Tara Brach - 2013-10-07 - Mindfulness-In-Schools-TaraBrach.mp3

Episode Date: February 11, 2014

2013-10-07 - Mindfulness in Schools- Enabling Children to Realize their Full Potential - This talk explores stress-related emotional suffering and how mindfulness and compassion practices can serve our children’s natural intelligence, creativity and openheartedness. Trainings in presence are the hope for this next generation, and the healing of our world. Talk given at Walt Whitman HS, Bethesda, MD.

Just looking around, it's so good to see you all here. And first I want to thank Dr. Goodwin for just the leadership in getting behind this. And the parents from Whitman that have been so amazing and planting all the seeds to move forward in this way. I'm just so excited about it. And thank you so much for each of you that came and has that openness and interest. I want to kind of check first and sense who's here, and I'm wondering how many of you are parents of teens in Montgomery County?

Can I see? That counts. That's good. How many of you have been involved with the meditation community? Yeah, that's a lot of people, too. There's an overlap. Let me ask it a little differently. How many of you have had some experience with meditation or mindfulness yourselves?

Okay. and the other way around, how many of you are unfamiliar, this is very new territory, not sure what it's about. Some of the same people just raised their hands up, which is good, don't know of mind. So by definition,

meditation and mindfulness is a training of attention to help cultivate a beneficial state of mind. And mindfulness itself is, a way of training yourself to be aware of what's happening in the present moment without judgment. In the present moment without judgment. And as many of you are aware, meditation is finding its way into all these different domains of the culture. And just to give you a little feeling, right? Here in the Washington area, folks from the teachers from the meditation community are teaching in hospitals,

They're teaching in eight different prisons, a few different schools. They've been teaching at the EPA. They've been teaching Superior Court Justices took a training, which is really cool. And then due to Congressman Ryan, we've been now going on the Hill and teaching, I think it's about a once a month now on Capitol Hill to staff and to legislators. Hasn't made too much of a dent yet. But it takes some time. I think part of what makes it kind of getting culture-wide is that it's not hitched to any religion.

When I teach down the block, people come from all different faiths, humanistic orientations, knowing that it's a strategy for learning how to pay attention. And just as now there's more understanding that we need to physically exercise our body to be healthy and well. the same understandings expanded to the mind, that we need to train our attention if we're to have a real sense of clarity and well-being. And so the biggest, I'd say, opening to the culture psyche has been because of science.

There have been over 10,000 studies now, good studies, on meditation in the last decade, let's say. So what I'd like to do is explore with you the basic components of mindfulness. Give you a taste, actually, while you're here tonight, of really what it is that in this training that enables us to kind of reap some of the benefits. And the very beginning of mindfulness is what I sometimes call the sacred pause, where we're willing to just stop. our tumbling forward into the future and just arrive right here. There has to be some discontinuing of the action.

And so I thought maybe we could pause together in that way. And you might want to just take a moment to just sit in whatever way is most comfortable. And I'm going to read you a verse from the poet Martha Postooy and just give you a chance to settle a little bit. So we're in the spirit of the evening. If you'd like, you can close your eyes. She writes this. She says, do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life and wait there patiently until the song that is your life falls into your own copped hands and you recognize and greet it. Only then will you know how to give yourself to this world so worthy of rescue. Do not try to save the whole world or do anything grandiose. Instead, create a clearing in the dense forest of your life. Create a clearing in the dense forest of your life. So as you sit with your eyes closed, as part of creating a clearing,

you might sense your breath. Just try that. Slow out breath. And then a nice full in-breath again, filling the lungs, filling the chest. And a slow out-breath, feel the sensations of releasing, relaxing, letting go. And then again, a full in-breath, really filling the lungs one more time. And breathing out slowly, just mindful of the sensations of the out breath, feeling a letting go, so that as your breath resumes its natural cycle, just notice the quality of presence, a little more of a sense of being right here,

sensing it's possible maybe to relax with the inflow and relax with the outflow. Your senses awake when you'd like to open your eyes. So the beginning of mindfulness is pausing, We just have to pause to arrive, and what we most start recognizing is the dense forest of our life is filled with a lot of stressors. And the bottom line is, and this is what I'll be talking more about, and I know that Congressman Ryan well, is that if we don't know how to manage the stressors, we get caught in a kind of tightness, both emotional or mental obsessing, that really interferes with our capacity to, to live well, to learn, to be creative. And I'd like to name what I think is one of the biggest challenges that we encounter with stress. And this is both a cause of stress and an outcome.

