Social Emotional Learning Topic: Mindfulness
/MINDFULNESS: 5 Key Lesson Takeaways
Mindfulness is the awareness of being in the moment with a non-judgmental stance.
Practicing mindfulness does not have to take a lot of time! It’s NOT a retreat all-day kind of ordeal. Taking a minute out of your day to check in with yourself IS mindfulness!
Mindfulness is essential for everyone. There are many proven benefits, such as decreasing stress, increasing mood and concentration, and improving quality of life.
It’s never too late to start.
There are many misconceptions about practicing mindfulness. Read the transcript below or listen to the podcast lesson to find out.
My favorite mindfulness books for children (click for more info):
Mindfulness books for teens (click for more info):
Evidence-based mindfulness books for adults (click for more info):
Transcript for Podcast Lesson on Mindfulness with Tori and Melissa
Jenny: I'm sitting next to Tori and Marissa and today, and we will be talking about mindfulness. Tori is an instructional coach who works with teachers all across the country to help them personalize their classrooms and boost social and emotional skills. She has also taught third-graders in North Carolina, before completing her Masters at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Marissa, next to me, has a research background at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she conducted FMRI research on mindfulness. Marissa also has a Masters from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and mind-bring and education, where she focused on integrating neuroscience and mindfulness into educational programs of self-improvement. Welcome!
Tori: Thanks, Jenny.
Marissa: Thanks it's great to be here.
Jenny: Yeah. And as I watch you doing sun-salutations earlier, this is definitely an exciting time to talk about mindfulness because it is such a buzz-word around and you are here because you've created Calm Body Active Mind to help elementary-school teachers understand mindfulness and incorporating it into the classrooms.
Jenny: Tell us what is mindfulness means to you and why is it important.
Marissa: Mindfulness is kind of a big umbrella term. In general mindfulness to me, just means moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness. So simply, being in the moment. Whatever's happening for you, whatever sensations you feel, and just being aware, and not judging what's happening. There are many different ways you can practice mindfulness, such as meditation or yoga but mindfulness itself is simply just being in the moment.
Tori: And there's a lot of benefits to mindfulness for both your brain and your body. Mindfulness actually helps to calm your stress-response systems and in your brain, as well as throughout your body so calming that racing heartbeat, jittery feeling, when you're faced with a stressor. Over time, if you practice mindfulness that feeling actually gets less severe and you become a little bit calmer, a little more relaxed in your resting state. It's also really good for self-regulation and focus. So, it's a really powerful tool to teach yourself as an adult or to teach children how to regulate their own emotions when they're feeling something strongly, not lash out with their bodies, and keep those impulses calm.
Marissa: You know there's been mindfulness research conducted on people across all ages, so both children and adolescents and adults. It's a common finding is mindfulness helps to reduce stress, increase emotional regulation, increase mood, increase academic achievement actually as well, and overall improve satisfaction and life quality.
Jenny: Wow! Clearly, there are tons of benefits both tangible and intangible ones around mindfulness. So how do we get started? I mean, you know as parents we don't have a lot of time in the day and perhaps that's also why we need to practice mindfulness. What can we do?
Tori: So, one of the best ways to incorporate it into your daily life is really to take small moments. A lot of people think that in order to practice mindfulness you have to set aside a half-hour for meditation or an hour for a yoga class but, actually 10 seconds of just checking in with yourself and asking yourself, “How do I feel right now?”, “Why do I feel that way?”, “How do I know that I feel that way right now?” And that's all it takes. If you could answer those three questions, you've had a mindful moment and you can sort of take a deep breath and move on with your day. So it's actually a lot simpler to take those mindful moments than people think.
Marissa: Yeah, there's actually a great quote that, Mindfulness meditation isn't hard to do, it's just hard to remember to be mindful. So like Tori said, just that moment of remembering to check in with yourself in the moment is really all a practice entails.
Jenny: I love that and how you really set it straight in terms of misconceptions around how mindfulness takes such effort and you need to allocate at least an hour. Are there other misconceptions around the buzz-word of mindful?
Marissa: One big one, I notice a lot is people tend to think that mindfulness is about completely being in the moment and not having any distractions.
Marissa: And of course that is the goal. But we're all human so inevitably, we all will have distractions within mostly a couple of seconds and a lot of people think that once their mind starts to wander they're during the practice wrong but, the practice actually is noticing that your mind has wandered and brought it back and that is what mindfulness practice and meditation really is about. So, when you notice your mind wandering that means you're doing it right.
Jenny: One thing I picked out of which you mention is really this notion of self-awareness. You've done so much work around elementary-school-age children also supporting teachers around that. Give us some tips around what can we do in terms of fostering mindfulness, self-awareness for elementary-school students.
Tori: So with young children, one really great way to foster mindfulness is just asking them questions at the end of the day which Jenny, I think you know a little something about things like, “How did you feel today?” or “What's on your mind right now?” to make them think about what they're thinking and what they're feeling. Another great way is through physical activity, having them stretch and hold the stretch and think about how their body feels. Getting kids to be more aware of their thoughts and their feelings really come from talking about what those thoughts and feelings are and allowing them to express them and bring them forward.
