Safeguarding Mindfulness in Schools and Higher Education

A Holistic and Inclusive Approach

Leigh Burrows

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138735521
• eBook ISBN: 9781351737203
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Although mindfulness can be located in a number of different traditions and disciplines, it was originally an esoteric and powerful practice based on developing a capacity attainable only by certain people. After previously publishing on the positive outcomes, in this book the author identifies a range of adverse effects of mindfulness meditation for some individuals that, from the point of view of mindfulness in schools and higher education, represents uncharted territory. The author demonstrates through research, personal experience and case studies how mindfulness activities can be safe for all students in education settings including the most vulnerable.

This book assists teachers in school and higher education settings to make informed decisions about whether to include mindfulness in their teaching, depending on their own capacity, student cohorts and activities to make sure it is safe for more vulnerable students. This guidance is based on a combination of existing pedagogical and clinical knowledge about meeting the needs of vulnerable students, clients and patients and the specialized expertise of trained mindfulness clinicians and teachers.

This book puts school and university teachers in the driver's seat as regards mindfulness teaching in education settings. It argues that the only way forward for mindfulness in education is to adopt an individualized approach which builds on what effective teachers already do in their work with vulnerable students through extending their knowledge about mindfulness and its possible effects. In this way teachers' existing skills are celebrated and extended, and mindfulness pedagogy develops organically with teachers, becoming a genuine and felt experience both for themselves and their students rather than an 'add-on' intervention.

1
Opening Pandora’s box of mindfulness for education

Have you ever been so desperate to know a secret that you took no notice of a warning? All through history there are stories of people being told not to open doors, caskets, cupboards, gates and all sorts of other things and, in so many of the stories, the people just did not listen. One person who did not listen was Pandora.

http://myths.e2bn.org/mythsandlegends/textonly562-pandoras-box.html

Introduction

Mindfulness can be located in a number of different traditions and disciplines, including Buddhism, ancient Greek philosophy, contemplative Christianity, Judaism and Islam, Gestalt, humanistic and cognitive psychologies and today’s ‘slow movement’ which includes the concept of ‘slow scholarship’ (Berg & Seeber, 2016), ‘slow schooling’ (Holt, 2016) and ‘slow education’ (Barker, 2012).

However mindfulness was originally an esoteric practice based on developing a capacity ‘attainable only by certain people’ (Black, 2016, p 1). As a long term meditator who has been through my own ‘dark night of the soul’ period I should not perhaps have been surprised when I stumbled upon a range of adverse effects of mindfulness meditation after previously publishing on positive outcomes (Burrows, 2011a; 2011b; 2015). However, as Kuyken (2017) has stated:

With the possible exception of the work of Willougby Britton, almost no work has been done in this field. It’s from a research point of view a really uncharted territory.

While most people clearly find mindfulness beneficial, my own formal and informal research and my deep exploration of the scholarly and practitioner literature leads me to the view, like Dobkin, Zhao, and Monshat (2017), that not enough attention has been paid to the possibility that some people may feel worse as a result of mindfulness. I agree with Britton (in Rocha, 2014) that mindfulness:

Is not just benign – these are quite powerful practices. My research is about offering a high level respect for just how powerful they are.

Similarly Farias and Wikholm (2015b) state:

Meditation was designed not to make us happier but to radically change our sense of self and perception of the world. Given this, it is perhaps not surprising that some will experience negative effects such as dissociation, anxiety and depression.

Farias and Wikholm (2012, p 2) believe that ‘individual differences in mindfulness including the potential for adverse effects … is the elephant in the room’.

Their study is crucial if we are to advance our knowledge of the real therapeutic potential of mindfulness. We must understand for whom and under what circumstances it works and when it may be contraindicated. The neglect of individual differences has other obvious drawbacks: it weakens our conceptual understanding of mindfulness and severely limits the scientific usefulness of the plethora of studies that are searching for its benefits.

