School Replaced Detention With Mindfulness Meditation to Create Incredible Results
We all know what happens when a child misbehaves at school: they’re sent to detention. But one school has taken a different approach to discipline — children are sent to meditation. We will see how this approach caused some incredible results.
Robert W. Coleman Elementary School in Baltimore, United States has been doing something different when students act out: offering meditation. The school has a meditation room instead of a detention room. The room looks nothing like a standard windowless detention room. Instead, it’s filled with lamps, decorations, and purple pillows.
All misbehaving kids are encouraged to sit in the room and go through meditation, helping them calm down and re-center. What they do is actually mindfulness meditation.
Mindful meditation has been around for thousands of years. Recently, science has started looking at its effects on our minds and bodies, and found some very interesting effects. For example, mindful meditation could give practicing soldiers a kind of mental armor against disruptive emotions and negative self talk. Another study revealed that mindful meditation can improve a person’s attention span and focus.
Taking help of the ancient Hindu practice of meditation, the school introduced the Mindful Meditation Room through a wonderful partnership with the Holistic Life Foundation. The school chose to break tradition and it seemed like a risky move. The question was, would it work?
Turns out, it did. The suspension rates in the school lowered and attendance increased significantly. Some of the students have mentioned how the program changed their lives. If they were taking a test, they would just start taking deep breaths. In the midst of noise, they would meditate to tune out all the noise and become one with themselves.
Best of all, the kids were bringing that mindfulness back home with them. One of the students recalled that in the middle of a conflict with their parents, they were about to lose their cool when they remembered the breathing techniques. After breathing in and out — the anger was gone. In the Oprah Magazine, Holistic Life Foundation co-founder Andres Gonzalez said: “We’ve had parents tell us, ‘I came home the other day stressed out, and my daughter said, “Hey, Mom, you need to sit down. I need to teach you how to breathe.”
This isn’t just happening at one school, either. Lots of schools are trying this kind of holistic thinking, and it’s producing incredible results. For example, in the UK, the Mindfulness in Schools Project is teaching adults how to set up programs. Mindful Schools, another nonprofit, is helping to set up similar programs in the United States.
We need a change in our detention system so that we can actually help these students become good human beings in the future. Robert W. Coleman School has set up a wonderful example to start the whole process. Now, we can only hope that all other schools may follow through.
Following through. It is the single most important thing that can make our world better.
If you want to meditate daily but cannot follow through, as Bethabit we are here to help you.
Wish you best
Andy Soraklis
