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The act of reading aloud can be a mindfulness practice

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The act of reading aloud can be a mindfulness practice

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Reading used to be a social activity, not something we did silently to ourselves. For thousands of years, we shared the news of the day around a crowded dinner table or a bar, and stories were told aloud after tea and chores. Perhaps now is a good time to revive the art of reading aloud as a form of connection and community.

Interestingly, perhaps because of the vast span of historical time when reading also meant experiencing sound, even when we are reading silently to ourselves it turns out we're still "hearing." When we're settled into our favorite book, or armed with our paper on the train (indeed, as you're reading these words to yourself right now), auditory processing areas light up in our brains.

Today, it's not unusual to attend a mindfulness retreat and hear someone read a passage aloud. Reading aloud and listening to someone read aloud can be a great way to tune in to the present moment and bring our mindfulness practice to life. And while there's also evidence that reading aloud can improve comprehension and memory, it is simply a wonderful opportunity to be present with friends and family.

To use reading aloud as a kind of mindfulness practice, we should remember that mindfulness is about awakening to the moment.

Elaine Smookler, a performer, singer, psychotherapist, and mindfulness teacher (and regular Mindful columnist), suggests that to use reading aloud as a kind of mindfulness practice, we should remember that mindfulness is about awakening to the moment.

"Mindfulness is about engagement," says Smookler. If we're reading but not necessarily connecting with the other person, or we're trying to make ourselves sound a certain way, we can easily slip into automatic pilot. "But, if we can courageously stand on the precipice of opening up a book, take a few breaths, and enter into sharing with another person-staying close to the intention of being present-reading aloud can be a powerful instrument of connection."

How Reading Aloud Can Be a Mindfulness Practice

1. Start Small

Just as you start meditating in shorter bouts that became longer over time, give yourself permission here to do the same. Books of short fiction, poetry, and essays are great for reading aloud. You might start with a two-person reading practice, one-on-one with a partner. Depending on the person, it could be a lovely nighttime wind-down ritual. Take turns reading, so that you can spend time with the intimate experience of being read to as well as the way that reading the words out loud makes you feel and see images differently.

2. Surprise Yourself

Remember that the idea is to be engaged in the moment, to allow ourselves to be surprised and shaken out of the routine of our own habits of mind. "So, if we are engaged, we might read it one way today and another way tomorrow. If we're reading the same way every day then we've already lost track of the intention of mindfulness, which is to be present in the moment," says Smookler.

4. Play, Don't Rush

The goal is not to get to the end of the story but to experience it fully. Feel the way your breath shapes the words. Don't be afraid to laugh; don't be afraid to weep; to stop and ask questions, and to say, "Again!" as a child would after their favorite story ends for yet another time, only a moment later to begin anew. Smookler suggests that no matter how you approach it, don't let it be about falling in love with the sound of your voice, or negatively judging how you sound, even if it's a "squeak."

5. Encourage Others

In our modern book clubs, we all commit to reading the same book together-yet we do the reading part alone. If you're already part of a book club, you might suggest reading the first few chapters of the next book together, even if you meet virtually. Encourage people to take notes about their favorite passages or ideas as someone reads, or to close their eyes and simply take it in. When the chapter is over, if you've found a particularly beautiful or insightful line, have someone repeat it and then have a silent meditation for two minutes to reflect. Then share.

6. Read Aloud Alone

Reading aloud can also be a way to spend some quality time alone connecting with the voice and mind of a beloved author, rather than scrolling through social media feeds. Pick a favorite book, a favorite speech, monologue, lesson, essay, or poem. Can you feel the voice of the author or character as you read aloud? Does it help you connect to them in a different way?

7. Memorize a Favorite Poem or Prose Passage

Embodying a piece of writing, out loud, without reading, offers a unique way to connect with the present moment. Once memorized, those words will always be with you, just like your breath is.

From embracing our emotions to exploring what makes us healthy, here's what the mindful editors are reading this month. Read More

The Mindful Editors look back on their favourite books from this year, covering diverse topics such as mindful communication, racial justice, and simply being. Read More

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How Reading Aloud Can Be a Mindfulness Practice - Mindful

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Reading used to be a social activity, not something we did silently to ourselves. For thousands of years, we shared the news of the day around a crowded dinner table or a bar, and stories were told aloud after tea and chores.

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Add some mindfulness to story time with this selection of books, written to help kids appreciate their world from the inside out.

When I was a kid back in the eighties, we had lots of cool books. We had Clifford the Big Red Dog, Curious George, and The Berenstain Bears. There were countless stories with morals and endearing, memorable characters, but I can't recall a single example that suggested mindfulness: awareness of breath, conscious self-talk, slowing down the moments, tapping into the senses as a way to come into the present moment for ourselves as well as for others.

Today, the number of well-written, thought-provoking children's picture books with a mindful component is growing by the moment. Adding a mindful book or two to the current cannon of bedtime stories feels like adding an extra nutrient to the meal. We are planting seeds of empowerment in our youngsters to grow into young adults who can appreciate their world from the inside out.

Adding a mindful book or two to the current cannon of bedtime stories feels like adding an extra nutrient to the meal.

I pulled together seven mindfulness-based illustrated children's books published over the last year that are worthy of a closer look. I lugged them around in a canvas bag on a road trip with my eight-year-old and two-year-old daughters, who were more than happy to add their insights and judgments. We gave them each multiple read-throughs in a range of places, times and environments, allowing the message of mindfulness to sink in deeply, and giving the books more than one chance to impress us. Here's what we discovered.

A World of Pausabilities pulls us into a neighborhood on a summer day that could be any neighborhood on any day. There, we see both children and adults applying mindfulness to everyday moments by taking a pause. The illustrations are crisp and active, depicting all sorts of people delving into the richness of moments like eating an apple and taking a slow, silent walk. The words rhyme, child-like in their simplicity. After reading this book, I started noticing pausabilities all over the place in my world-little bursts of extra mindfulness while brushing my teeth and walking the dog.

(one of three books in a series, between I Am Yoga and I Am Human) reads more like an aspiration than a tale. It takes us through one, slowed-down moment with a child who is using mindfulness to bring about peace when his thoughts are worrisome. "I give myself a moment. I take a breath. And then I tell myself, it's alright." Peter Reynolds' illustrations are simple and endearing, peace signs abound. In a perfect world, people of any age will have access to the same sanity and peace that the child in this book has.

Crab and Whale tells us the simple story of a crab that helps a whale make it through a tough day by using calming breathing and encouraging awareness of his senses. When the whale is washed up onto the shore, the crab tells him, "I'll stay with you until the tide comes in." I was touched by this gesture, and the profound significance of staying with our loved ones when they are going through a hard time. Readers will find this tiny tale helpful in that it shows how mindfulness can be an offering not only to ourselves, but to others when they may need it most.

