Promoting Balance and Harmony Through Meditation in the Classroom!

 

Tests, projects… no time to socialize, too little time and too much homework!! These were listed as sources of stress by my 7^th period IB Economics SL class. Now, I wonder as a teacher of a course that is demanding, as most IB courses are, what am I doing to promote happiness for my students?

I have become more aware of this since my presentation and participation at the Ahimsa Center in November at the Ahimsa and Sustainable Happiness Conference.  My presentation topic was on teaching skills to promote happiness through education, yet, the  IB course  load that  we teach, clearly is not making students too “ happy”---even when we coordinate and try not to give all the projects at the same time, and make room for adjustments, the complains do not seem to stop, especially towards the end of the quarter!! At times, it seems we are creating more unhappiness in the name of teaching!!  So how do we help our students achieve the IB Learner Profile of being Balanced?

Well one of the presenters at the Ahimsa center was Dr. Jarman from FAU.   Dr. Jarman has worked closely with Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the “father” of positive psychology and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Dr. Jarman presented on how meditation can promote success in school through better attention span and focus.  Luckily Dr. Jarman is based right here in South Florida and so I got in touch with him and invited him to my class. When I mentioned this to my class, they were overjoyed!! So I took this opportunity to ask my students to write  reflective journals for 10 days on the sources of  their ‘stress’. The goal was to generate adequate amount of self knowledge on the topic, so that the session would be more effective.

Dr. Jarman came to my class yesterday. I had invited the Principal and another teacher who was interested in the topic. The main idea that Dr. Jarman shared with the students was that the mind needs to be seen as a separate entity and needs to be guided. He told the students that every time we try to pay attention and focus on something, the mind tends to distract us. So we need to observe that, be aware of it and then bring the focus back to where it needs to be. To illustrate this, we did a breathing exercise where we simply focused on our breathing for 7 minutes and in the meantime observed where the mind was taking us. Every time the mind took us away from the focus on breathing, we had to bring the focus back on the breathing. In this way, we were guiding the mind to focus, and were not allowing it to distract us. After the  7 minute-session, we discussed our experiences and realized just how difficult it can be.  Dr. Jarman emphasized that despite this we need to continue with the process : focus, observe the distraction,, label the thinking and bring it back to focus. In this way we can strengthen the  mind and develop more focus.

It is a simple process, yet quite revealing at a deeper level. It forces one to be aware of the thinking process. Dr. Jarman also mentioned how the mind is good at building stories and thus creating stress. When this happens, we should cut the stories short and focus on what we are doing and what needs to be done. So after some reflection, the students learnt that instead of worrying about all the tests and all the assignments they have to do (the stories!!), they can just focus on one assignment at a time, do it well, and then move on to the next. This means, if distractions come along the way, then we have to bring the focus back to the task.

The session ended with students reflecting on their list and sharing how this meditative process can help to bring their focus back to the moment. The students also learnt that they need to :

•  be aware of the stories that the mind can create and cut them short in order to avoid panic/stress and the fight or flight  mode! Aka Stress!!
• make time to meditate, exercise, organize, reflect in order to be more productive even when very busy;
• have a level organization in order to  keep the focus on what needs to be done;
• build mental strength by being aware of thoughts, consciously labling them and bringing the focus backto where it needs to be. 

In the end, we all felt we learnt how our mind works and how we need to train and control it and not let it control us! We will continue our discussion on this in my 7^th period class and assess how well we manage our time and assignments. We may not have reduced the work load but at least we have some tools now with which to address it. Most importantly, we learnt that the mind can make the load lighter by being focused!