And that is that when we're caught up, we turn on ourselves. And I don't know how many of you have noticed this. And I can even ask this as a question, how many of you feel you judge yourself too much? Can I see by hands? Let's see. Yeah, okay, most of us always makes me feel like I'm in good company. So we know that, but what we don't always get is what I call the trance of unworthiness,

that we're actually, it's very pervasive the number of moments that we have a background sense of, I should be doing more, I'm not enough, I'm falling short, I'm in some way deficient, that really interferes with our capacity to feel that we can be intimate with others. There's some sense of, well, they'll find out who I really am. And I mentioned this because this is something that's particularly poignant with teens and with younger people because, for me, it was when I was 19, actually, that I identified this trance of unworthiness. and I was on a camping trip with an older, wiser friend of 22

who had come to the conclusion that she could really be her own best friend. And I remember her saying that, and I just froze and then crumbled because I realized I was the furthest thing from my own best friend. You know, I was at war with myself for being, you know, not really doing as well as I could at school or being overweight, or I was war with myself for not being a good enough friend or daughter. I was just at war. And I share that with you because part of what motivated me to start meditating

and bringing mindfulness to my life is I wanted to make peace with myself and stop judging so much. I remember I wrote radical acceptance with the understanding from many years, decades of working with clients and students, of how deep that sense of suffering out of feeling deficient goes. And when I was on book tour, I went to one university and to do a workshop on radical acceptance. And they had a poster with me on it,

and the title at the bottom was, something is wrong with me, because that's the basic conclusion that we carry around. So I would talk about it a lot. I think that trance of unworthiness is amplified in our culture. And part of why I bring it up is because, especially in the Whitman community and so on, it's so hard driving.

It can be so speedy, so filled with areas to achieve and accomplish in. In our culture in general, we have a lot of standards that we have to make to feel like we're a successful person or an attractive person or an intelligent enough person or whatever it is. And it's very easy to be monitoring ourselves and coming to the conclusion that in some way we're falling short. I'll share with you one of my favorite little essays. If you can start the day without caffeine or pepills, if you can be cheerful ignoring aches and pains, if you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles, if you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you time, if you can overlook when people take things out on you and through no fault of yours something goes

wrong, if you can take criticism and blame without resentment, if you can face the world without lies and deceit, if you can conquer tension without medical health, if you can relax without liquor, if you can sleep without the aid of drugs, then you are probably a dog. So the given is that we, especially in the West, we grew up with a huge amount of stress, we feel very imperfect, and one of the images I have is kind of that early on we enter this world and there's a lot of demands and there's misunderstandings and there's, you know, sometimes not good enough parenting that everyone and every generation encounters. So we develop a kind of space suit, which is the equipment to get through.

And while some of our equipment is useful, some of it really causes us trouble. We kind of get over-amped on the ways that we fight, our flight, or freeze to try to deal with a challenging environment. and we can see it in ourselves and our teens if we think of what are the strategies that we use. For many of us it's really striving to prove ourselves which is overwork, really stressing on how much we have to do and for others it's procrastinating and not taking risks

and laying back in a way where we don't really show up. Another way that we get stressed and we don't really trust ourselves is that we present a persona. We don't feel so authentic. It's kind of like we're presenting the person we want to then receive approval. And deep down, we don't feel aligned in some way. It feels kind of fake. I heard one story of a young man who worked in a supermarket, and he was around the fresh food area, and a guy comes in and asks him if he can buy half a head of lettuce.

And the young man said, we don't think we do that, but let me ask our manager. So he goes into the back and he says, this jerk back here, he wants to buy a half a head of lettuce. And then he turns around and realizes the guy's just standing there. And he says, and this fine gentleman wants to buy the other half. So later in the day, the manager says, son, I like a guy who can think on his feet, you know, and he's kind of flattering.

He says, where are you from? And the young man says, oh, I'm from Canada. And he said, Canada, well, what brings you here? And the guy says, Canada, all they have is horse and hockey players there. And the manager kind of got quiet, and he goes, my wife comes from Canada. Oh, what team does she play for? So we get trained in to, in some way, deal with the stress. by either being quick and sharp and funny and, you know, or manipulative or deceptive or withdrawn and quiet, but we all have our strategies. And then there's the addictive behaviors

to soothe when we get overstressed, which we know cause so much pain for so many, whether it's overeating food or drugs or alcohol. Also the addiction to the screen, you know, to email and the web, underneath all of this, and this is a little bit where we're going here, is that there are the emotions of fight, flight, freeze that we, whether, and I'm looking around seeing some young people, whether as teens or as adults that we feel, that really cause suffering, whether it's that we get