Author Kira Willey is a children's music and yoga expert. You can feel her wide-awake energy in the pages of Breathe Like a Bear. Thirty bite-sized mini-meditations-with names such as "Candle Breath" and "Wake Up Your Face"-are accompanied by fanciful, super-inviting animal images. The author has sectioned off the meditations by energy: "Be Calm," "Focus," "Imagine," "Make Some Energy," and "Relax." But I could easily see this as being a family-friendly coffee table book that adults and children alike can pick up, open to any random page, do the tiny practice and be a just a bit more mindful and centered because of it.

Each page of Breathe and Be offers a miniature poem to tune the mind to the pitch of that which is nourishing and beautiful. "There's a quiet place in my head like an egg hidden in a nest." The clever and delicate drawings are not to be rushed through. My eight-year-old daughter declared, "Wow, this is my favorite one." Breathe and Be is, to put it simply, classy. It would be as much a gorgeous book to give to my daughter as a gift as to give to my mother. It has a lovely timeless quality about it. I could see having this one on my shelf for generations.

6. I AM A WARRIOR GODDESS
By Jennifer Adams
Illustrated by Carme Lemniscates
Sounds True

The half-wall next to my eight-year-old daughter's desk is filled with post-it notes marked with mis-spelled positive affirmations: "you got ths" and "you r luvd," they say. I could easily sneak one in there that says, "I m a worior godiss." The book, I Am a Warrior Goddess feels as simple as a collection of pages of encouraging self-talk for my daughters. The illustrations are fun and lively, telling us the story of a sweet little redhead who talks to herself wisely and affirmatively- the way we are teaching our young girls to speak to themselves.

My Magic Breath is a colorful manual on how to use breath as a tool that can be practiced alongside specific visualizations in order to work with negative, unwelcomed thoughts. Personally, I'm not a fan of the notion that we need to blow sad thoughts completely "off the page," as I believe there is a place for them in the holistic narrative as well. But, using breath with positive imagery is a very effective way to create space in the psyche for more pleasant thoughts. My two-year-old-who adores blowing out fake birthday candles-really resonated with this one. Regardless of the specifics, I'm a big fan of bringing awareness to the breath, as this book most certainly does.

*Indicates that the book includes a guided meditation.

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Seven Mindful Children's Books - Mindful

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Add some mindfulness to story time with this selection of books, written to help kids appreciate their world from the inside out. When I was a kid back in the eighties, we had lots of cool books. We had Clifford the Big Red Dog, Curious George, and The Berenstain Bears.

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Check list to ensure your teaching of mindfulness is trauma informed 

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Check list to ensure your teaching of mindfulness is trauma informed 

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"If you're unintentionally portraying that it's really important to close your eyes, they can misinterpret that," Himelstein said. In fact, it's common for folks who have been traumatized to misinterpret a neutral direction.
2. Establish a sense of safety
"There are some situations in some school settings where youth are not that safe because there's violence that happens," Himelstein said. "If you're not in a place where kids feel physically safe, then you probably shouldn't be doing any deep practices."

Kids can feel vulnerable when attempting to be present in the moment, so physical safety is key. Establishing that kind of safety may take some extra culture-building in the classroom first.
3. Build relational mindfulness
This set of strategies is about building the type of community where students feel safe practicing mindfulness. Teachers can help make their classroom feel safe to students with clear boundaries that are predictable. Group norms or agreements developed with students are one way to do this.

"For people who have experienced trauma those things tend to not be present, so the more you practice predictability by practicing group agreements, and building authentic relationships between you and the youth, and among the youth, it starts to feel more safe," Himelstein said.

It can be tricky to know if relational trust has been built, but Himelstein said when students are more willing to share openly about themselves or they're relating class material to their own lives, that's one sign they feel safe. Of course it's complicated because of different personality types, some of which may naturally be more reserved. But even with introverted students, teachers can often tell if trust is there through their writing or if they share something out loud even once.

"You can check in with the youth and not just leave it up to your own assessment or guesswork in terms of where they're at in feeling safe and that there's trust in the room," Himelstein said. If there's more work to be done, trust games and icebreakers can help people get more comfortable.
4. Understand intersectionality. Be mindful of implicit bias and culture.
Mindfulness cannot be detached from the other ways teachers interact with students in the classroom. Himelstein said it's important to take note if, for example, girls are being punished more harshly for the same behavior a male student exhibits, but for which he isn't punished.

"It depends on the context, but I've definitely coached some teachers and therapists who work in diverse settings in terms of who they call on the most, who gets the most energy, how their expectations are shifting depending on different folks," Himelstein said.

If students think a teacher is unfair based on race, gender, sexuality or any other identity marker, that will undermine the relational trust needed to facilitate mindfulness and mental health.

"In my work with youth, I never divorce the practice of mindfulness from the greater sphere of building an authentic relationship with that young person," Himelstein said. "I don't divorce intersectionality from the practice of mindfulness."
5. Understand the "window of tolerance" and be on the lookout for it
Imagine two parallel lines. Within those lines is the window of tolerance for physiological arousal. Outside of that is when people may experience tunnel vision, when they can't think straight. Outside the window of tolerance students may be hyperaroused when they're extremely angry or hypervigilant. But students can also be hypo-aroused, when they're disassociated from their surroundings. In both of these states, students won't be able to follow directions.

Himelstein remembers meeting his wife for lunch after a therapeutic session with a client that triggered him. He couldn't physically read the menu because his prefrontal cortex was offline. "My brain was down regulating," he said. "I wasn't quite in fight, flight or freeze, but I was on the way there."

If teachers can recognize those moments with students, they can use other interventions to help students get back into the window of tolerance. Those might include listening to music, playing a rhythm game, dancing -- something that doesn't require the student to process directions.

A teacher might notice a student is getting triggered and naturally take a break from instruction to listen to some music or play a quick game without calling attention to the student who is triggered. This works better if these types of movement or music breaks are already part of the DNA of the classroom. Then it doesn't feel odd or out of place to students when a teacher uses it as a tool to intentionally support a specific student.

"You're hoping in some way the music moves them, not emotionally, but there's something about the music they like," Himelstein said. "Maybe they get that head bob going. That's what you're looking for."

He remembers one young woman he worked with who had been estranged from her father for several years because of his drug addiction. She finally felt ready to reach out to him to try to build a new relationship when she found out he had died of an overdose. Himelstein was with her when she got the news. The young woman was in shock and no mindfulness techniques would have worked at that moment. Instead, Himelstein put on a song he knew his client liked, and they sat and listened until she came out of shock and back into her window of tolerance.
6. The paradox of mental training
The paradox is that paying attention to the present moment -- the heart of a mindfulness practice -- won't always make a person feel calmer. But, at the same time, practicing mindfulness when one isn't upset builds a toolkit that could be useful to stay calm in stressful situations. Himelstein said this is a contradiction teachers have to embrace in this practice.

Deep breathing exercises or a body scan are strategies to practice in a calm state. They can help with stress reduction and emotional management. The goal is to make them part of everything that happens in the classroom so they're second nature, and students can draw on these tools when they need them without thinking.

Himelstein trains youth and guards in juvenile detention centers in these techniques. Recently a young person told him that when a guard called him a name he naturally took a deep breath, providing him the slightest bit of space to consider the consequences of taking action, and preventing him from getting triggered.

