LIFE

Kids can benefit from mindfulness meditation

Mary Guip For
Living & Being
Lily, left, and Fiona practice a moment of mindfulness meditation.

With the new school year just around the bend, mindfulness meditation is being turned to with hopes for the same benefits for adolescents as scientifically substantiated for adults.

Mindfulness is now accepted as a practice for coping with the daily stress of living in the modern world and for alleviating symptoms to improve physical and emotional well-being.

There are many studies looking at the benefits of teaching mindfulness as part of the regular academic curriculum. In the United Kingdom, based at the University of Oxford, a $10 million grant has been awarded by the Wellcome Trust for the MYRIAD (My Resilience In Adolescence) project, which will include nearly 150 public schools, reaching an estimated 7,000 students over the next five years. It is a randomized controlled trial investigating how schools prepare young people to manage their emotional health.

“It is based on the knowledge that adolescence is a vulnerable time for the onset of mental illness: 75 percent of mental disorders begin before the age of 24, and half by age 15. By promoting good mental health and intervening early, particularly in the crucial childhood and teenage years, we can help to prevent mental illness from developing and mitigate its effects when it does (Department of Health, 2011),” from the center’s website.

The study will determine the best ages to introduce mindfulness as a valuable life skill. It will also look at the cost effectiveness and the best way to train teachers to implement the curriculum.

For the study, a curriculum called .b (dot-be) is being used. It is based on the highly regarded secular adult courses, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy, which have significant supporting clinical data for numerous applications, including anxiety, depression, cardiovascular health and chronic pain, to name a few. It is expected to find similar benefits for our younger population.

The curriculum .b is a nine-session experiential mindfulness program designed for schools for adolescents ages 11-17. Some of the reported benefits for students include: feeling calmer and happier, improved focus and concentration, coping with stress, testing anxiety and low mood, better sleep, self-confidence and compassion, and for students to reach goals academically, personally, creatively and athletically.

Students learn simple breathing, awareness techniques and community-building exercises. They learn about how stress affects them physically and emotionally, and how to feel into the sensations of different emotional states in the present moment to mitigate difficult emotions before it turns into problematic actions.

The program .b is an actual practice for catching stress right when it occurs. It stands for “Stop, Breathe and Be” — feel your feet, feel your breathing and just “be” right where you are. It helps students to pause and get grounded so they can reset before difficult emotions have an opportunity to take over.

There are other meditation programs being offered to schools, such as “MindUP,” from the actress Goldie Hawn’s Hawn Foundation, and film director David Lynch has given a boost through his Lynch Foundation to a program called “Quiet Time,” based on Transcendental Meditation (TM). Originally taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in the late 1960s, and made famous by numerous celebrity practitioners such as The Beatles, Mia Farrow and Clint Eastwood, TM still draws celebrity practitioners today. TM uses a mantra — sounds or words, said repetitiously to help students to calm and concentrate with reported positive results.

It may not be long — our children may have the opportunity to attend a supportive mindfulness meditation class in between science and math as the demand for stress reduction and resilience training is honored in the classroom.

Mary Guip

Mary Guip, BBA, RN, ERYT-500, is a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction teacher and Mindfulness in Schools Project certified teacher. She leads Mindfulness courses in the Hudson Valley. Visit www.Mid-HudsonMindfulnessMBSR.com for more information. Contact her at108MaryG@gmail.com