riled up into anger a lot, or whether we feel anxious, or whether we feel anxious, or whether we there's a lot of shame, or whether there's depression, we push under. These are all versions of this kind of overreactivity to stress that block our basic intelligence, and they block our open-heartedness, and they block our curiosity, and they block our sense of wonder,

all the things that we want for ourselves and our children growing up and as full humans. What meditation and mindfulness do is they enable us to shift from the kind of fight-flight-freeze reactivity to attending and befriending. From fight-flight-freeze, which is kind of a more primitive response

to a more evolved response of attending and befriending. And here's a way to consider. consider it, just to ask you, if you will, to maybe close your eyes and sense perhaps a time that you kind of lost it, where you got really upset and maybe you yelled at your teen, or if you're a teen, you yelled at your parent or a friend, and if your way of getting upset isn't to yell, maybe at a time you got so anxious that you couldn't, that you froze and couldn't really prepare for a test or something. anxious that you really couldn't feel okay in a social situation, but a time when you got

really stuck in an emotional reaction. And the question is, when we're really stressed, what's going on at these moments in our brain? What's happening in our brain when we're being ruled by painful emotions? So just keep that question in mind. I'd like to show you the This is something that I learned from Dan Siegel, who's a neuropsychiatrist and a really wonderful teacher and speaker. And here's how he explains it. So you have to look up here and see my hand, and it's like this in a fist,

and my thumb's inside underneath my four fingers. And what this fist represents is here's the brain stem. This is the primitive part of our brain, and it's responsible hunger and temperature. It's kind of the animal nervous system. Here, tucked under my fingers is the limbic system, and the limbic system, which is a key player here in stress, it really plugs into the amplifier with emotions. It gives us the felt sense of what's going on in an emotional way.

And then these fingers over the limbic system are the frontal cortex. And the frontal cortex is the more recently evolved part of our brain, and that's what's responsible for executive function. In other words, reason, perspective, capacity to focus, concentration, emotional regulation, parts of memory, and empathy. Okay? So what happens when we get triggered by stress, and some of you might have thought of a time that you burst out and yelled at somebody

and others where you completely froze and couldn't function? What happens is we flip our lid. Okay, we flip our lid. And think of it this way. What's happening is we're getting hijacked by our amygdala and we flip our lid, or in other words we don't have access any longer to the more recently evolved part of our brain. In those moments, we've lost our connection

to any bigger sense of perspective, any reasoning, any sense of humor, any sense of empathy. We've lost contact with part of ourself. What mindfulness does strengthens this frontal cortex in a way that when we get stressed, we don't flip our lid as easily. And for me, when I got this rendition of how it works, that to me was one of the most useful ways to think of it, some called the upper and the lower,

and that the upper gains some strength. So when it communicates kind of downstream, it's able to quiet down or regulate more. the emotional centers. So let's look how it works when we're actually caught in an active situation. And one way you might think of it, let me ask you just to float back in your memories a minute. This is again a reflection. And as you do so, consider for yourself perhaps a time in your teen years, and if you're a teen, you can think of something more research. a time in your teen years where things were difficult,

where you hit a real difficult stretch, something that was a time that was very upsetting, or maybe you felt very lonely, you felt lost, reactive, hurting. And as you think of that, you might think of if there was someone who showed up for you who could meet you there, and you might also sense, in those moments, when you're most having a hard time,

what is it your most wanting and needing? What do you most want and need from others? What is the teens most want to need from others? You can open your eyes, and I'd be curious, maybe if a few people, if you raise your hand, might just say out, what is it you notice that you most want and need when you're really stuck? Say it again? Compassion, thank you.

What else? acceptance, thank you. I say another person too. What else? Understanding. We can stop right there. This is great. Thank you. That's what I had in my list. There's other nuances, though. But think of it. We want compassion or love. In other words, we want just to feel cared about.

We want to feel understood. So somebody gets where we're at, and that what's understood is accepted. It's okay for how it is. So if we're with our teen and they're really upset, and we try to go to jump to being rational and reasoning, we're not going to meet them. Does that make sense? If they're very upset and we try to talk sentence,

we try to appeal to their logic, we try to problem solve that won't work. What really works is that that person wants to feel felt. So they're overwhelmed with homework and that child lashes out at you. What do you do? Well, instead of judging, reacting back, or trying to talk logic,

maybe the first thing is to just name what you really sense might be going on with that teen or with that child. I can understand that you'd feel upset or frustrated. Now, there's the first step is to meet. It's almost like right brain to right brain, limbic to limbic system. you know, meet the child where they are,

and then it's possible to move the energy. Dan Siegel calls it connect and redirect. Let me give you an example, because the reason I'm even bringing this up is this is what we can do for ourselves. When we are emotionally reactive, we can recognize the emotion, accept it, see it, be kind towards it,

and then we can begin to move on. But if we try to skip over it, if we judge herself for it, doesn't work. So one teen, she's 15 years old, some of you might know that there's some retreats for teenagers that have been held in Virginia and a number of metro area teens have gone. And she describes an incident where she really learned the power of mindfulness. So she had come down to this retreat. her family lived 10 hours away.