"I've heard that in juvenile hall, in education settings, in so many situations," Himelstein said.
7. When teaching mindfulness, prioritize somatic-based exercises.
"The body tends to have the ability to help ground people a little more, or at least not trigger as much," Himelstein said. Especially if students are not used to mindfulness, or don't feel comfortable with it, keeping them out of their heads can be a good thing. Instead focus on how deep breathing feels in the belly and the chest. Do body scans or remind young people to think about the sensations in their bodies.

"When youth don't have a clear sense of what they're supposed to be doing, and it's not as tangible, it's easier for their minds to wander and stumble upon traumatic memories," Himelstein said.
8. Don't over-identify with mindfulness logistics
It can be counterproductive to insist too strenuously that mindfulness look a certain way. Things like keeping eyes closed, holding the hands in a certain way, or having a particular body posture really don't matter, and can lead to power struggles.
9. Think about daily mindfulness interventions.
There are lots of informal ways to bring some of the benefits of focusing on the present into the classroom. It might become routine at the start of the day, or when class begins, to do a mindful check-in: Each student takes a deep breath, and shares how they are feeling at the present moment. Himelstein always encourages youth to use a real emotion like angry/frustrated/happy/sad, as opposed to more generic statements like good/bad. It's also not too much of a stretch to add some element of academic content to these activities.

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Nine Ways To Ensure Your Mindfulness Teaching Practice Is Trauma-Informed | KQED

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"If you're unintentionally portraying that it's really important to close your eyes, they can misinterpret that," Himelstein said. In fact, it's common for folks who have been traumatized to misinterpret a neutral direction. 2. Establish a sense of safety "There are some situations in some school settings where youth are not that safe because there's violence that happens," Himelstein said.

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Each school year, educators, students, and families prepare for a new, yet familiar rhythm. Despite many teachers' best planned lessons, best decorated boards, and most innovative stations, they may be surprised to find that some of their students are simply not learning, are having trouble paying attention, or are even too emotionally dysregulated to engage in the basics of math, writing, and reading.

There are a lot of good reasons this could be going on, and we might jump to ADHD, ODD, laziness, or any number of common "culprits" behind such behaviors. If we forget to investigate why those behaviors might be showing up in the first place, we can overlook the impact of toxic stress and trauma on our students.

With a trauma-sensitive approach we don't necessarily need to know the reasons or causes, but we can create an environment that allows all nervous systems to access regulation.

Eric Jensen, author of Teaching with Poverty in Mind, stated, "the brain that is susceptible to adverse environmental effects is equally susceptible to positive, enriching effects." This means that while you may know the traumas your students have experienced and cannot change their history, you can help them to feel safe, valued, calm, and hopeful in your classroom. That's pretty powerful!

Here are a few ideas to create that in your classroom using a mindful approach.

1. Take a deep breath, and shift your frame of reference for students. Rather than asking, "What is wrong with this child?," ask, "What has happened to this child?" You may not find the answer, but trauma-sensitive teachers create awareness by understanding the trauma response. Hyper-vigilance, fear, shame, and guilt are typical reactions to trauma, and the corresponding behavior is usually not purposefully manipulative, defiant, or avoidant. Rather, it is adaptive and functional for the child to get what they need. Understanding behavior this way can help you think through other ways for your students to get their needs met.

2. Practice self-awareness by knowing your own triggers and know how to regulate yourself. You can help a child regulate their body when you regulate yours. It's a bit like a superpower, and it has a fancy name: interpersonal neurobiology, but the concept is quite simple. When an adult is calm, regulated, and using their prefrontal cortex, students can co-regulate with the adult, helping to calm their own limbic structures and engage their prefrontal cortex. In other words, by being in the presence of a calm and regulated adult, children can become calmer and their brains and bodies can learn from the adult's regulation.

3. Build relationships with students not based on academics. Find out what they like to do, who their favorite pop or rap star is, and what movie they want to watch. Building relationships with caring adults is a powerful protective factor for young people. You may find that once your students know you care about them as people, they'll care about what you say and teach them.

4. Teach your students about their brains, their stress response system, and basic coping skills they can access in your classroom, like soothing themselves, breathing mindfully, and asking for help.

5. Create a space for students when they need to take a pause. A calm corner may be a place in your classroom where students can choose to go when they need to--to de-stress or help regulate themselves after experiencing a big emotion. It's important that this space is not used as punishment, but only as a tool to help students. You can include stress balls, paper to tear up, sand timers, Hoberman spheres, mirrors to identify emotions, and other mindful tools.

6. Provide students with choices. This can be as simple as asking, "Do you want to use a pen or pencil?" or "Would you like to sit over here by me, or by the bookshelf where it's less distracting?" Most children, especially those who have experienced trauma, have had very few opportunities to make their own choices. By ensuring their voices are heard and giving them options, students can feel a greater sense of power and agency, thus safety.

7. Be aware of potential triggers when practicing mindfulness with your students. For instance, give them the option to look down at their hands or the floor rather than closing their eyes, as keeping their eyes closed may be a trigger. Additionally, ensure that all mindfulness practices are an invitation and a choice. If a student is not able or willing to participate in a breathing exercise or mindfulness activity, do not force them to or threaten disciplinary action. Rather, take a moment to get below their eye level, let them know you are there for them, and give them a suitable alternative choice.

When we think about our students' learning brains, we might imagine an upstairs and a downstairs. The upstairs brain, namely the prefrontal cortex (PFC), is our academic brain, and helps us with executive functioning skills like planning, organizing, regulating, and inhibiting impulses.

The downstairs brain consists of our limbic system (including the amygdala), which is responsible for our fight/flight/freeze response and bypasses the PFC so our bodies can respond quickly to threats of danger (perceived or real). What does this look like?

Stress hormones cortisol and adrenaline flood the brain

Muscles contract and eyes dilate

Palms may get sweaty

Heart rate increases

The body is ready to fight, run away, or freeze to survive. The most critical thing to remember is that our brains and bodies are wired for survival. Even though we're not all necessarily facing predatory animals in the wild, our brains respond the same way to other events in our lives.

When the brain is under stress and feels like it needs to be in fight/flight/freeze mode, the upstairs brain turns off, and the body relies on the downstairs brain. That means those higher-order, executive functioning skills are inaccessible. Usually, a stressful event results in a brief elevation of cortisol, and this can help us perform better (think: "getting in the zone" for a sports game, performance, or test). While good in small doses, large amounts of stress can be toxic for our brains and bodies. When we're faced with trauma, our brains are constantly in this state of toxic stress.

Trauma can include one of the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) identified by researchers in a CDC-Kaiser Permanente Study. These are:

Emotional, physical, or sexual abuse

Neglect

A parent who is incarcerated, gets a divorce, has a mental illness, has experienced domestic violence, or abuses alcohol or drugs

Trauma can also include immigration/migration/refugee status, institutional trauma (e.g. from the foster care system or juvenile detention), or experiencing bullying or witnessing community or neighborhood violence, in addition to other toxic stressors.

