Beginning With Mindfulness

Largely unheralded in the daily media, schools have been successfully experimenting with various methods for resolving conflicts, and preventing violence. I mention several in my original Skills of Peace article. They include such innovations as the "jigsaw" and Peace Games.

But outer peace and the interface of communication to reach it require inner work as well. The self-knowledge that allows for psychological awareness, for example. And the ability to calm the mind, to center and concentrate. The New York Times writes about one school in Oakland, California using a very ancient technique: meditation.

In their case, it is derived directly from Buddhist practice. The Times story starts:

The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness. With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.

Just another Bay Area fad? Well, first of all, Oakland is not San Francisco. The school is mostly black and Latino. And more to the point, real results are in the very next paragraph, from out of a student's mouth:

I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”

The story continues: Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.

Years ago, Jon Kobat-Zinn revolutionized medicine with his program of meditation and yoga applied to the most intractable back pain patients at the University of Massachusetts. Now these efforts in schools are adapting his methods.

Like the back pain efforts, this also zeroes in on a felt need: the ability of students to concentrate. “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a [Stanford] researcher. “But we never teach them how.”

It also applies to other problems students have, caused by anxieties and peer pressure. Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said.

The mindfulness program didn't begin in Oakland. Although mindful education may seem like a New Yorker caricature of West Coast life, the school district with possibly the best experience has been Lancaster, Pa., where mindfulness is taught in 25 classes a week at eight schools. The district has a substantial poverty rate, with 75 percent of students qualifying for free lunch.

Teachers report mixed success, which wouldn't surprise anyone who has tried to meditate. Even those who have been meditating for many years have problems--it is a vital part of the process, which is not always obvious to the inexperienced. But the need is so great in a generation surrounded by violence, even among their peers, that even a small help constitutes progress. Above all, linking outer peace with inner change is a crucial step forward toward equipping us all with effective skills of peace.