Bringing Mindfulness to Higher Education
Young people are facing a full-blown mental health crisis. Since 2011, the clinical depression rate among youths has more than doubled. Suicide rates went up forty percent. This crisis was brewing long before Covid-19, but months of fear and isolation during the pandemic made it worse. As a college professor, I can testify to it. My students are struggling.
Sure, some students have always found college life too overwhelming. But now it seems like most of them. Students I meet in my classrooms are anxious and distracted, reporting loneliness even on a college campus. The low-achieving students are unmoored, they fade mid-semester, unable to either meet the demands of the course or ask for help. The high achievers strive and succeed but at a high price. They are stressed out, unable to relax or focus on one task at a time without obsessing about other things they need to accomplish.
If kids are not ok, neither are we, the educators. I’ve been overworked and stretched thin for a while. I couldn’t enjoy writing or other academic tasks that drew me to the field in the first place. It was all just another chore. I was going full gas in neutral. Did I mention that my neck and shoulders were killing me? My experience is not unique, I hear similar reports from friends and colleagues.
I needed a reset. This is how a couple of years ago I found myself at a yoga retreat. I was too tired to do actual yoga, but I went to a workshop billed as yoga-based stress management. Over four days, we explored theory and practice: from the neuroscience of stress and its effects on our bodies and minds to approaches to stress reduction — from spiritual to commonsense, from breathing exercises to basic planning. I can’t recall another time when I felt I was learning something so vital to my — and society’s overall — current moment. And as I was absorbing the workshop materials, I was thinking, this is so important, if I could only share this knowledge with others, especially with young people. And then, the light went on — I’m a college professor — I can do it!
I had a new calling. When I returned home, I took a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course at the UMass Memorial Medical Center and established a daily meditation practice. I enrolled in a training program at Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. I started going to silent meditation retreats at the Insight Meditation Society. Finally, I joined a Contemplative Pedagogy group on my campus, learning from colleagues who already incorporate mindfulness in their teaching.
These practices and training over time have transformed my life. I’ve been always interested in the mind-body connection, emotional regulation, and mindfulness. But now I was walking that path. I slowed down. I consciously extricated myself from commitments that I continued doing on autopilot. I’m less dependent on my own or others’ judgments, freeing my mind to focus on a task at hand, rather than worrying whether I’m fit to do it or being stuck on what the Buddhists call mental hindrances. When a problem arises — which happens all the time — I can approach it with more discernment and less panic. I have less physical pain. I’m less reactive and I’m treating myself and others with a lot more compassion. Simply put, I’m happier.
This is what I wanted to teach my students. Not to share my scholarly specialization, but much more vital stuff — how to be present for your life. How to find happiness in the mundane moments. How to persevere during hard times and how to treat your body and mind with awareness and intention. I understand that this was a tall order but I wanted a start.
I developed a one-credit honors course “Without Stress: From Ancient Wisdom Traditions to Neuroscience.” I knew I was doing something right months before the start of the semester. The course enrolled in minutes, and I received so many emails with requests to overenroll, that administrators had to open a waiting list, which also immediately filled up. The pleading emails continued weeks into the semester. Once we started, the feedback from the students was astounding: mostly they were thrilled to be assigned to breathe, to meditate, or just to take a break. They told me that normally, they feel guilty over every moment that they are not being productive or are not multitasking. This was brought home to me in a unit on Sabbath — a Jewish tradition of conscious rest (I’m a professor of Jewish Studies after all). I gave my students tiny sleeping bags for their phones, made by artist Jessica Kirzane. I invited students to see what it would feel like to put their phones away, to be present, not working, not responding to calls and pings, just being. Most of them have never tried it before. They came back stunned by how much calmer they felt and how much work they were able to do when their phones were down. Many adapted digital Sabbath as their new practice. As the semester progressed, and I distributed meditation logs to record their daily practice, I did it with some trepidation — would they have time for it? They did. The daily meditation turned out to be the most popular assignment — the students were hungry for it. For an opportunity to be mindful, for permission to pause, for an invitation to be happy.
Right now, the moment is ripe for incorporating mindfulness into our curriculum. We owe it to our students; we owe it to ourselves. This is not some kind of neo-liberal call for pulling ourselves up by the bootstraps. Mindfulness practice is not going to solve the democracy crisis, climate change, or racial injustice. But its absence surely impedes our progress. Being mindful will help us to see things clearly. As one of my meditation teachers, Winnie Nazarko, said, recognizing “what is” is the basis for any skillful action which is onward leading.
Resources:
Where can you start as an educator interested in mindfulness?
· Take an MBSR course online, at the UMass Memorial Medical Center, or at Brown University to learn the foundations of mindfulness and establish a daily practice.
· Continue with daily practice using an app such as Insight Timer (which is free)
· Find a group of like-minded colleagues interested in Contemplative Pedagogy, such groups exist now at several universities
· Build a network through the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (ACMHE)
· Read articles in The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry (JOCI)
About the author: Olga Gershenson is Professor of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies and of Film Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. To learn more about her work, see her website