In the chronically stressed brain, the cortisol tap is always on, flooding the system, and acts like poison to the brain of a developing child. When cortisol is present, energy and resources that should be used to make new connections for learning are instead rerouted to the parts of the brain dedicated to survival. Meanwhile, the amygdala becomes even more sensitive once it is activated, meaning a traumatized child may have hair-trigger responses to unprocessed emotional memories related to their trauma or stressors.

Imagine you have experienced a major trauma without a safe adult to help you process your feelings and experiences. Now, imagine that you are in a classroom with a new teacher, 25-30 peers, and a lot of expectations to behave in a certain way. How would you respond?

Unfortunately, many of our students deal with this exact situation every day. An estimated 45% of children have one or more ACEs; approximately 10% have three or more. Yet, only about 20% of children with mental, emotional, or behavioral disorders actually receive care from a specialized mental health care provider, like a psychiatrist or psychologist. In the absence of support, children develop survival mechanisms that help them control their environments and feel safe. All individuals have very different methods of coping with difficult situations.

A good number of us are "internalizers," meaning we prefer to keep to ourselves. We might hide our feelings from others, or push them down and away. Others are "externalizers," meaning we seek to express our emotion outside of ourselves, perhaps through our behaviors, actions, and interactions with others. In either case, pure, unprocessed emotion or traumatic experiences can cause damage. Keeping things bottled up can lead to depression or anxiety. Spewing feelings out can lead to aggressive encounters and words or actions that feel out of control.

Above all, know that you cannot control the experiences, fears, and traumas with which your students enter your classroom. You can, however, influence how safe you help them feel with you and in your room.

For more ideas, check out some of these great resources on trauma-sensitive teaching and trauma-informed classrooms.
Dr. Poonam Desai is a Certified Instructor of Mindfulness, with more than 300 hours of training completed. She has maintained a practice of Vipassana Meditation, as taught by S.N. Goenka, for over ten years and has completed six 10-day meditation retreats in addition to several other shorter retreats. Dr. Desai is a licensed psychologist and a licensed specialist in school psychology in the state of Texas. She has worked in the fields of education and mental health for over ten years and was a mental health trainer and psychologist at Momentous Institute. She believes mindfulness and compassion are the two things that will change the world, but also that the first revolution is always internal.

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How Teachers Can Use Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness Practices to Support Students

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Each school year, educators, students, and families prepare for a new, yet familiar rhythm. Despite many teachers' best planned lessons, best decorated boards, and most innovative stations, they may be surprised to find that some of their students are simply not learning, are having trouble paying attention, or are even too emotionally dysregulated to engage in the basics of math, writing, and reading.

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Video of co-author of the book "Radical Dharma" -an excellent book about applying lessons from Buddhist teachings about dharma to addressing injustices in the world

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What "radical dharma" means to Rev. angel Kyodo williams

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Rhonda Magee on Her Inner Work of Racial Justice

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Rhonda Magee on Her Inner Work of Racial Justice

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Mindfulness as a way to interrupt injustice.

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Law professor Rhonda Magee applies her deep meditation practice to the difficult waters of racially-charged interactions.

Talking about race isn't easy for anyone-and teaching about race can be a minefield. One of my own most difficult moments teaching about race happened when I encountered intentionally provocative behavior from one of my students, Dan, an Asian-American cis-gendered man.

Dan was in his last semester of law school, and this was his third course with me-it was a course on contemporary issues of race and law.

A major component of the course was a research paper and the students each took turns discussing their thoughts on their projects. When we came to Dan, he said, "I want to do a paper on the Rodney King beating." His likely "thesis," he announced, was that the beating King received at the hands of police "was deserved."

Even as I write this now, I can feel a blip of reactivity. I can see the policemen in that grainy video that we've all seen, appearing to let loose with as much force as they could muster on Mr. King, raining strikes with their batons on the head and torso of a man already on the ground beneath them. And I can feel the empathetic pain, sadness, and anger coming up for me as a result.

So, when Dan made this announcement to our small seminar-style class sitting around an oblong table, I could sense the tense silence that fell across the whole room. And I could feel my mouth go dry with fear and a bit of intimidation.

I felt my temperature involuntarily rise, the blood seemingly rushing to my head. "This is what anger feels like," I knew enough to admit to myself silently. And I certainly felt viscerally and immediately the sense of energy of judgmental thoughts arising in my own mind ("You are wrong!") and indignation ("How dare you?"). This was what confusion, anger, and dismay all mixed up together felt like. And it was what deep concern and compassion for my other students felt like-several of them were black and brown, and had felt the direct impact of nationwide patterns of overpolicing of black men. Finally, on top of all of this, my own ego was on the line-I'd been tasked with facilitating this conversation and guiding it productively, and this moment certainly wasn't feeling like success.

Navigating Reactivity Around Race

There are times when the best way to handle strong emotion is to give yourself a time-out, to give yourself space to figure out the best way to address a difficult situation. This felt like one of those times. In the throes of reactivity, my first strategy was to notice my distress and to take steps to find my centered self.

As best I could, I stayed as centered as possible in the full-on experience of reactivity and judgment.

"Dan, I want to remind you that this is a legal research paper and not an opinion paper," I said, feeling supported by the structure, in this case, of a law school course and its stated objectives. "So as you think through your topic and thesis, be sure to keep that in mind.

"And," I continued, "we should discuss your thinking about this project, and about this particular topic, one-on-one."

And so, we did. During the first of several one-on-one conversations with Dan, I invited him to sit down with me and talk this through. We had both enjoyed our interactions over the course of the other two classes he'd taken with me, so in preparation, I did what I could to refocus us both on the positive history between us. After a bit of small talk, I told him I appreciated his interest in this topic. "I am always curious about what draws students into one topic or another," I said. "What is it that draws you to this particular topic? Has it been an interest of yours for some time?"

In the throes of reactivity, my first strategy was to notice my distress and to take steps to find my centered self.

It didn't take long for me to uncover a prior, related trauma Dan had experienced. And herein, another lesson: Beneath every aggression or effort to attack is a wounded human being.

"Well . . . yes," he said. His voice slowed as his gaze turned inward. "Actually, I tried to write a paper about this a long time ago, and . . . it did not go well. In fact, it was the worst experience I've had in school. Ever."

Dan told me that years ago, in a class on multiculturalism-the only other class he'd ever had with a black female professor, in fact-he'd sought to make the same argument about Rodney King. According to Dan, that professor had reacted with what felt to him like fury. Flooded with anger, she had shouted him down for what to him had seemed like an eternity. She'd dismissed his proposal and whatever thought or experience went with it in a way that left him shaking and undone.

Not surprisingly, as a result, he had not written the paper he'd proposed. Instead, he had withdrawn into his own feelings of anger and shame. From that day on, he held something against this teacher, this particular black woman. And, as he came eventually, slowly, to see, maybe all black women.

Sitting with Compassion

Years of sitting and breathing and noticing what arose allowed me to stay present to my own racing heart and fluttering stomach without investing it with a story of what had to be done next. Somehow, despite my original impulse to run away, I remained right there with him, my eyes on him with openness. I maintained awareness of my own breathing, in and out, and feeling the ground beneath my feet and the chair supporting me at my core. I remained grounded, even as I felt my own emotions arise and subside as the words tumbled forth from this student sitting across from me. And I kept coming back, again and again, to the intention of listening to Dan-my student. And listening to him, I began to actually put myself in his shoes. Empathy and compassion naturally opened my heart.

