Teach mindfulness, invite happiness!

By objective measures, our young people are more anxious, more depressed, and have more psychopathology in general than students did a few decades ago. This has important implications for educators, school administrators, and society at large.

Sense of Failure
As we are all well aware, the current educational system is narrowing its definition of what defines student success. It’s almost all cognitive knowing, as evidenced by standardized testing. A young person could be a prodigy in one or more areas (kinesthetic, inter-personal, musical, ecological), yet still grow up thinking that he or she is a failure based on messaging given by the schools. As some students’ light dims and self-doubt grows, there’s a good chance that they won’t grow into their full brilliance and power.

How Mindfulness Can Help
Mindfulness is a way of paying attention to present-moment experience and doing so with kindness and curiosity. It is not cognitive but sensory, and so taps into and strengthens different but vitally important parts of the brain that have been neglected by traditional education. One crucial attribute of mindfulness is that it is practiced without judgment. Many of our students are so hard on themselves and their internal critic is so loud that just a few moments of being given permission to not judge can bring huge relief to body and mind. I have seen it bring students to tears.

Honoring True Genius
Sadly, many of the students never make the connection between mind and body, and just keep sinking into those self-defeating thoughts as they worry about how they will measure up on the next standardized test. These thoughts are contributing to the rise in mental illness and inhibiting students from reaching their full human potential. There is now ample evidence that mindfulness practice enhances positive emotions . Imagine the possibilities if we offered this to young people with developing brains! What if we helped all students make this simple connection and gave them the tools to strengthen their own inner knowing? What if we gave them permission to honor their true genius, even if we can’t measure it on a standardized test? What if we practiced full disclosure and acknowledged that there are many different kinds of intelligence, and that some cannot be measured by conventional means? What if schools gave equal time and emphasis to cultivating things like kindness and compassion?
It might just change everything.