Tori: So anything that you can do with kids to bring that about is a really healthy way to get them to be more mindful.
Jenny: So on the topic of connecting the mind with the body, so a very real problem I'm going to put on top of you. For example, if an elementary-school-age child had a fall, a bad fall, and it really depends on personality but, I'm just wondering you know for those who really dwell on, I got a booboo, this really hurts! and kind of can't get back out into the positive zone. But then, we also as parents want to honor sort of that mindfulness of understanding you know, I'm feeling the hurt, I'm not happy. How do you balance that tension between like, Suck it up! You know, let's move on right? during the day for the day versus honoring those feelings?
Tori: Having fielded many recess injuries, one strategy that I used and saw other teachers use was, use that mindfulness and mindful awareness of their body to point out the ways that it doesn't feel as bad as it felt before. So, for a kid who fell, who maybe feels that they can't bend their knee because they've scrapped it after a few minutes, you ask them, “Does it, you know, can you still not move your knee at all? Can you move it even a little bit?” And they start to tune into, oh, I can bend it more than I could before!, that shows them that it's getting better which is a little bit of motivation to then continue to get back out there and try new things.
Tori: But, I think there's there's definitely no downside to being aware of your body whether that means you're resistant to get back out on the playground because you're aware that your knee might hurt, there's still a benefit to being tuned in in that way yeah.
Marissa: Tori makes a great point about being aware of your body. Even in times when you're in pain, there's actually a lot of research about mindfulness and meditation and pain. And it turns out that a lot of the pain we feel is in our heads. It's our anxiety about what the pain is going to happen in the future but, if we just simply focus on the pain at the moment, people tend to report actually feeling less pain, and then over time, it's even shown to reduce the pain activity in your body. And of course, it's not the end-all if you are in a life-threatening situation, you might not want to focus on that pain but for a recess booboo, it actually might be beneficial to just focus on what's actually happening and they might realize that the pain isn't as bad as they're worried it is.
Jenny: I love that! These are such great useful insights. I really like your point, Tori, about focusing on the change, the improvement, the differences which again, that sort of the mindfulness throughout that thread and Marissa, your point about it actually there are benefits of focusing on that now, instead of sort of jotting it away and not thinking about it but having it arise later on. So, tell us what are some of the mindfulness exercises that you personally enjoy doing.
Tori: I love doing yoga at night before I go to bed. I usually set aside 10 or 15 minutes because I like a little bit of a longer, mindful moment at the end of my day to just go through some stretches and count my breaths. So, controlled breathing is a really valuable part of mindfulness. I like the 4-by-4 breath, so you count in for four as you breathe in and out for four as you breathe out and it's actually very soothing overtime to count to four over and over in your head, while you go through these stretches and then I usually sleep very well because I'm all relaxed. So, that's a great way to take a few minutes for yourself especially if you have kids and you're busy and you know that once the kids have gone to bed, you have five minutes to go through a little stretch. That's one way that I keep it part of my daily routines.
Marissa: Yeah I really like to do formal, focused, attention meditation so I also tend to anchor on my breath; so I just focus on my breath where I feel it in my body and when my mind starts to wander, I just notice it and bring it back to bring my attention back to my breath. I also really enjoy doing yoga. If you're a parent, you might not have time to set aside 30 minutes for meditation but doing venus of flow, which is just a quick sequence of a couple of yoga moves really helps bring that connection of mind and body for me.
Tori: If you're looking for something a little less body-oriented to practice mindfulness, journaling is also a really great practice. Even just a few minutes a night or each morning when you wake up to jot down how you're feeling.
Tori: People also really like mood trackers and those types of anxiety trackers or exercise trackers things to make you clue into how you felt in a moment. So if you can jot down you know I had a moment of stress today it brings it to the front and helps you kind of recognize it and be mindful.
Jenny: This sounds great. So tell us, leave us with some resources, and also tell us more about your calm body active mind website.
Marissa: So we created a Web site called Calm Body Active Mind and the goal of this is it's catered towards elementary-school teachers and we wanted to help them understand: A) the benefits of mindfulness and B) how mindfulness actually works. So far we've focused on self-regulation and stress-reduction and we want to help teachers understand how the practices actually work within the body, the neurological and biological systems that are involved. And then we also wanted to help teachers understand how to do this and give them support, so we have a whole page of resources on our website that you can go to. We have vetted these resources to make sure that they're aligned with the research.
Tori: And even if you're not a teacher a lot of the resources on there are really helpful. There are great videos of child-friendly yoga and guided meditation practices that you can do with kids. There's also a lot of lesson plans and research articles as well as some articles from the popular press that really break down the research so that people can understand it. So, we hope that anyone who wants to learn more about mindfulness will check it out.
Jenny: I will certainly be checking it out. And with that, thank you so much for your time here today.
Tori and Marissa: Thanks, Jenny.
Jenny: And thank you, for tuning into 52 Essential Conversations.