Years of practicing mindfulness, says Rhonda Magee, has "allowed me to stay present to my own racing heart and fluttering stomach without investing it with a story of what had to be done next."

Here again, my meditation practice helped. Years of simple mindfulness meditation practice -which helps you recognize more readily when you need to take a moment, as well as the STOP practice-which helps you develop the emotional intelligence and psychological flexibility required for greater mastery over the challenging moments when you engage in difficult conversations.

As I listened to Dan, I intentionally sought not only to hear his voice and story, but to listen as deeply as I could to what he wanted me to hear. It wasn't easy. When my own reactions arose, I noticed them. Relying on my practice, I sensed the ground beneath my feet. I came back to the sense of my role as professor and guide. Sitting with him, I returned my focus to his words and the sense of the feelings beneath them.

I listened to him in a way intended to help him feel safe enough to share deeply about his experience. Knowing that he had truly suffered over this, I wanted to alleviate his suffering by truly listening to him -in a way that would enable him to feel a sense of my caring for him, while at the same time staying in touch with my own feelings and guarding against any emotional reactivity that could get in the way.

As I listened to Dan, I intentionally sought not only to hear his voice and story, but to listen as deeply as I could to what he wanted me to hear. It wasn't easy.

I realized that I wanted him to sense that my concern for him would not be disrupted by what he had to say. Doing so required more than intent or will; it required the support of a nervous system whose capacity for just this had been built up through the regular practice of mindfulness.

So, with awareness of what was happening, but as little judgment about it as I could muster, I could guard against my own reactivity enough to actually hear Dan's words.
I could see and feel the complex set of emotions running through him as a result of what he had experienced in that classroom so long ago: anger, fear, confusion, and the most toxic feeling of all-humiliation. I could see the suffering he still carried with him.

Sitting with Dan, with a desire for him to experience relief from his suffering, was not easy for me. The Rodney King video had shaken me to my core. Watching that instance of police brutality left me fearful of police for years and years to come. Despite my reactivity, however, I understood that my role as teacher in that setting was not so much about me. It was about creating a space in which Dan's truth could be uncovered, unpacked, and given a chance to be met with other truths that would allow learning, healing, and potential transformation to take place.

Walking the Walk of Mindful Racial Justice

As Dan and I took the time to have a series of difficult talks together, outside the spotlight and group dynamics of the classroom setting, I learned that in that very first moment when I decided to pause, to respond rather than to react, and then to take a time-out before meeting with him again, I'd not only reconnected with my own center but had also taken the first steps in helping Dan find healing. And by the end of the semester, he'd come to realize it too.

In the final week of the class, after giving a presentation in which he sought to make an argument that hewed closely to his original premise, Dan told the class, "I realize I have been holding on to some of my own pain around this incident. And it's something I have to let go." He wasn't necessarily a completely changed man. But he could see a glimpse of a way forward that no longer involved painful, unnecessarily provocative confrontations with others whose looks just happened to remind him of his earlier trauma.

So much of what we know as reactivity begins as an emotional charge in response to what we see, hear, read, think about, and otherwise experience in life. That charge leads us to act in ways that may appear to be fully rational, but on reflection, often are not rational at all.

As I think back on my experience with Dan, I realize that dealing with this very triggering moment and relying on my own mindfulness practice over the course of that entire semester many years ago is what solidified my decision to bring mindfulness and compassion practices directly to bear on teaching and facilitating conversations about race and law. I realize that what had been my own, personal strategy for dealing with difficulty around these issues-compassion-based mindfulness practices-needed to come out of the closet and into the center of my work.

Now, in my work as a law professor at the University of San Francisco, and as a facilitator of restorative, trauma-sensitive MBSR, I can see the power of working through race issues with the support of awareness and compassion practices. Each time I sit with others in their pain and vulnerability, listening with compassion, I'm reminded of something my grandmother (GranNan) used to tell me: We are all one family who have forgotten who we are. Through mindfulness practices, we can begin to infuse our experience of ourselves in culture, community, and context with a sense of the valid, often painful experiences of others.

Reprinted with permission from The Inner Work of Racial Justice by Rhonda V. Magee, published by TarcherPerigee, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Rhonda Varette Magee.

Rhonda Magee on being with vulnerability, getting angry, and knowing joy and healing are possible. Read More

Rhonda Magee takes us through this simple portable mindfulness practice she uses to find calm when difficult moments arise. Read More

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Rhonda Magee on Her Inner Work of Racial Justice - Mindful

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Law professor Rhonda Magee applies her deep meditation practice to the difficult waters of racially-charged interactions. Talking about race isn't easy for anyone-and teaching about race can be a minefield. One of my own most difficult moments teaching about race happened when I encountered intentionally provocative behavior from one of my students, Dan, an Asian-American cis-gendered man.

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Mindfulness meditation is best known for its positive effects on practitioners' brains and bodies. My research suggests it may also encourage compassion toward others.

Gosia Wozniacka / AP

How do you cultivate compassion? How do you ensure that at the end of the day, it's your kindness and generosity for which you'll be remembered? It's a good question, for as much as we all agree that compassion is a virtue to be admired, as a society, we don't seem to be very effective at instilling it. In fact, research by Sarah Konrath at the University of Michigan suggests we're actually getting worse on this score. In reviewing the results of a standard assessment of empathy and compassion taken by 13,000 college students between 1979 and 2009, Konrath discovered that self-reported concern for the welfare of others has been steadily dropping since the early 1990s. According to this analysis, levels of compassion and empathy are lower now than at any time in the past 30 years, and perhaps most alarming, they are declining at an increasing rate.

Since acting compassionately usually means putting others' needs ahead of your own, prompting yourself to act with kindness often requires not only vigilance but a bit of willpower. That's not to say that relying on religious or philosophical guidance to prompt kindness won't work at times. It will. But any method that depends on constant redirection of selfish urges and top-down monitoring of one's moral code is apt to fail. Perhaps cultivating compassion situationally-so that it automatically emerges at the sight of others in need-would be more foolproof. As a psychologist interested in moral behavior, I have long wondered if there might be a way to develop precisely this sort of reflexive compassion.

As it turns out, I didn't have to look too far; a means was hiding in plain sight. Mindfulness meditation involves guided contemplation as a way to focus the mind. It commonly entails sitting in a quiet space for periods ranging from 20 minutes to an hour (depending on your level of advancement) and learning to guide awareness to the current moment rather than dwell upon what has been or is yet to come. The practice has lately been promoted for its abilities to enhance the brain and heal the body, but many of its most experienced teachers argue that its fundamental purpose involves the soul. As Trungram Gyaltrul Rinpoche, one the highest lamas in the Tibetan tradition, recently pointed out to me, meditation's effects on memory, health, and cognitive skills, though positive, were traditionally considered secondary benefits by Buddhist sages. The primary objective of calming the mind and heightening attention was to attain a form of enlightenment that would lead to a deep, abiding compassion and resulting beneficence.

