"What would you do for society if you had all the resources you needed?"

Whenever I am asked a question like this, I believe it starts with education. I'm an educator and I already have some resources at my disposal to effect social change by impacting on the students I teach.

I don't often talk about my role in education as it's not part of my wider identity and I don't like to be pigeon holed as a teacher as that has it's own connotations for many, which isn't entirely fair. Many have had their bad experiences at school and tar all teachers with the same brush. Truth be told, I'm not entirely happy with the education system as it stands as it is far too results driven and works to funnel you into universities and the workplace to support an economy and society that is far from perfect.

But I'm not here to criticise the education system - in fact, I work within it, and know that the teachers in my school teach critical thinking as best they can as it's a value they all abide by. They know that teaching kids to think is the best education they can give them, so they can apply the skills learnt on one project to another. This kind of flexible thinking is really hard to teach and needs to begin from an early age, and involves resilience when the first attempt fails, or the marks don't come back shiny and A+ as some kind of arbitrary model of excellence. But that's all pedagogy and I don't want to go into that into this post, especially as many people here believe in 'unschooling', which is awesome, but doesn't always see that in many instances teachers do a really good job at trying to prepare kids for life and inspire and motivate them to be amazing human beings. Teachers get a really bad rap here but there's so many of them being amazing - sadly, bureaucracy, funding and the powers that be can make our jobs pretty difficult.

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However, I'm also quite unhappy with the fact my school isn't adopting a whole school approach to teaching meditation, or mindfulness as it's pitched in a secular way. There's much research that suggests that if you don't have the executives on board you're going to fail at setting up any kind of mindful program for kids. This is quite depressing for me. I've seen the effects of mindful meditation on mental health (including my own) and I have read all the research I can on learning projects I've undertaken professionally. Right now I'm doing the best I can with what I've got in the classroom and the students love it - but this question says 'all the resources', so I'm presuming they include:

funding to train staff how to meditate and teach others to do so
funding for external meditation educators to come into the school and work with students
time resources to allow it it fit into the curriculum
funding across the states to allow this to be implemented across the entire country in every school, including indigenous communities

Why Mindfulness Education?

Mindfulness gives kids tools to understand and work with their nervous systems. They learn to focus their attention where it's needed, to regulate their emotions and to help move them away from thoughtless reaction to thoughtful, informed and conscious decisions in every aspect of their lives.

I think the concept of filling minds versus creating awareness of mind is where we need to focus.

This is pretty important in a world where the mortality rate is actually getting worse, not better, because of increased anxiety and stress. Teaching people to regulate their emotions and calm their fight or flight response has knock on effects for all sorts of life decisions, actions and reactions - drug use, violence, crime and so on, which in turn has a massive impact on society.

The education system too knows that it can help performance - there's been much research on this in the field of sports psychology, so it makes sense that this is also true in the classroom. When we learn to focus on one thing, we're calmer and our mind is more finely tuned and alert. We always do better when we pay attention to what we're doing.

And on the flipside, it's going to help with percieved failures too - to be able to self regulate and undrestand what our minds are really doing. I've seen kids really unable to deal with getting a lower grade and the kids that are able to regulate can take a breath and consider why it is they feel that way and translate it into something more useful - to see it as a learning experience, to understand it's not reflective of them as a person, and so on. Whilst I hate a grade based system that makes kids feel that way, in life, this is going to happen too - we're going to fail that job interview, be rejected by a lover, get our projects rejected. That's life.

Mindful training can also help students respond in a more balanced way by learning skills to recognize feelings in the body as sensation and learn tools to calm them down, like breathing strategies and observation and labeling of thoughts. When we're aware of our inner life and can observe it, we are less reactive and have more time to respond instead of act impulsively. I love the way the kids describe the effects of mindfulness in the video below. I teach secondary kids but they describe it in similar ways.

I also feel it makes them more free from the society that attempts to mould them in ways that bind them. If we're more aware of bodily reactions and sensations, we can make more real choices. Consider how advertising works, for example, by playing with our desires. If we can recognise that happening, we're going to be less likely to go down that route of 'having' to keep up with what society wants us to be, what it wants us to buy, to like, how to operate. The use of social media can be recognised as a distraction, comfort, an illusion rather than a determining identity.

So many of our mental health problems are lined to our understanding of our identity as fixed - by teaching kids that identity is fluid and constructed by our response to external stimuli we could do a lot to freeing them from these terrible self judgements. Consider teen eating disorders linked to the desire for acceptance. If we could teach them to recognise the body sensations in response to stimuli and label 'oh, I am feeling the desire to belong' and not react to it, would we go down such desperate and damaging routes? We're not really taught to recognise sensations in our bodies as biochemical processes linked to brain function - the most basic understanding of our bodies in time and space really needs to be taught.

Mindfulness also helps us to be more compassionate and empathetic because we're able to stop and consider what the other person might be feeling before we react. And that's something that society really needs. The cry of 'go back to where you came from' in Australia in fear of asylum seekers due to being brainwashed by a media that makes us fear the other is an example - if we could be truly mindful we may understand the 'other' as one of us and not react with fear that our jobs will be stolen, our children raped and other such bullshit that is perpetuated as truth. Because mindfulness teaches us to be curious and compassionate about our own experience and thoughts, it helps foster compassion to others. To cultivate self compassion is thus to cultivate compassion for others.

And who doesn't think that a more compassionate society is a better and more improved society?

Students get it - why doesn't the education system?

You only have to show a few youtube clips on how the brain works and how mindfulness works, get them to experience the process and they're hooked. They get it. Students love learning about themselves. They love learning about their brains, psychology, how they tick - they're trying to figure out how everything works, including themselves and others.

This stuff blows them away. They ask all the time why it isn't implemented on a whole school level. Why isn't there lunchtime sessions for them? Why don't they do it at the start and close of every lesson? I get asked this all the time. I love the fact that they come into my classroom and ask for it. They know they're stressed, and they know it helps. I can think of no better service to society on a Friday afternoon period 5 leading students through a meditative practice and literally watching them melt into the floor and their whole energy levels shift and float out of the room.

Sadly I don't have the resources at my disposal because I have a principal that thinks ten minutes of silence in church on Sunday is enough for him, so it must be enough for everyone else. The aging head of welfare isn't supportive - she knows it's good, and glibly smiles and encourages me verbally, but when it comes to helping me implement it, she's not too forthcoming.

I'll keep pushing, because it's important to me, but damn, unless I get support from the school, all I can do is keep doing it on a micro level in the classroom, hoping that I'm contributing in some small way toward a collective freedom in society.

https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU9f4FK9j91cnUGYk9hnMXuYdAFcnF6ekkpXZ5DfiByfG