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Page 2 of 2 Mindfulness
and related contemplative techniques have been making strong inroads in
recent years as effective prevention tools, Greenberg says, because
their effectiveness in bringing about certain desirable outcomes is
being proven in setting after setting, and federal grant-making agencies
and foundations are taking notice. Mindfulness
practices can increase people’s awareness of their own emotions and
their ability to regulate them. This can make it possible for them to
reduce feelings of depression and anxiety, and since a “pretty good
percentage of teenagers are at risk for depression,” it’s important to
have it in the educational tool bag. Another critical element that has
made mindfulness appealing to educators is its effectiveness in
increasing attention, “the ability to aim our cognitive capacities in
one direction with as little distraction as possible.” Attention is one
of the greatest challenges for children, and perhaps only more so in a
world offering so much distraction so frequently. Greenberg
says mindfulness has something else going for it. “Mindfulness is not
just a series of practical techniques. It helps us have the ethical
character we need to live in the world. It carries with it a world view
of not harming others.” Some may think that mindfulness needs to be
married to Buddhist ethics, such as expressed in the Eightfold Path.
Greenberg feels, however, that inherent mindfulness helps us to realize
that we live in an interconnected world and puts us in touch with the
golden rule. To
this end, Greenberg founded a program in his center called the Program
on Empathy Awareness and Compassion in Education (PEACE), which focuses
on ways to promote pro-social behavior. He and colleague Patricia
Jennings have also done groundbreaking work with the Garrison
Institute’s initiative on contemplation and education. The teacher
training program that Jennings directs as part of the initiative
recently received a second major grant from the U.S. Department of
Education to study the effects of mindfulness and related practices with
classroom teachers. The first grant worked with teachers in and around
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The second grant— approximately $5 million
over four years, divided among Garrison, Fordham University, and Penn
State—will take the program into New York City schools. Programs
that use yoga for both students and teachers have also been an
important part of Greenberg’s research agenda. In Baltimore, he has been
involved in a study of the work of the Holistic Life Foundation, which
teaches yoga to fifth graders in inner city schools as a means of
helping them work with their emotions and find peace within their
bodies. Likewise, with support from the 1440 Foundation, he has begun
work on a study involving teachers practicing yoga prior to the start of
the school day as a way to prepare themselves both physically and
mentally for the challenges in their classrooms. Another
prevention center program focuses on improving parenting skills.
Parents take a class once a week for seven weeks. They’re first asked to
do short reflections on topics such as gratitude and caring. Then, the
focus turns to mindfulness skills: becoming more aware of your emotions
and your child’s emotions, learning how to listen deeply to your child,
even when they are telling you things you’re not so happy about, trying
to be low in reactivity and not so automatic in your reaction, learning
to be more present in the moment. From there, the class moves into
compassion skills such as remembering how difficult it was to be a
teenager, to have compassion for their own parents and the struggles
that they now see their parents had with them. The center recently
received a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to
investigate the effectiveness of this program by studying 600 families
over a four-year period. The
scope of the work that Greenberg and his colleagues have been doing
covers all age groups and all facets of the developmental environment of
children in ways that break new ground in how mindfulness might be
defined. While children who are three or four cannot practice
mindfulness per se, they still have inherent mindfulness, which they can
discover and benefit from. Greenberg works with a curriculum in Head
Start programs that has been shown to improve children’s readiness to
become students in a classroom. One
of the practices they use is the turtle. “We tell a story about a
little turtle who has lots of problems,” he says. “The turtle sometimes
gets very sad or very mad, but then the turtle goes into her shell,
where it’s very quiet and she can take some deep breaths and calm down
and think, ‘What’s going on with me? How am I feeling?’ Then, we teach
them to do turtle, which is just crossing their hands across their chest
and taking a deep breath. When children are upset, teachers and parents
can prompt them to use turtle as a way of calming down and using their
thinking skills.”
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