Yet for all the emphasis meditation instructors place on kindness, solid evidence linking mindfulness to compassion has been lacking. By historical accident, the first psychologists to study meditation were experts in neuroanatomy, information processing, and physiology, which, as you might guess, meant that these topics were where they focused their research. The result was a decade's worth of findings confirming that meditation enhances the functioning of brain and body-findings that continue to appear regularly, and serve as the basis for much of the publicity surrounding meditation. Unfortunately, the question of how meditation might influence social behavior wasn't, until very recently, on anyone's radar.

A few years ago, my research group at Northeastern University set out to change that. If meditation was indeed capable of fostering compassion-a quality this world seems at times to have in short supply-we wanted to find proof. To do that, we conducted a simple experiment, led by Paul Condon, a graduate student in my lab at the time, and subsequently published in Psychological Science. We recruited 39 people from the Boston area who had never meditated before and assigned them to one of two experimental groups. Those in the first completed an eight-week meditation course led by Willa Miller, a Buddhist lama. Those in the second were placed on a waitlist for the course.

After eight weeks had passed, participants returned to our lab one by one, supposedly to complete measures of attention and memory. In reality, the true experiment occurred in the waiting room, which had three chairs, two of which were already occupied by actors. A few minutes after each participant arrived and took the remaining seat, a third actor appeared, this one on crutches, wearing a boot typically used for a broken foot, and wincing in pain. Upon entering, she leaned against a wall, sighing audibly, as there was nowhere for her to sit. By design, the other actors ignored her. They thumbed through books or scanned their smartphones, paying no mind to her discomfort.

Situations like this-in which other people seem to be ignoring a person in distress-are known to inhibit helping behavior, a phenomenon termed the "bystander effect." If no one else is helping, why should you? In our study, among participants who didn't meditate, the bystander effect was on clear display. Only 16 percent of our subjects (or three people out of 19) offered their chair to the actor on crutches. But of those who meditated, half (10 of 20) immediately and spontaneously offered their seat to the woman. It's important to note that none of the participants had meditated before, and were all equally interested in signing up for the course (even though they knew some might be assigned to a waitlist). The resulting differences, then, didn't stem from any factors related to a pre-existing interest in or experience with mindfulness. The only difference between the groups was that one meditated for eight weeks and the other didn't. Nonetheless, eight weeks of meditation proved enough to triple the likelihood of this benevolent behavior, even under conditions known to discourage acts of kindness. And as any research psychologist will tell you, an intervention that can shift human behavior by three-fold holds a lot of promise.

To be certain about this level of promise, however, we wanted to replicate the finding while also examining whether it might be scalable. After all, how realistic is it to imagine that substantial populations of people will seek out a meditation master and sit at her feet to learn the practice of mindfulness? With these questions in mind, we set out to see whether mindfulness training using mobile devices might do the trick when it came to enhancing compassion. To this end, we repeated our previous experiment using a smartphone mindfulness app designed by an individual with Buddhist monastic training. In this version of the experiment, led by my graduate student Daniel Lim and recently published in Plos One, we randomly assigned 56 people to complete three weeks of either mindfulness training using the app, or cognitive skills training using a web-based, brain-training program. When we later exposed our participants to the waiting-room scenario, the results were similar to those from the original experiment: While only 14 percent of non-meditators (four people out of 29) offered their chair to the woman on crutches, 37 percent of the meditators (10 people out of 27) acted to relieve her pain.

Outside of the waiting room, however, there are people everywhere who need compassion. But there's only so much to go around. As the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom regularly points out, it's well established that we feel more empathy for single individuals in pain than for larger numbers of suffering masses. Based on this fact, techniques for building compassion might seem futile. And yet, it's this very contradiction that helps to explain why meditation may be uniquely suited to fostering compassion.

Concern for others tends to nosedive as suffering grows because, thanks to our natural empathic response, distress is a bit contagious. When we encounter people in pain, we not only recognize their discomfort, we feel it-an experience that can quickly become overwhelming. As a result, people can shut down emotionally and turn away, a result known as "compassion fatigue." Attesting to this fact, research confirms that compassion fatigue is quite prevalent among physicians and nurses whose work centers on oncology and palliative care-specialities that require daily confrontation of suffering, pain, and emotional loss.

But recent research by the neuroscientist Tania Singer and the Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard has shown that meditation-based training reduces activation of the brain networks associated with simulating the feelings of people in distress, in favor of networks associated with feelings of social affiliation. In other words, shared pain rapidly dissipates, but compassion remains.

This finding appears to offers a neuroanatomical basis for something many long-time practitioners of meditation have observed: a lack of compassion fatigue among meditators. As Thupten Jinpa, a Buddhist scholar and long-time translator for the Dalai Lama, told me "meditation-based training enables practitioners to move quickly from feeling the distress of others to acting with compassion to alleviate it." Put simply, contemplative training appears to teach the mind to move directly from an observation of suffering to benevolent action, without becoming paralyzed by others' pain.

In short, then, our research suggests that mindfulness's most profound benefit may not be the one that's most often touted-adapting to a stressful, competitive, even unkind 24/7 world. Instead, meditation might fundamentally alter how we treat those around us. Corporations, physicians, and policy-makers who now push mindfulness as a technique for self-enhancement and physical wellbeing would do well to focus more on its potential for preventing everything from bullying to domestic violence to callousness and indifference. To see why, one only need look at the impressive results stemming from a meditation program that the Center for Wellness and Achievement Education recently offered in Visitation Valley School-a junior-high school in one of San Francisco's poorest neighborhoods where violence was a frequent occurrence. After providing instruction and instituting twice-daily meditation periods known a Quiet Time, a noticeable difference began to emerge. Over a four-year period, school records show that suspensions decreased by 79 percent. It's important to note that unlike the work from my lab, this was not a scientific study designed to control extraneous factors. Accordingly, it's possible that the decline may have as much to do with the benefits of meditation as it does with a school culture that decided to adopt Quiet Time in the first place. Either way, though, the result is striking and calls for additional study.

Perhaps most interesting, though, is that when it comes to enhancing compassion, it may not matter much whether you begin the practice for self-advancement, health, or character building. Arianna Huffington, the Huffington Post co-founder and one of today's most prominent evangelists for mindfulness, emphasizes this point. "It doesn't matter why you start meditating," she told me, "as you'll get all the benefits-those you intended and those you didn't-if you stick with it." Both she and Chade-Meng Tan, the creator of Google's immensely popular Search Inside Yourself course, which teaches mindfulness skills to the company's employees, compared it to exercise. "Even if you start going to the gym with the purpose of buddying up to the boss," Meng recently told me, "You'll gain the benefit of better health if you keep on going. "Mindfulness, practiced correctly, works much the same way."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University. He has written for The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Pacific Standard.

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Mindfulness meditation is best known for its positive effects on practitioners' brains and bodies. My research suggests it may also encourage compassion toward others. How do you cultivate compassion? How do you ensure that at the end of the day, it's your kindness and generosity for which you'll be remembered?