Like Mikulas (2010), I see a space emerging for more individualized approaches to mindfulness, which are the focus of later chapters in this book. I believe it is time for an ‘artisanal’ approach to mindfulness teaching inspired by physician and writer Mukherjeemay (2016) in relation to medicine who advocates for individual cases to be ‘played by ear’, combining ‘the standard and the idiosyncratic – in unusual and creative ways’. The medical analogy stands up well when we consider that meditation is like medication in that it requires professional discretion, clear instructions, the right dosage and adaptation to suit the individual according to psychologist and mindfulness practitioner Huxter (2016). Farias and Wikholm (2015b) take this further:

For some, penicillin is life saving; for others it induces a harmful reaction … The same is also true with mindfulness: for some it may be very effective or it may not work at all, for others, there may be harmful effects.

Similarly, for Rosenbaum and Magid (2016):

Whenever something has the power to help, it will inevitably also have the power to cause harm; it could not otherwise be effective. There is no medication that does not cause side effects in some people, there is no solution that does not create unexpected consequences.

(p 6)

The purpose of this first chapter is to establish a case for safeguarding mindfulness. This is important because studying the benefits and the risks of mindfulness can help to prevent harm to people learning mindfulness skills (Baer & Kuyken, 2016) for as Kendall (2011, p 420) has clearly stated in relation to mindfulness-based interventions with young people:

Our duty of care requires us to be familiar with the potential adverse effects of any interventions we use.

As Dobkin, Irving, and Amar (2011) have suggested, harm has rarely occurred through negligence, but more through a lack of knowledge. This intensifies the need to share this information with teachers and researchers interested in mindfulness in schools and higher education so they are able to make informed decisions about if, how and to whom to they should bring mindfulness. I suggest do this not only from a desire to safeguard mindfulness for vulnerable students and their teachers but also to help protect the integrity of mindfulness itself and its many beneficial aspects for all people, if activities are wisely adjusted to their needs.

According to Rosch (2007) when Brown and Ryan (2004) defined mindfulness as a receptive awareness they unknowingly opened a Pandora’s box since:

Far from a simple technique that we might call mindfulness, we are dealing with an entire mode of knowing and of being in the world composed of many interdependent synergistic facets which include a relaxation and expansion of awareness, access to wisdom, and an open-hearted inclusive warmth toward all of experience, oneself, other people and the world. The teacher, teachings and community of other practitioners are all part of this tapestry.

(Rosch, 2007 p 26)

The holistic understandings of mindfulness provided above (Rosch, 2007; Sims, 2016; Witt, 2014) align well with Petr’s (2009) notion of ‘multidimensional evidence based practice’, which brings together knowledge from different sources including:

• What we have learned from personal experience
• What clients (in this case students) bring to practice situations
• What we know from research and theory
• Professional wisdom and values.

A key element in the multidimensional evidence-based approach taken in this book is that professionals:

Should not blindly apply research findings to every individual client, but instead use their own experience as well as the client’s (or student’s) preferences to honour client self determination.

(Petr, 2009, p 8)

Opening Pandora’s box of mindfulness

In the ancient Greek myth Pandora (whose name means ‘all giver’) is the human form of the earth goddess Gaia. She was given a locked box by Zeus and warned not to open it. As the story goes when she did not heed the warning, she released much emotional pain into the world (Thomas, 2009) and just as a teacher in one of my early mindfulness studies wrote in her journal:

Since I have allowed myself to stop, it’s as if the lid of Pandora’s box has been opened and years of anxieties, fears and stresses have blown out. …

All of the stresses that I was holding in to cope have been flooding out.

(Research Participant Journal, 2010)

Initially Pandora was overwhelmed by what she had released and hastily closed the lid of the box leaving only hope lying at the bottom. Eventually she realized she needed to trust her own judgment and let go of her fear to dare to open the box one more time when the last of the contents, the light of hope, was released (Thomas, 2009). For Sardello (in Thomas, 2009) the spilled contents of Pandora’s box are the unconscious contents of our own psyches that are asking us to transform them with the light of consciousness.

Writing this book and a recently published paper (Burrows, 2017) has involved complex work akin to opening Pandora’s box since I feel I have released some difficult material that may be difficult to digest. As the experienced mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) teacher and writer McCown Reibel and Micozzi (2010) has observed:

While there is a side of mindfulness that represents the sunny side of the mountain – warm, inviting, and a topic of much animated discussion, there is also a shadow side – forbidding, less explored, and spoken of only in small groups and rarely above a whisper.

