If every 8-year-old is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation. ~Dalai Lama
MINDFULNESS IN THE CLASSROOM
Meditative Training Helps Kids Thrive
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by Ronica O’Hara
hen I feel like I really want to get angry and yell, I sometimes, like, take deep breaths. My brain slows down and I feel more calm and I’m ready to speak to that person.” Those self-aware words come from a 5-year-old Los Angeles girl in the film Just Breathe. A 9-year-old boy in a tough British neighborhood forgets about “all the scary stuff ” when he does “petal breathing”—opening and closing his fingers in time with his breath. “If I concentrate on my breathing, the worrying thoughts just go ‘pop’ and disappear,” he confided to The Guardian newspaper. This is the effect that mindfulness training in the classroom often has on students, and it’s key to why it’s happening all over the world—not just in the U.S. and the UK, but in more than 100 countries, including Australia, Taiwan and India. What started a few decades ago as a small experiment in progressive schools is rapidly gathering speed as emerging research documents the strong positive effects of mindfulness on developing brains.
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Seattle
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A 2015 meta-review from researchers at the University of Melbourne, in Australia, which evaluated 15 studies in six countries involving 1,800 students, showed three broad outcomes: higher well-being, better social skills and greater academic achievement. They were more optimistic, self-accepting and happier, more likely to help others, more able to focus on lessons and be creative, and less likely to be angry, anxious or disobedient. “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally,” is how it’s described by Jon Kabat-Zinn, whose pioneering research at Harvard in the 1980s helped kick off mindfulness as a scientifically based, nonsectarian approach to a calmer, clearer mind. It has spread since then into business, health care and professional sports, as well as schools: Googling “mindfulness in education” brings up 116 million links. “Mindfulness offers children the skills they need today to meet the age-old challenges of growing up within the new
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healthy kids