I would like to thank Dr. Tara Sethia and the Ahimsa Center (http://www.csupomona.edu/~ahimsacenter) for creating  this excellent opportunity to share these important topics at the Ahimsa  and Sustainable Happiness Conference and thanks to  Dr. Jarman for sharing his insights with us!! Ahimsa Center also holds two-week residential summer institutes for selected K-12 teachers every two years on integrating nonviolence and sustainability in education. This year it is on Gandhi, Sustainability and Happiness.  Dr. Jarman also has a website (www.scholarisacademics.com), where he offers his service to students and teachers. Finally I want to end by saying that while we were in India, visiting schools,  through the three week summer program for k-12 teachers of the ISSJS (www.isjs.in), I found  the attitude of students there towards education was quite different and students seemed to be much more relaxed. Their relationship to education was quite different in the way they took full responsibility of it (rather than putting it on teachers) and as a result seemed more in control of their success. In a way it is also about the thinking process--what we tell ourselves makes us behave and react quite differently. So, thanks to Dr. Shughan Jain and Laura Hershfield for making this trip to India possible and for helping us gain an insight on how nonviolence is practiced in Indian schools. The ISSJS has another summer training this year for k-12 teachers.

 

 

 

The Gender Gap- A Reflection on Societies

As I reflect on the recent horror story in New Delhi, I find myself searching for answers to questions like --why did these men become so inhuman?  What were their own experiences that led them to become such monsters? What desensitized them to such an extent and so shamelessly…. What pumped them up to such level of brute arrogance…..?  A sense of justice is disturbed within and questions like this keep erupting.

Examining it quite clinically, I find that answers are hidden behind more questions… poking accusing fingers at the very society that is silently feeding the male gender to its grotesque inner form...

Aren’t culprits a product of the society they live in?  What happened is terrible, but what is even worse is realizing that they are a byproduct of the socio-cultural environment they live in. Isn’t it the same society that kills the girl infant, and devalues girls by marrying them off with a “dowry”…. and the one that denies daughters education and nutritious food while the sons are pampered to the point where they never learn to take responsibility of their lives? So isn’t this society teaching men that they are worth more just for being the “male” gender and that their lives are more valuable than that of their female counterparts? …Silently but surely, isn’t this society creating such insensitive  monsters?

How long can this type of silent and institutional violence continue, noticed and yet not? Why are those who were oppressed as a girl child becoming the oppressors of the same girl child as mothers—or to be less harsh, why are they allowing it to happen? Aren’t men and women enslaved in this system because they have chosen to be blind and deaf, conforming quietly to such irrational traditions -- paving the path for such atrocities?

So doesn’t change start with each one making fair choices. You cannot change a whole system, but do you have the courage to change yourself and shake free of this inhuman construction? Can you as parents make sure your girl child is made to feel like gold along with your boy? Can you as parents, fathers and mothers, stand strong against killing of the girl infant and can you as parents allow your daughters to get the same education as sons and not give her away as if her marriage is a favor bestowed upon you? Can you make sure you train your sons to be responsible and not smother so much of selfish love into them that they never learn to appreciate but take things for granted? Can you teach your sons through your own behavior that women are to be respected and that they too should fight against injustice? Can you as a woman make sure you take care of yourself and not give so much away that your children and husband think that your only job is to give to them and that you are not important otherwise? Can you make sure you learn that while the love of a man is important to you, you will never give yourself away to norms that subjugate you to them? Can you men and women please, please not keep quiet at the face of injustice but talk to educate, teach and pave the path to justice?

Societies everywhere, ---men,  women--- adults, have stopped thinking and questioning for most part…and they lack the courage to stand up for what is right, or to even differentiate between right and wrong in the first place. Like robots, this society (as most societies) is machinated and runs on the engine of unjust (including gender) value systems ….so why would it not do something inhuman? Anything robotic is clearly far from anything humane. So, machinated, dehumanized products of a society can surely commit inhuman acts, right?

More generally, whatever the ills are in a society, clearly the source of change lies in the choices we make in creating the kind of society we wish to have….We… each one of us, through our choices and behavior, make or break the monsters in our societies.   If we can have the courage to give space to justice in small ways, the bigger picture will be just too. But if we lack courage, act blind and deaf in the name of culture and traditions well then aren’t we too responsible for the atrocities in our societies? Remembering Gandhiji, we have to be the ‘change we want to see” and for that we need the “truth force” to push against systematic, institutional wrongs through  the choices we make. As teachers we need to build the steps to this ladder by helping  young minds learn the skills to stand up for truth  and justice even if it means going alone.