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The impact of mindfulness: Data from Mindful Schools 

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The impact of mindfulness: Data from Mindful Schools 

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Headspace!

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Mindfulness & Your Brain

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When Mindfulness Meets the Classroom

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Mindfulness in Education

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Mindfulness in Education, Learning from the Inside Out: Amy Burke at TEDxAmsterdamED 2013

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Guide to Mindful Classrooms

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Use mindfulness to awaken to implicit bias

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Welcome to Mindful Summer! We can't believe that we're already at the last week of Mindful Summer. As you practice mindfulness, you might discover thought patterns, feelings, and physical sensations that you didn't notice before. Mindfulness provides the space for us to discover more about ourselves and how we relate to others, including the narratives that we inherited through our families and our childhoods. This week we are talking about awakening to our implicit biases. If you're completely new to mindfulness, you might want to check out this Introduction to Mindfulness article first.

Sharing a Story
I was 22 years old, working and living on my own for the first time in downtown Chicago. I'd gotten a speeding ticket and planned to go to court to get it removed from my record. My dad, an attorney in the city like my mom, offered to join me. As we walked into the courtroom, an African American woman was representing herself before a white male judge. We overheard the sentencing - a high penalty. And then it was our turn. As we approached the bench, the judge smiled at my dad and greeted us warmly. In a matter of minutes, my hearing was over, and I was let off with the gentle consequence of attending traffic school. As I turned to go, relieved for myself, I glimpsed the woman again. She was still in the room, now watching us leave, a grim expression on her face. I can't know what she was thinking or feeling, but in that moment, I felt ashamed and horrified. For the first time, I was intensely aware of the privilege so deeply ingrained in my everyday life - the implicit bias that regularly and unjustly favored me.
How many times had similar scenarios played out without my noticing? And what harm had been done over the years because of my unconsciousness? As a white, heterosexual, cis-gender, non-disabled, college-educated, US-born, English-speaking woman, raised in an upper-middle class household in suburban Chicago, privilege had protected me from the negative effects of bias. Privilege had enabled me to remain ignorant of the bias that I regularly benefited from at the expense of others. The experience in the courtroom was an awakening for me - an awakening to bias and to my responsibility to challenge it.

As I began to explore bias more consciously, I encountered it everywhere, especially in the lives of the people I love: my mom's stories of being one of few female lawyers in the 1970's; the kind of treatment a family member is regularly subjected to as a waitress; the outrageous comments people make to a friend who uses a wheelchair; the exhaustion of a Black friend attempting to educate her white colleagues about racial inequality. On a broader scale, implicit bias plays out every day in politics, business, law enforcement, communities, schools, and families. Bias, when unexamined and uncorrected, generates pain, suffering, and even violence.

This article is an opportunity for us to explore implicit bias together. What is it, and how can mindfulness help us to challenge it? Simply noticing bias is a critical first step, but how do we notice something that is unconscious? What follows is a brief description of bias, its implications, and five suggestions for using mindfulness to transform it.

What is Implicit Bias?

" Implicit bias" refers to attitudes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These attitudes are expressed as judgments of others based on their social identities. Our biases tend to favor the social groups to which we belong ("in-group") and target those which are less familiar ("out-group"). We've already internalized bias by the time we are toddlers, and bias continues to develop throughout our lives in interactions with family and friends, schools and other institutions, media, and the broader culture.

Implicit bias doesn't necessarily reflect our conscious values. We may believe that diversity is a great thing, but the unconscious mind still creates categories of "us" and "them." ( Read more on how the brain makes automatic assumptions based on bias.) Although bias exists within every one of us, it's when bias is combined with social privilege (in terms of race, class, gender, age, educational status, ability, etc.) that it becomes more powerful and its effects more dangerous.

This is of particular importance for us as teachers and caregivers, especially for those of us carrying more privilege: even with a strong commitment to equality and deep care for the children we serve, bias is still affecting our behavior. We unconsciously treat some children better and some worse based on their social identities ( see the research). And, our bias spreads. A recent study shows that adults nonverbally communicate bias with children, and children pick up on these cues to form their own biases.

It is possible to mitigate the effects of implicit bias. The brain is malleable. Neural connections within the brain are constantly changing - old connections die off without use, and new connections grow with practice. Research has begun to reveal that mindfulness can reduce the brain's negative associations that cause implicit bias. Studies have shown that mindfulness can decrease bias related to various aspects of our identities including class, race, and age.

Using Mindfulness to Challenge Bias

Whether we are long-time practitioners or just starting out, mindfulness can help us to transform our implicit biases. Simply setting the intention to notice bias is a great start (see the "Homework" section below). The following are additional suggestions for using mindfulness to challenge bias in our daily lives:

1) Commit to a Daily Meditation Practice

The first step to challenging bias with mindfulness is to become more mindful in general! Mindfulness can improve our self-control and adaptability, making us more capable of changing old habits. Committing to a formal mindfulness meditation practice is the foundation of living a more mindful life. If you find it difficult to make a daily commitment, consider using an app, joining a mindfulness meditation group (in person or virtually), or finding a mindfulness buddy to check in with regularly. ( Read more tips on starting a practice.)

2) Use the Triangle of Awareness

Formal mindfulness practice helps to stabilize our informal practice - bringing mindfulness to each moment of our daily lives. As a practitioner, I know that this is much more easily said than done. One tool that helps me to live more mindfully is the "Triangle of Awareness."

The Triangle of Awareness includes the primary elements of inner experience - thoughts, emotions, and body sensations - all continuously shifting. With mindfulness, we bring our attention to the rising and falling of these elements throughout our waking lives. In doing so, we gain insight into what's happening within us on a deeper level, empowering us to respond more skillfully and intentionally to each passing state.

3) Set the Intention to Notice Bias

We set the intention to notice what's been unnoticed - to become aware of implicit bias. As we encounter people in our daily lives, whether in-person or in some form of media, we can use the Triangle of Awareness to observe our automatic, conditioned patterns of thinking and feeling. We watch how the mind "others" people who are different from us in some way.

This "othering" can be subtle, and it depends on our identities. For example, if we are white, there may be a tendency to expect less of other people whose racial or ethnic identities are in the minority. If we identify as a person of color, we're likely to have biases based on our generalized experiences of constant subtle or overt racism, which leads us to expect poor treatment.

Since setting this intention in my own life, I've been alarmed by the myriad stereotypes that run through my mind on a regular basis - judgments of people based on appearance, language, occupation, where they live, what car they drive, and so on. Just like in the courtroom, I am sometimes horrified by seeing these biases arise, but I no longer feel ashamed. Rather than blaming myself or others for my bias, I can accept that I've been conditioned in this way and be open to the opportunity to challenge it.

Bringing our biases to light with the Triangle of Awareness doesn't make them automatically disappear. We work with bias as an ongoing practice, just like mindfulness is a practice. With intention, commitment, and compassion (see below), we watch bias arise again and again throughout each day. Over time, we train our brains to think and act differently.

