Mindfulness: Purposeful Pause in times of Crisis and Change
I have learned to appreciate the benefits of meditation and mindfulness during my years as an educator at Green School. The school has adopted the ‘Mindful Schools’ curriculum, and we frequently practice mindfulness along with our students and also as a faculty in staff meetings. From studying and teaching psychology, I have discovered research indicating the health benefits of mindful practices. I have also felt the benefits as an educator within the classroom community.
The school has a daily 2:00pm ‘gong’ that can be heard across our jungle campus. This signals the beginning of our ‘mindful moment’ when everyone (security guards, students, kitchen staff, faculty) stop what they are doing, take three deep mindful breaths, and then continue on with their day. It has become a part of the culture in our school. If there are parents on campus at that time (and there almost always are), they know the practice and they stop and participate. Yet, as I’ve often told my students at the beginning of our mindfulness exercises: although I appreciate and have witnessed the benefits, I am not a disciplined practitioner. I am beyond ‘busy’ most of the time, juggling teaching with administrative responsibilities in a school where ‘fast-paced’ cannot even begin to describe the ways in which we operate from hour to day to week to year. During mindfulness sessions in faculty meetings, I’m often going over mental ‘to-do’ lists, cataloguing priorities and drafting emails, unable to focus on the visualisation and centre my breath.
“Meditation and mindfulness cultivate patience” (Miller 2019, 209).
At the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in March of 2019, my school spiraled into crisis mode. I worked to support our teachers in adapting our relationship-centred, holistic, experiential and place-based program to online learning. The pressure to pull off a phenomenal program was higher than ever as enrolments were plummeting and the school was forced to downsize and lay off a significant portion of our staff. We needed to draft new policies, develop new procedures and protocols for online instruction, and ensure that our program did not lose its ‘Green School’ elements as our faculty pivoted again and again while juggling teaching and home responsibilities.
The anxiety became too much at times, and I had to start listening to my body, taking more movement breaks in between Zoom meetings for short meditations or yoga exercises.
As read the chapter on “Body-Mind Connections” in Jack Miller’s The Holistic Curriculum (2019), I thought about how a program similar to Linda Lantieri’s “Inner Resilience” program would be so beneficial to both students and faculty as they return to school (in whatever form that is) in autumn 2020. In August 2020, we are returning to school at Green School Bali, adapting our program once again to pod-style learning off school campus (using a number of the school’s satellite spaces, such as the farm) and we will have to implement a number of challenging protocols, including keeping the students apart from one another and keeping masks and/or face-shields on at all times. There will be (and already is) a lot of trauma over the crisis and how it has impacted families in our community. While our ‘Mindful Schools’ curriculum is fantastic, it is sporadically implemented at best and does not integrate into our SEL program in the same way that Lantieri’s program does. This leads me to wonder how we can adapt our approach to mindfulness to build resilience in our community — one that integrates mindfulness, social and emotional learning, and experiential community-building activities. I plan to work with the school team to implement such an approach in Aug 2020.
