Online Mindfulness

Mindfulness Fundamentals

Description:

Healthy stress is a natural part of life, including infancy. Adults as much as children must be challenged in order to grow and develop. However, in today’s education system and in modern life, healthy stress is often replaced by toxic stress. Toxic stress happens when life’s demands consistently overtake our ability to meet those demands.

/ Students

Stress affects focus, emotions, regulation of mood, sleep and preparation for daily learning in the classroom. Even more worrying, prolonged exposure to toxic stress in childhood has lifelong impacts on physical and mental health.

/ Educators

Stress starts with a decrease in productivity and creativity, and it progresses into more serious symptoms like frequent anxiety, dissasociation, frustration and finally exhaustion.

/ Parents

Too much stress can lead to a parenting style which looks more like a “to-do list” instead of an empathetic relationship centered around being present with the developing child.

It has been shown that exposure to parents’ stress in early infancy affects gene expression years after adolescence.

Even children that have not suffered adverse experiences in childhood can have problems with frequent “imbalances” between the severity of a stimulus (a routine surprise exam) and their reaction (loss of peripheal vision, sweating, nausea, fear, inability to move).

For children who suffer trauma, these “imbalances” become chronic and frequent. As toxic stress has it’s roots deep in the nervous system, we need tools which go further than the conceptual mind, so we can directly target the nervous system.

In order to transform our habitual responses, we need to practice our skills regularly when we are not in “fight-flight-freeze” mode.

How to meet this need:

/ Developing our full attention:Heightened awareness of our thoughts, emotions, feelings and the world around us.

/ Developing a full heart:The intentional development of positive mental states such as kindness and compassion.

By discussing how the practice of heightened awareness tackles stress and other problems in education, we don’t want to lose sight of the fact that heightened awareness can take us away from managing symptoms to a place where we are developing the most profound capabilities of the human mind.

Benefits:

/ Attention: Strengthens our “mental muscle” to develop the focus to where we want, and when we want.

/ Compassion: The awareness of our own thoughts, emotions and senses increases our compassion of what other people are going through.

/ Emotional Regulation: Observing our emotions helps us to recognise when they occur, to see their natural transitory and to change the way in which we respond to them.

/ Calming: Breathing and other mindfulness practices relax the body and mind, giving us access to peace regardless of the external circumstances.

/ Adaptability: Being aware of our patterns allows us to gradually change our regular behaviour with wisdom.

/ Resistence: Seeing things objectively reduces the amount of narrative that we add to the natural ups and downs of the world. Giving us more balance.