Education means discovering what we love and learning how that love can carry us forward. How can mindfulness help?
A talk to a gathering of Head teachers of independent UK Girls Schools on the difference mindfulness can make to schools and their leaders
Girls School Association Conference, Celtic Manor, 23/11/2015
Let’s take stock. How are you finding the conference? I recently participated in a conference quite like this one, and after the first day my head was filled with ideas, conversations and plans. Maybe your thoughts are full of how you can be the great leader of a fantastic school and all the things you’ll do when you get back.
That’s great. It’s great to plan and to feel inspired. But, for me at least, there’s something eerily familiar about that sense of excitedly looking ahead. I’ve had that feeling all my life. How things will be when I’m an adult, when I grow up – I’m still waiting for that one — when I sort out my career, when I have a family.
Well here’s a simple reflection. We’ve got there! The future we imagined and worked for when we were younger is where we are right now. It probably hasn’t worked out quite as we planned, and it may not feel the way we wanted it to feel. So we keep worrying, keep thinking a little anxiously about how things might be one day when we get it all sorted and finally get to the bottom of our Things To Do List. But, the truth is, this is the life we have. And this present moment is the only time we can feel anything, learn anything and live our lives.
So how are you doing?
The theme of this service is ‘Schooling the Heart’ because the forces that mean make us want to be somewhere else are really matters of the heart. They affect us in the intimate inner space of our private thoughts and inner feelings. We hear a lot about ‘student wellbeing’ and ‘character education’ these days. And whatever politicians may mean by these terms, I would connect them with the sense of fullness or emptiness that flows from that inner space.
All good teachers know that students need to gain far more than knowledge as they make the tricky journey from childhood to adulthood. ‘Schooling the head’ is important, but if we neglect to ‘school the heart’ as well students will struggle. Education has always been concerned with developing personal qualities along with academic achievements, and at its best, I believe, education means discovering what we love and learning how that love can carry us forward. But this inner world is becoming an ever more challenging place for or many young people. Last year, Public Health England reported that thirty percent of English adolescents displayed sub-clinical mental health problems, and teachers see each day what that means for young people who are struggling.
So it’s natural that teachers are looking for ways to help, and recently, mindfulness has entered the mix. This has been a little surprising for people like me who have practiced meditation and mindfulness for many years and been considered rather odd. But mindfulness is immediately helpful because it offers ways simple ways to access a sense of calm. In a period of mindful meditation we focus our attention on things that conduce to it, like the breath and body. And in a moment I’ll invite you to join me in a just such a practice.
But there’s more to mindfulness than this. It’s also about encouraging an attitude that allows us to stand back from the whirl of events and notice what’s happening. It means training the attention, but it also also means becoming aware of our experience with an attitude that’s open, curious and emotionally responsive.
If we learn to pay attention in this way, we’ll start to notice more fully what’s happening in our bodies and our senses, our thoughts and feelings, and the word around us. That brings greater richness to our experience, and a sense of spaciousness in which we’re more able to respond consciously and creatively, rather than reacting automatically.
Those reactions compound the sense of facing a challenges or being under pressure so they spiral into much greater difficulties like stress, anxiety and depression. That’s why we need reminders to value where we are right now, rather than where we want to be, and who we are in ourselves, rather than how we compare with others.
This is what mindfulness is really about. We all need ways to open to our experience with greater fullness and depth, so I invite you to join me now in a short period of mindfulness practice:
[meditation]
Just by where I live in Cardiff is an area of park and woodland centred on a hill. The whole city is visible from the top. You can see right the way to the sea and, on a clear day, right across the Bristol Channel to Somerset. There’s a piece of woodland, and if you follow the path you come to a secluded pond edged by trees. No one goes there much, but there it is, looking down on Cardiff; and if you’re still, the birds emerge: ducks, and moorhens and Canada geese. And if you listen, the air is filled the high trebles of birdsong above the distant rumble of the traffic.
Everyone needs a way to find that hidden pool: a literal sanctuary, perhaps, but also a figurative one. It’s always there, high on the hill; and it’s surprisingly close by. We need time in our days to visit it, and each one of us needs our own way to find the path that leads there.
If we want the organisations we lead to be calm and focused, we need to embody those qualities in our own lives. If we want our young people to be happy in their own skins, we need to pay attention to how we feel in ours
We need space in our busy lives, because we really cannot live without it. Then whatever’s present will emerge from the trees and show itself to us. Our fears, sadness and frustration will reveal themselves like the ducks and the geese, leaving their nests to swim on the water. And perhaps, also, our compassion and the heartfelt joy of being alive will rise up before us in a flurry of song and colour.
Potentially, we can bring that quality of heartfelt awareness to every moment. If we look, I think we’ll find many moments in our days when we can access the same qualities that we touch in meditation. A service like this is just such an opportunity, and now we’ll hear a sequence of words and music that speak to the heart.