Her older sister drove her down. And there she is on the last day of the retreat, and her sister texts her and says, I've decided I'm not going to be driving back with you. You'll have to find a ride. So here she is 15 years old, and she's going to have to figure out how to get a ride back. And she completely felt abandoned, stranded, and enraged.

And she was overwhelmed with emotions. Just started crying, really angry, goes to the awful. there and there's a staff person there, and they agree they're going to sit down and meditate a little, especially while they're waiting for her mother to get back to her. So here's what she wrote. She said, I focused my attention on my breath and gradually calm myself down over the course of some minutes. I repeated a phrase I'd heard a couple of times on the retreat to myself.

Anger is arising. I am not my anger. That phrase really did help me to objectively observe my reaction. So mindfulness allowed me to feel the anger and then move on. The whole thing felt like a muscle spasm. It was so painful at first, but once you start breathing through it, it's over in a matter of minutes. In a kind of way I feel only people who meditate can understand,

I sent my sister some gratitude for giving me the opportunity to apply what I'd learned that week to my daily life. That's bigger than many of us could be, right? So let me just review the elements here because they're really powerful. That the first she paused, they agreed to meditate. Then she named what was going on. She became mindful.

She said, anger. In the way you can say fear or anger or sadness. The shaman say, when you can name a strong emotion, it no longer has power over you. and some research from UCLA says the same, that as we name something, we're starting to activate both the left brain where languages and more generally the frontal cortex,

starting to bring that back into action and creating a relationship where there can be more communication with the limbic system. When you start naming, you start coming into balance again. That was the first step. She went a little deeper in her naming. She not only said anger is arising, I am not the anger. She wasn't taking it so personally.

If you say, I am not the anger, then you can relate to it, not from it. That's a more advanced practice. That's good. She used her breath as an anchor to help her just stay with what was going on, but calm her. Now, the breath is powerful when we breathe a slow, even breath, it begins to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, which actually helps us relax and deactivate the sympathetic nervous system. Another way you can do that, and many people do, as I said, it's attend and befriend, is a simple message of kindness to yourself. That helps to,

again, bring a sense of calm. I often teach people to put their hand on their heart, their hand on their belly, because these are areas, if you touch lightly, there's a nexus of nerve there, that it actually quiets the nervous system, it comforts. And I'll sometimes send a message to myself like, it's okay, sweetheart, or it's going to be okay, or just relax. But as soon as there's that kind of communication, I'm again activating the more recently evolved part of my brain and beginning to find my way back to well-being. Okay, so that's the second. part, the anchor of the breath, or you can use a comment. Out of this, she accessed a real sense of confidence.

It's very empowering. You know, when we're out of control with our emotions, we add in shame because we feel bad about it. But when the teens that learn these practices begin to realize that they can pause, they can breathe of what's going on, and as one young man described it, he was very, he was, he He could very easily have social anxiety, not athletic enough, not this enough. He said, when I could remember to pause and be aware of my thoughts of what's going to go wrong, be aware of my chest, the way my throat gets tight, and just breathe with it,

and he'd tell himself, you'll be fine. He said, I'm much more able to be natural, much more able to be myself. There's a sense of empowerment, a sense of confidence. So this is the movement of fight-flight, flight, freeze, to attend me friend. I just want to give you a taste of it just to try it out for yourself. So you might, again, close your eyes. And in a very simple way, just take something in the last day or two where you were aggravated, where you had some emotional reaction.

And not traumatic. Don't go for trauma right now. Just something that was unpleasant. And if you're having some really fine days, go back a little in time. It's okay. So some situation, this is just to give you a little taste. And see if you can bring it right into the right now.

Just remember what happened. Go to the worst part of it. And just kind of let yourself be aware of what it's stirred up in you, what you're afraid of, what's going to happen. And just notice your whole way. your whole attitude towards the situation, how in some way you're not liking what's happening, in some way you're saying no to the experience.