(p 26)

As a university teacher and researcher, counsellor and previously a special education teacher and well-being advisor I take the view that we should ‘first do no harm’ (from the Latin primum non nocere). One way of ensuring this to set strict exclusion criteria such as the following for a recent trial of a university-based mindfulness intervention (Galante et al., 2016):

• Currently suffering from severe periods of anxiety or depression
• Experiencing severe mental illness such as hypomania or psychotic episodes
• Experiencing recent bereavement or major loss
• Experiencing any other serious mental or physical health issue that would impact on their ability to engage with the course.

However, like Arthurson (2017) I do not wish to deprive anyone of the benefits of mindfulness meditation. Also, school and higher education teachers do not generally have the capacity or necessarily the right to exclude students from their classes and students do not always disclose their conditions or necessarily have a diagnosis. The impetus for writing this book therefore is to demonstrate how mindfulness can be safely inclusive of all students. In addition research (Lustyk, Chawla, Nolan, & Marlatt, 2009) would also ideally be inclusive of all students since we need to learn from their experiences how to better tailor mindfulness for their needs and situations.

In this first chapter I therefore draw on multiple sources of evidence to build a case for safeguarding the integrity of mindfulness in schools and higher education, including teachings, teachers, students, clinicians and researchers as ‘part of the broad tapestry of mindfulness’ (Rosch, 2007, p 26) already mentioned. Safeguarding aims to protect people’s health, well-being and human rights and includes protecting them from things that are harmful for their health or development (Centre for Public Scrutiny, 2010). It involves placing the individual at the centre and listening to and understanding his or her perspective (Barlow & Scott, 2010). In addition it embraces the complexity, ambiguity and uncertainty of human experience, behaviour and relationships (Ruch, 2005) and in relation to mindfulness aligns well with McCown, Reibel and Micozzi’s (2017) description of mindfulness teaching as ‘stewardship’ and Farb et al.’s (2015, p 10) thought-provoking idea that we are ‘curators of our bodies’.

What I and others have learned from personal experience about the importance of safeguarding mindfulness

I first began researching mindfulness with teachers and leaders across Australia (Burrows, 2015; 2011a, 2011b) with positive findings relating to increased well-being, self-awareness and self-regulation and reduced stress through establishing positive relationships, using a simple emotionally neutral and grounding ‘soles of the feet’ mindfulness meditation adapted from the work of Singh, Singh, Adkins, Singh, and Winton (2008) and reflective journaling.

I was therefore surprised by findings from a qualitative study I conducted with community college students taking a course on mindfulness that did not focus on outcomes of mindfulness meditation but on their experience which was not as positive as in my earlier studies. My research question was inspired by longtime meditation teacher and researcher Roche (2011) who has argued that researchers do not spend enough time addressing people’s experience of mindfulness meditation and recommends asking the direct question ‘What happens when you close your eyes for a mindfulness meditation?’ (Roche, Personal Communication, 6/2/2015). Similarly, neuroscientist Kerr (2014) believes that the ‘concrete experience’ of those doing the practices should be more central in the research. She suggests that questions such as ‘What does it feel like?’ and ‘Did you like it?’ are ‘the real questions,’(Kerr, 2014). This is also reflected in the following comment:

I sometimes wonder if researchers in this area are asking the right questions of the right people.

(Rosenbau & Magid, 2016, p 141)

My most recent research (see Burrows, 2017) showed that mindfulness meditation triggered a range of unusual p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Opening Pandora’s box of mindfulness for education
• 2 ‘Turning the lens of mindfulness on ourselves’: the significant role of the teacher
• 3 ‘Crossing the threshold’: student vulnerabilities in relation to mindfulness
• 4 ‘Minding the gap’: attunement to learning activities and environment
• 5 Mindfulness right under our feet: teaching mindfulness in higher education
• 6 Creating calmer classrooms with mindfulness in the primary years
• 7 Mindfulness for the sensitive and spirited secondary years
• Conclusion
• References
• Index