College Mindfulness Training

Reducing Student Life Stress and Improving Academic Performance

Kevin Page

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429000928
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

College Mindfulness Training is a ground-breaking book that carefully combines selected meditation exercises with guidance explaining the background, scientific context, and practical applications of mindfulness practice. More than just a meditation manual, this book details how and why personal mindfulness practice is essential for the college-aged student. In addition to extensive practical exercises for both beginner and intermediate-level meditation students, the author explores the kinds of institutions and organizations that have arisen out of the popular mindfulness movement and what career options in the field may be available in the future.

Throughout the manual, the author provides readers with insights into basic meditation techniques; active and passive meditation techniques; Focused Attention Meditation in both guided and self-guided forms; Open Monitoring Meditation; informal meditation exercises; a brief history of the MBSR program and Koru meditation; a survey of current apps and meditation-supportive technology platforms; and detailed instructions for self-driven practice, and a semester-long outline for teachers.

A captivating read, this book covers many of the essentials of mindfulness meditation and self-care of interest to college students, making it an essential tool for those of college age seeking to practice mindfulness meditation as well as college educators seeking a guided system to enhance their students' emotional well-being and academic performance.

1

What Exactly Is Mindfulness?

The term “mindfulness” has traditionally been difficult to define (Heffernan, 2015). One reason for this is that researchers have often used the term differently in different research studies leading to a difficulty in comparing the results of various studies (Dam et al., 2018). Another reason is that the term can be used interchangeably to describe both states of consciousness (“I am being mindful right now”) and different types or styles of meditation practice (Chiesa & Malinowski, 2011). For our purposes, I will use the term mindfulness in three different ways and we will deal with each definition separately.

First, mindfulness can be a way of being in the world or a state of individual consciousness. Well-regarded writer and the creator of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction therapy (MBSR), Jon Kabat-Zinn, describes this state of consciousness as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 2013, p. xxvii). This state of paying attention to what is arising in the present moment of consciousness can be cultivated and trained by using specific meditation techniques that quiet the mind and discipline the attention function of consciousness. This, then, is our second way of using the term mindfulness: as defining a particular type of meditation practice that can, when properly engaged over time, cultivate the state of mindful awareness (Lippelt, Hommel, & Colzato, 2014; Valentine & Sweet, 1999). Finally, over the last 20 years, mindfulness has become acultural movement in Western societies that includes the proliferation of numerous approaches to mindfulness practice and mindful consciousness into education (both K-12 and secondary), the workplace, popular culture, psychotherapy, and beyond. The mindfulness movement has spawned books, videos, audio programs, websites, and apps, creating a sub-category of the self-help industry worth over a billion dollars a year, and presumably growing (Wieczner, 2016).

Mindfulness as a State of Consciousness

The ability to focus our attention on events in our environment (which includes internal events such as memories and emotional states) is fundamental to our functioning as human beings. Without the ability to selectively direct and focus attention, we would not long survive in the world. However, many people are surprised when they test their own abilities of attentional focus at how easily distracted they become. Try the following experiential exercise. Read the instructions and have the experience before reading on to the next section. (Reprinted from Advanced Consciousness Training for Actors by Kevin Page, 2018, with permission from Routledge Press.)

THE WATCH EXERCISE

Locate a watch with a second hand or a clock on the wall. A traditional mechanical stopwatch is best. Please avoid digital readouts (i.e., clocks with numbers). If you only have a smartphone, download a stopwatch program that allows you to view a traditional clock face with a functioning second hand. The problem with digital readouts is that they require you to conceptualize “numbers” instead of following the progress of the second hand as it makes its way around in a simple circle. Using a second hand will make this exercise much simpler. If you have no other options, the exercise can be attempted with a digital readout, but the results may vary substantially.

Sit either in a chair or on the floor, so that you will be comfortable and without distraction for at least five minutes. Either start the timing function on the stopwatch or pick a time on the watch/clock face to begin the exercise.

Concentrate your attention on the second hand of the clock and think about nothing else for five minutes. Neither remove your eyes from the clock face nor become distracted in any way. If you find that your thoughts have wandered to anything but the clock’s second hand, you have failed the exercise and must start over. Begin …

How did you do?

