 2014. Accessed November 21, 2021.

Kazlev, M. A. (n. d.). http://www.kheper.net/topics/gurus/etymology.html

Purser, R. (2019, June 14). The Mindfulness Conspiracy. The Guardian.

Raami, A. (2015). Intuition Unleashed-– On the application and development of intuition in the creative process. DOCTORAL DISSERTATIONS 29/2015. Aalto University publication series, School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Aalto ARTS Books, Helsinki, Finland.

Rocha, T. (2014, June 25). The Dark Knight of the Soul, The Atlantic.

Saint John of the Cross, (1959). Dark Night of the Soul. (E. Allison Peers, Ed. and Trans., 3rd revised edition), Image Books. http://www.carmelitemonks.org/Vocation/DarkNight-StJohnoftheCross.pdf (Original work ca. 1578)

Senge, P. M., Scharmer, C. O., Jaworski, J., & Flowers, B. S. (2004). Presence, Human Purpose and the Field of The Future. Currency Doubleday, New York.

Shapiro, D.H. (1992). Adverse effects of meditation: a preliminary investigation of long-term meditators. International Journal of Psychosomatics, 39.

Your thoughts on this journal post are highly valued, as I continue to build and refine my perspective on schools and the school environment. Please share your own experiences and perceptions of the school environment below!