Food for Thought: More findings on importance of mindful activities.

As we move further away from our winter break and Tet. Have an increased focus for our older students on their summative end of year examinations. Face increasing temperatures, as we move from the cooler dry season towards the onset of the rains. Wait for the arrival of seasonal flu and colds, it is clearly a time when we all need to be taking care of ourselves, physically and social and emotionally. The more I read, the more convinced I become that the best way of doing this is through meditation and mindful activities. When ISHCMC began its journey with its new mission and its link to mindfulness through energized and empowered learners the rationale was not as strong as it is today. Today we have evidence from more and more studies and sources that mindfulness brings with it a huge number of benefits that assist us as humans struggling to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. In this week's Food for Thought I am sharing two articles. The first is from one of my favorite sources, Mindshift, and focuses on data from a recent in school study on the important impact of making time for Mindfulness in schools. 

The second article is an essay from AEON magazine, Breathtaking, by M M Owen a British nonfiction author. He obtained his PhD at the University of British Columbia, and runs an animation studio called Misfit Productions.on the importance of breathing. This is a long article so I have taken out what I think you would like to read to increase your personal understanding of the importance of deliberate breathing on our well-being. Even in the section I have included there are lots of excellent links for those of you who enjoy developing a deeper understanding.

How Making Time for Mindfulness Helps Students

 (iStock/Valeriy_G)

"Not knowing the answer to a question when you’re called on in front of the entire class. Forgetting your homework. The kid behind you pulling your hair. School poses a lot of stressful moments, but how children (and teachers) react to them can make all the difference.
A new study suggests that mindfulness education — lessons on techniques to calm the mind and body — can reduce the negative effects of stress and increase students’ ability to stay engaged, helping them stay on track academically and avoid behavior problems.
While small, the study of sixth-graders at a Boston charter school adds to a still-growing body of research about a role for mindfulness in the classroom. In recent years, the topic has excited researchers and educators alike as a possible tool to help students face both behavioral and academic challenges by reducing anxiety and giving them a new way to handle their feelings and emotions.The Findings
After finding that students who self-reported mindful habits performed better on tests and had higher grades, researchers with the Boston Charter Research Collaborative — a partnership between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University (CEPR), MIT, and Transforming Education — wanted to know if school-based mindfulness training could help more students reap similar benefits.
They designed a study focusing on sixth-graders in another Boston-area school. The study, published in a white paper by a team including Martin West of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, showed that sixth-graders who participated in an eight-week mindfulness were less stressed out than their classmates who hadn’t. Practicing mindfulness had helped hone the ability to focus in the moment, expanding students' capacity to learn and regulate their emotions.

Four times a week, instructors from Calmer Choice, a Massachusetts nonprofit specializing in mindfulness education, taught the group techniques and led them through practices, like focusing on a rock for a minute, then discussing when their mind wandered and refocused on the rock. Another group of sixth-graders took computer coding during that time instead. The students were randomly assigned between the groups.
At the end of the eight weeks, the mindfulness group reported being less stressed than they had been before the mindfulness education, and better able to practice self-control. About half of the students also volunteered for brain scans, and those revealed positive effects for the mindfulness group, too: their amygdalas — the part of the brain that controls emotion — responded less to pictures of fearful faces than they did prior to the mindfulness work, suggesting their brains were less sensitive to negative stimuli, or, in other words, that they were less prone to get stressed out and lose focus. The group who attended coding classes didn’t see the same benefits.
The findings suggest that the mindfulness instruction helped boost students’ attention skills, as well as develop coping mechanisms for stress. The authors maintain that this kind of evidence could be especially useful in efforts to support students suffering from trauma and other adversities that trigger stress in the body, hurting students’ ability to succeed.Bringing Mindfulness to Your School

The paper includes recommendations from educators and leaders of mindfulness-based education programs for implementing mindfulness in your own school:

• Build consistency and school-wide buy-in. Make time for staff and students to learn about the theory and science behind mindfulness, so students know how to talk about mindfulness and understand its purpose. Creating consistent space for mindfulness practice – like guided meditations — and theory in the school day can positively affect the entire school culture, emphasizing acceptance, self-care, and empathy.
• Provide teachers with dedicated time to engage in mindfulness practice themselves. In order to help students reap benefits, teachers also need time and support in adopting it. Research has also shown mindfulness to be helpful to teachers, improving their own emotional wellbeing, helping them understand student perspective, and freeing them up to be more effective in the classroom.
• Allow students to make their own time for mindfulness. Encourage students’ awareness of their own emotions by allowing and encouraging them to identify times when they can use and practice mindfulness. In order to adopt mindfulness as a tool for mental health and happiness, students have to have the space and time to practice it."