Just notice the tension in your body, the attitude like maybe this shouldn't be happening, the judging of yourself, the judging of others. Take a pause in your mind's eye and just sense, okay, let's see what happens with real mindfulness. and just simply begin to just name a little of what is going on inside you, just perhaps the emotional quality, the sensations, just feel your breath and just name what's going on.

It may be you name anger, maybe you name fear, and sense that you can name it and just say yes to it. Like, yes, meaning I'm just going to let this be here, I'm not going to judge it. and notice what happens when you say yes to your inner experience. Mindfulness is just noticing what's happening inside you and saying yes. You're not saying yes to the other person's behavior. You're not saying yes, go ahead and step on them.

You're saying yes to your inner experience. You're just being present with it. Breathing, being present. and if you want to experiment, you could even put your hand on your heart and just offer your accompaniment with your own experience by gently touching your heart, as if you're just saying to yourself, it's okay.

And see if you can notice that shift from being either a victim or just out of control or reactive, kind of a small sense of self, to a larger space of presence, where there's more choice, because that shift is the power of mindful presence. You might find a new creative way to respond to the situation. You can continue to just sense that inside yourself.

I want to bring one last piece up just to consider, which is as adults, for those of you that have teens, it's fantastic to know that our teens will start to be able to, learn how to be with their emotions, how to be able to pause, quiet down, get some clarity, take that test or be with friends or whatever it is with more resilience. But we teach from who we are and we can't help them regulate their emotions if we're yelling at them to calm down, you know, it's not going to work. So it's really, can we manage our own difficult emotional and access our own clarity and empathy.

And for me, some of you might know, my son went to Whitman. He's graduated about 10 years ago. And since graduating, he's actually gotten very much into mindfulness. He's gone to some retreats, and he's been part of doing some research and so on on it. But back in the day, when he was a Whitman student,

a Whitman student, and I remember particularly when he was 14 or 15, I was in a massive standoff with him. He was completely, his grades were sliding, he was into computer and video games, TV, and the more I tried to give him boundaries and have teeth to what I was saying, the more defensive and distance he came, and we really were having quite an edgy time of it. My approach wasn't working, the more he would violate rules and I'd get attacking and so on. one night it hit me that the years were rolling by and how terrible it would be if I went through his whole childhood and teen years

in some way at war and so I decided I was going to bring mindfulness alive and I was going to pause before I encountered him I was going to pause and breathe and connect with myself I remember next evening after I made that vow I heard he was supposed to have started homework at a certain time I could hear the sound of the video game. It was EverQuest.

I don't know how many of you were, that maybe ages me, but it was EverQuest. I could hear the sounds in his room and my anger's building, and my image was I was going to go in there and take a boulder and throw it through the screen of the TV. But no, I paused outside his door and I breathed. And at first I felt all the anger, and I breathed with the anger, and then it unfolded into fear. Like, oh, he's really going to ruin his life if he doesn't. get more discipline. And then under the fear was kind of shame,

like I'm not being the parent I should be to make sure he is who he can be. And then under that, because I kept breathing with and just saying yes, because that's the practice, there was a grief that I want to find a way to connect. I don't want to lose our relationship.

And it was basically the sense that above all, I loved him and I wanted to meet him with a quality of presence. And I knew that if I didn't, we wouldn't. It was like connect and redirect. I needed to connect. I knocked.

I went in. He kind of mumbled the come on in thing. I walked in solely. He started writing on this defensive thing of why he hadn't yet started, and I just was really quiet, and then he got it that we were on a different playing ground. And I said we needed to talk. When I talked, it was kind of that I wasn't saying such

different things, but I was coming from a place of care and concern. And then I also listened. And I started getting how much pleasure he got from those gains when he started to feel a sense of mastery and how lights out was so frustrating when he wasn't tired. And he knew I understood. And the boundaries were still there. And yet there was more of a sense of respect and connection. and I share this with you because our relationship with our self and our relationship with each other comes out of presence if it's to be good and we have this amazing opportunity

to shift from not quite as much of the to-do list and a little bit of more of the to-be list and if you think of who is what is the sense of you when you're at your very best and if you really ask yourself that who are you when you're at your very best and what is it that helps you to be in that place we can all give a little more time

to those whether it's being in nature or listen to music are taking 10 or 15 minutes to just be mindful and learn how to come into the present moment to access those strengths for the sake of ourselves and our children and our community. So again, may we take a pause, find a clearing in the dense forest of our lives,

and really enjoy our lives, and support ourselves and our children in waking up. Thank you so much for your attention.