Mindfulness matters

“You could say that mindfulness is like a personal app that allows you to see what's playing out in your mind whenever you pause to notice it. Without this awareness, the unnoticed thoughts, beliefs, memories, and feelings sit at the control panel of your mind, pushing your buttons and controlling your behaviors”.

When many forces converge with the same message, it is time to consciously recognize the importance of that line of thinking and engage with it, as indicated by the image above (drawn on my iPad using the Mindmap App Fluent MM then adding layers with Adobe ideas). A recent online writing workshop with HASTAC highlighted (through Amanda Strauss’’ presentation) the value of mindfulness in our work. In my interviews with educators I have been referred to mindfulness by three research participants. A midwife drew a picture indicating the balance needed between soul matters and information, a doctor involved at a non-governmental organization (Perinatal Mental Health Project ) shared the value of mindfulness as a strategy for engaging with individual’s lifestories, and our Head of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology handed me papers on mindfulness in education at the end of our interview.

Last week I used an open access resource with my students. It was a recording of a mindfulness exercise. The impact of those 7 minutes was significant. A number of students made themselves comfortable lying on the floor while others came to speak to me afterwards. There was a different flow of energy that permeated our being and becoming. Ergas (2015) encourages us to engage with the lived experience of education rather than the structured curricular process which tends to be seen as linear.

Jon Kabat-Zinn is renowned for his work at the Massachusetts Medical School where he developed a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) programme in 1979. However it was only in the 1990s that mindfulness started making an increasingly important impact in education. Now in 2015, educators in all disciplines including Obstetrics are asking how it can be incorporated into curricular and pedagogical practices. Hyland (2015:171) reminds us that mindfulness “simply means ‘paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment and nonjudgmentally’ in a way which ‘nurtures greater awareness, clarity, and acceptance of present-moment reality’”.

By using contemplative practices Ergas (2015:204) points out that we “are introducing an alternative curricular deliberation; one that inevitably challenges the very concept of ‘curriculum’ as a ‘course of study’ and its implications to our conception of life-meaning and where we ought to look for it (in here and/or out there).”.... It is about dwelling in the here and now, and gradually realising that there is no place ‘better’ than now. Paradoxically, this is a radical critique of the very essence of the ‘curriculum’, which inevitably proposes that reaching the ‘end’ of ‘the course of study’ will in effect bring us to a ‘better’ time and place”.

Ergas,O. 2015.  The Deeper Teachings of Mindfulness.  Journal of Philosophy of Education. 49:2..

Hyland, T. 2015. On the Contemporary Applications of Mindfulness: Some Implications for Education. Journal of Philosophy of Education. 49:2.