4) Self-Educate

It is up to us to do the work of educating ourselves about people with other identities. When choosing a book or movie for entertainment, we can purposely choose one that is created by people with identities different from our own. We can seek diverse experiences with the intention of stepping outside our comfort zones. We can even bring up the issue of implicit bias with friends and colleagues, perhaps sharing our intention with them and seeing where the conversation leads. When initiating conversations about bias, we do so mindfully, aware of our own identities and the identities of others. Back to the example of racial privilege - if we identify as white, rather than burdening people of color to "educate us" about racial bias, we take care to explore our privilege within our own racial/ethnic group first.

We also recognize that every individual's experience is unique and that each person holds multiple intersecting identities. Everyone relates to their own social identity groups in a personal way. We cannot know how someone thinks or feels without hearing it directly from them, so it is critical to approach this process of self-education with a commitment to openness and humility. We accept that we don't know what we don't know and that we are all learners when it comes to each other. (If you're not sure where to start in this process of self-education, please check out the articles on mindfulness and bias below.)

5) Practice Self-Compassion

It is necessary to bring kindness to this process of uncovering bias. With kind-hearted awareness, the work of challenging bias is possible. Without it, we can easily slip into resistance, self-judgment, criticism, blame, guilt, and indifference which limits our ability to continue. We approach all that we don't know with curiosity, openness, and humility. We acknowledge the causes and conditions of our biases and continue to love ourselves as we work to challenge them.

"To the extent that it is possible, you must live in the world today as you wish everyone to live in the world to come." - Alice Walker

That day in the courtroom is a painful but welcome memory. I'm grateful for its lessons, and I'm committed to continuing on this path of learning. I am inspired by Alice Walker's words, " To the extent that it is possible, you must live in the world today as you wish everyone to live in the world to come. " May our mindfulness practice guide us in this critical effort.

Setting an Intention This Week
This week, please set the intention to become aware of bias.
When you notice someone who appears different from you in some way (in terms of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, gender, gender identification, ability, religion, language, etc.), notice what arises...

You may notice thoughts: an assumption, a stereotype, an expectation. What judgments are coming up? In what ways is the conditioned mind "othering" this person?

You may notice emotions: let yourself fully feel and explore these emotions with moment-to-moment awareness and compassion.

You may notice body sensations: a visceral/gut feeling, a tension in the muscles, a facial expression, a shift in your posture, etc. How is your body conveying deeply-conditioned biases?

This noticing is the first step of challenging bias. Becoming aware is what starts to shift our patterns. Let yourself live this intention (for this week and beyond!) with curiosity and kindness.

Mindfulness & Bias Resource List

Can the practice of mindfulness reduce unconscious racial bias? MSU Extension

Disrupting Systemic Whiteness in the Mindfulness Movement, Mindful Magazine

Does Mindfulness Make You More Compassionate? Greater Good Magazine

Fear Less, Love More, Mindful Magazine

How Adults Communicate Bias to Children, Greater Good Magazine

How Mindfulness Can Defeat Racial Bias, Greater Good Magazine

How to Train Your Brain to See Beyond Us Versus Them, On Being

Integrating Mindfulness Into Social Justice Education and Anti-Oppression Work, Decolonizing Yoga

Meditation Mitigates Biases You May Not Know You Have, Harvard Business Review

Mindful of Equity, Teaching Tolerance

Mindful Reflection...for Developing Culturally Responsive Practices, Teaching Exceptional Children

Mindfulness & the Possibility of Freedom, Angela Davis with Jon Kabat-Zinn (Vimeo)

Mindfulness Can Literally Change Your Brain, Harvard Business Review

Privilege and Bias: Awareness First, HuffPost

Three Ways Mindfulness Can Make You Less Biased, Greater Good Magazine

Why Intersectionality Can't Wait, The Washington Post

Zen and the art of social movement maintenance, Waging Nonviolence

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About Grace
Grace Helms Kotre, MSW, is a Certified Mindfulness Instructor and the founder of Power to Be, LLC. She shares mindfulness with children and adults in schools, non-profit organizations, businesses, community groups and families in Southeast Michigan. Grace's empowering and nurturing leadership style, background in social work and child development, and long-time mindfulness practice inform her teaching. Grace also has training in the areas of mindful parenting, trauma-informed mindfulness, non-violent communication, intergroup dialogue, and racial justice. Contact: grace@mindfulpowertobe.com.
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Mindful Summer: Awakening to Implicit Bias - Mindful Schools

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Welcome to Mindful Summer! We can't believe that we're already at the last week of Mindful Summer. As you practice mindfulness, you might discover thought patterns, feelings, and physical sensations that you didn't notice before. Mindfulness provides the space for us to discover more about ourselves and how we relate to others, including the narratives that we inherited through our families and our childhoods.

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Make a Gift Today
We've kicked off our annual fundraising campaign and we hope we can count on your support. Make a statement about the kind of community you want to live in and the future you want to see

Take Five: Classroom Activity
One of the great things about mindfulness is that it helps us insert pauses throughout the day. Try this Take Five exercise and print a poster for your classroom.

Mindful Communication, December 7
Discover tools and insights of nonviolent communication and the science of nervous system regulation to create more trust, cooperation, and collaboration.

We empower school teams to build upon their unique strengths to achieve their community's vision of wellness.

Our team of classroom teachers, administrators, and implementation specialists draws from lived experiences and expertise to design programs that are impactful and relevant for educators.

"Mindful Schools is our go-to organization when it comes to training and resources-- what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. We were searching for that, literally for years."

- Robert Caplinger, Elementary School Principal
Laveen, AZ

Schools are facing a mental health crisis, with anxiety, stress, and burnout at record levels. But it doesn't have to be this way. We take an integrated approach to create healthy school cultures in which every person feels valued, engaged, and ready to learn.
Ready to build resilient schools and districts?

Over 70,000 educators have started their mindfulness journey in a Mindful Schools workshop and 101 course. View our Program Catalog, explore upcoming programs, and join us in nurturing a new generation of leaders to create a more equitable and thriving world.

LIMITED OFFERINGS

New Year Retreat
Learn About Retreat
Sat, Jan 27, 2024

Virtual Mindfulness Retreat
8AM-1PM PT / 11AM-4PM ET
Registration Deadline: Jan 25

201 Live Intensive
Learn About 201 Live Intensive
July 2024

Join this powerful, 2-week live experience of our 201: Mindfulness in the Classroom course over the summer when you have more dedicated time to dive into the richness of the course content.

Communicate for a Change

Wed, Feb 28

Virtual Workshop:
1PM-2:30PM PT | 4PM-5:30PM ET

Disrupt communication habits that leave educators and students feeling drained and disconnected. Learn to shift this dynamic and build more authentic connection. Learn more.

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Mindful Schools | An Integrated Approach to Create Equitable and Joyful School Culture

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We help educators create equitable and joyful learning environments that center collective well-being. Mindful Schools has trained over 70,000 educators. What's New at Mindful Schools Make a Gift Today We've kicked off our annual fundraising campaign and we hope we can count on your support.

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Mindfulness in Schools: Richard Burnett at TEDxWhitechapel