Mindfulness

A recent article in the TES titled Mindfulness Is A Fad Not A Revolution caught my eye and reminded me of the topic of emotional health and well-being of the adults who work in schools. (I was once advised that the EHWB acronym can best be recalled by associating it with Elephants Have Wobbly Bottoms and, for various reasons, have not forgotten it since!) Frank Furedi, emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent, clearly unleashes his dislike for the subject and, despite his exalted academic position, goes on to rubbish the subject without saying very much about how it actually works. After labelling it a ‘veritable panacea’ and a ‘super-fad’, his main reason for being so negative about mindfulness appears to be its guilt by association. Furedi successfully puts the reader off by associating mindfulness with ‘Hollywood celebrities’, ‘Silicon Valley gurus’, ‘privileged middle-class adults’ and ‘leaders trying to balance hectic schedules with peak performance and enjoyment of a very full life’. When I read his article I felt his opinion was not only biased but very weak as he actually makes some points about mindfulness which leaves the reader asking ‘What’s so bad about that?’ For example he resists mindfulness as a remedy for the stress modern children face, the incessant chatter ‘pushed to them’ via their multiple IT devices, to say nothing of how over-connected they are with people especially in the quasi-realistic but socially potent and often toxic world of Facebook and various free text messaging facilities. Furedi quotes ‘Mindfulness gives children access to some of the same techniques that the world’s top athletes, speakers and musicians use to perform at their best under pressure-filled circumstances’. Further to this he states ‘mindfulness allegedly assists individuals to gain greater self-control and objectivity, to improve tolerance, equanimity and emotional intelligence, and to boost concentration and mental clarity. It also boosts their ability to relate to others with kindness, acceptance and compassion …’ Again I am left asking ‘What’s so bad about that?’

As headteacher I was committed to encouraging my senior colleagues to lead on managing the signs of stress in the colleagues they line managed and set a good example to those they line managed with the intent that they should do the same. (Unfortunately, as there was no effective line management when I arrived so the first stage in being accountable for staff well-being was to ensure all staff were linked to a line manager who could attend to their professional development, mentor and, as appropriate, look after them.) In the course of doing this I made a detour with my senior colleagues into the realms of mindfulness and spent some time focussing on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s book Full Catastrophe Living – How to Cope With Stress, Pain and Illness Using Mindfulness Meditation. Despite various opinions the team agreed the book, based on the programme of the stress reduction clinic of Masachusetts Medical Centre, should go into the school’s staff library and form part of the conceptual framework of a developing deeply supportive culture among the school staff.

The fact is that the teaching profession is partly defined by being constantly in the arena of challenge to standards and constant change. Inevitably this culture in itself, compounded by possibly being in a leadership role, makes demands on the teacher personally and professionally. Personally for me it wasn’t the shock of finding a huge deficit, dealing with staff resistance to change, dismissing silly gossip or even having to do other people’s jobs to show them how it should be done that got me down but having to leave my children on weekend mornings to return to school and put in the hours vital to turning round a school which shortly after my arrival had been judged inadequate. For teachers at every level, people in other stressful situations (including children and teenagers) Kabat-Zinn makes the point that we often have survival techniques that help us manage our short term episodes of stress but probably fail to mitigate the deeply unhealthy longer term effects. Possibly a good chapter to dip into is ‘Sixteen: Centredness’. The first thing to get used to is to shift some of your focus onto yourself and make time to meditate and practise the mindfulness techniques. If this

feels selfish or narcissistic one is advised to remember the benefits to having a good quality of life including improved self-esteem and healthy relationships with others. Kabat-Zinn encourages us to connect healthily with people, ourselves and the world as opposed to how we suffer from ‘the great delusion of separateness that we indulge in, coupled with our deeply conditioned habits of mind, the scars we carry, and our general level of unawareness, can result in particularly toxic and disregulating consequences for our body and our mind’. By contrast ‘If we wish to mobilise our most powerful inner resources to help us to move toward greater levels of health and well-being, we will have to learn how to tap into them in the face of the sometimes blistering levels of stress that we live immersed in’.

As opposed to those feelings we endure when working in school at the weekend, marking books or planning lessons ‘til late into the evening or managing of ‘that group’ on a wet Thursday afternoon in November, mindfulness advocates and teaches ‘centredness’: ‘the more centred you are yourself, the easier it will be for you to be centred in your relationships, to appreciate connectedness with others, and to be able to fine-tune it’.

While my last article on mindsets is so fresh in my mind I can’t help finishing on the topic of attitude, thoughts and emotions and their power to harm or heal (chapter fifteen). For me, this is possibly the most striking article in the whole of Kabat-Zinn’s long but quite digestible read. Kabat-Zinn cites the pessimist who catastophises and converts a bad experience into something that will be long-lasting and negatively affect multiple aspects of his or her life. Compared with the optimist who diminishes the impact of something ‘bad’ happening the pessimist is much more likely to become depressed. Worse still, Kabat-Zinn’s research warns of physical side-effects including hormonal and immune-system changes, even statistically premature death. The multiple references to research employed by Kabat-Zinn leads to him to align pessimism with smoking as being deeply unhealthy for the individual but also for those damaged passively.

After a brief shot at mindfulness through the lense of Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living professor Furedi’s dismissal on the basis of association with celebrities, Silicon Valley, middle-classes and busy leaders is not only flimsy but ultimately most undeserving of a place in a magazine read by so many education professionals who probably could benefit from it. To add salt to the wound six days later I read a tweet from the TES that invited readers to vote on the relative merits of mindfulness, a vote I assumed was informed or mis-informed by professor Furedi’s article. Rather than outright and biased dismissal I would fully recommend readers of the TES to bypass Furedi’s pessimistic appraisal of mindfulness and go straight to the horse’s mouth before coming to any conclusions.