Breathtaking: From first cry to last sigh, we do it without a thought. Yet the benefits of conscious breathing are truly remarkable

Scientific research on conscious breathing is hard to gather up. Some of it is published in leftfield journals, and studies mix terminology (deep, slow, controlled, yogic, abdominal). But caveats aside, hard findings are there. All the good research accepts that the chief physiological mechanism is the interface of conscious breathing with the parasympathetic nervous system. The range of claimed effects is bewildering in scope.

Here is what seems solid: there is some evidence that yogic breathing lowers blood pressure, improves diabetic symptoms, can alleviate depression, and can help with asthma and the management of migraines and chronic pain. There is good evidence that yogic breathing reduces inflammation and boosts the immune system. Conscious breathing appears to be associated with moderate improvements in many areas of cognition, especially attention and memory retrieval. A recent study revealed that it ‘remarkably enhances retention of a newly learned motor skill’. There is robust evidence that deep breathing reducesstress and any form of anxiety.

Cast out into the more isolated or less robust studies, and there is some evidence that deep breathing can help with poststroke aphasia, atrial fibrillation, heart failure, ADHD, chronic neck-pain, menopausal symptoms, abstention from smoking, recovery from bypass surgery, wellbeing in breast-cancer patients, and more. Some of the claims made are truly grand. Though it sounds like pure woo-woo, a study from the august Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences found that yogic breathing ‘might reduce the incidence and progression of cancer’.

Strange but true: breathing is keeping you alive, but it’s also killing you

The only way to read this fireworks display of benefits is to conclude that intentional deep breathing is good for you – all of you. And that, though they had grander aspirations than the medicalised West, the ancient mystics were right: the breath has far-reaching powers............
Interestingly, in these older traditions, it isn’t only about breathing slowly and deeply. In Kundalini yoga, there are practices where one suspends the breath altogether for longer and longer stretches. In an appendix to his book The Doors of Perception (1954), Aldous Huxley describes how such a practice ‘permits the entry into consciousness of experiences, visionary or mystical, from “out there”’. In 1837, an ascetic yogi used meditative breathing to help him survive being buried alive for 40 days. Allegedly. Such otherworldly efforts are similar to Taoism’s so-called embryonic breathing, where the breath is made so sedate that a feather held under the nose remains still – one of a vast set of cryptic practices aimed at redirecting sexual energy to achieve immortality.

Interestingly, the reverse – hyperventilating – also has its spiritual side. Yogic breathing includes the practice of kapalabhati, or ‘breath of fire’. A more adventurous teacher might also have introduced you to this at the start of a yoga class. You sit up tall, then breathe quick and hard and loud through your nose, snapping your stomach on the exhale. In yogic parlance, this type of conscious breathing promotes ‘detoxing’ and ‘inner cleansing’.

To a skeptic, these aren’t encouraging descriptors. But they receive vague validation through one of the most famous breathing specialists of our current moment, the eccentrically charming Wim Hof. This extreme athlete’s breathing technique includes deep breathing, but also periods of controlled hyperventilation. In a small study, Hof’s approach was shown, rather amazingly, to increase human resistance to acute E coli exposure. Paradoxically, Hof’s work suggests the opposite of deep breathing might also help to boost immunity. This is hard to reconcile with the rest of the scientific picture as it stands. After millennia of scrutiny, a full understanding of the breath eludes us.........

Strange, that breathing can be at once so everyday, so forgettable – and also the material plane on which all of life and death manifests. In not exactly the sense that my meditation teacher meant it, the breath is without doubt, from the human perspective, the most powerful force in the entire Universe. Yes, conscious breathing is a fad; yes, there is something faintly ridiculous about people learning how to do something that they do every second of their lives without even thinking about it. But as discovered by diverse spiritual traditions, spread over thousands of years and divided by thousands of miles, it is worth thinking about.

Though I’ve remained an on-again-off-again meditator, developing the instinct to remember my breath comes to my rescue almost every day. My motivation for going on that meditation retreat persists; my thoughts can still move too fast, and they can be awfully loud. But heaving my attention away from the surging river of consciousness back to my body – back to those older parts of me that in ancient incarnations of my DNA were doing their mineral, material work long before evolution conjured up the chattering forebrain – helps me to turn down the noise. Whenever my mind starts to trample me, whenever I feel my perception turning skittish and clawing, I go to the base of my stomach, and I make it the limit of my thought. It is always there, this respite, this remembrance that everything layered on top cannot possibly be as important as the miracle of my body keeping me from death. There is a perception in this, I suppose, of something like māyā. Some vast, secret slipstream, behind the sound and fury.

Mine is a specific use of conscious breathing, but they all come down to this: to connect with the breath is to connect with what is most vital in you, as a creaturely thing. Whatever your suffering, if you find yourself needing to feel more at home in this world and in this body that carries you through it, let a lungful of oxygen fill you up. Make a practice of it, if you like. There’s a good chance it will help. Come back to the core. All of us are but borrowing our oxygen, for a while.

There is a new Oprah and Deepak 12 day meditation course beginning on the 25 March if you want to join here is the sign up link.