If you made it past a minute, you did better than most people that have not had specific attentional training. This exercise is intended to highlight the difficulties and challenges of focusing the untrained attentional function within your own consciousness. Now let us try an exercise that comes at the issue from a different angle by highlighting what the experience of “paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” actually feels like.

One of the most common activities of human beings is eating. In most cases, it is something we do several times a day and often under a variety of circumstances. In many cases, eating is done habitually with little awareness dedicated to the act or the sensations of the act beyond meeting the overriding goal of quenching physical hunger. While an exquisite or special-occasion meal may merit careful attention to the various flavors, smells, and other pleasures of eating, most often, particularly in Western culture, we plow through our meals with little actual consciousness of the experience.

A favorite early exercise in many MBSR trainings is called “the raisin-eating exercise,” which brilliantly plays off of our general inattentiveness to our eating habits in order to introduce the basic idea of mindfulness practice (Kabat-Zinn, 2013, pp. 15–16). Below, I will offer my own adaptation of an eating exercise that can be used to generate an immediately observable sensation of present moment attentional focus (or mindfulness). This exercise can be done in a group setting where the instructor or facilitator guides the process by narrating the instructions, or it can be done individually by simply following the instructions below.

MINDFUL EATING EXERCISE #1

Instructions:

Take a single piece of a small fruit or other bite-sized, hand-held food item (such as a raisin, grape, piece of candy, peanut or shelled pecan-half, pretzel, or cracker, etc.) Sit comfortably but erect in a chair. If you normally slouch, you might consider sitting on the front edge of the chair with your body aligned and your back relatively straight. The idea is to be comfortable but alert throughout the experience without the need to shift or change positions often, so that the focus can remain on the activity.

Take a few moments to settle into your seat and become present to the moment. You might bring your attention to your breath for a few cycles.

Observe the food object in your hand. Pay complete attention to it. Explore its qualities carefully. Look at the object as if you have never seen such a thing before. Hold the object up near your face and view it from all angles, turning it around between your fingers. Track the movement of your arm as it raises the object in front of your eyes, what muscles are you using to accomplish this? What are the sensations of your fingertips as you turn the object around? Squeeze the object and experience its consistency and weight. What does it look like when held up to the light? Is it translucent? Are there patterns on its surface? Does it make any sounds when turned or squeezed between the fingers near the ear? Investigate the object in any ways you can think of (but do not put it in your mouth … yet) and also note any kinesthetic or emotional reactions you might have. Is the object pleasant or subtly repulsive? Take at least a minute to explore the object thoroughly. Be creative with your investigation.

Raise the object to your lips, but do not put it directly into your mouth. What was the sensation of simply rubbing the small food object against your lips? Is there any reaction in your body? Do you start to salivate?

Slowly place the object in your mouth and just hold it on your tongue for a full minute, exploring the sensations that go along with having food in your mouth but not chewing. You may suck it gently and explore any faint flavors that might arise. Move the object around in your mouth, still without biting into it, and experience the texture against your tongue, teeth, and gums. Do you salivate? Do any emotions or memories arise? Just take in what experience is there in the moment.

Finally, you are invited to bite into the food object and chew it in a wholly controlled and deliberate manner, noting each sensation and flavor as it arises in consciousness, discovering as if for the first time the experience of chewing and swallowing.

How was this experience for you? Were you able to stay with the sensations of eating in this manner? Did you find it easier to stay focused on this activity than to simply follow a clock’s second hand as in the previous exercise? Were you present to the sensations as they occurred? Did you observe anything new about the eating process or discover a previously unrecognized quality of the food object that you used? In other words, were you more mindful of the actions and experiences that arose in your consciousness as you performed the exercise than you normally would be? This is the experience of mindfulness as a state of consciousness.

Most people find this experience fairly easy to grasp when presented in a form like the mindful eating exercise, yet more difficult to achieve when approached through the watch exercise. Why is that? The reason is that a state of mindfulness is very simple, it really is nothing more than paying “bare attention” to the experiences of the present moment, as Kabat-Zinn suggests, but the ability to do so at will often requires training. Which brings us to our next perspective on the term mindfulness, which is mindfulness as a particular type of meditation practice.

Mindfulness as a Type of Meditation

Meditation as a mental practice has been around for at least 3,500 years of human history (Everly & Lating, 2002, p. 199). Meditation can take many forms and have various effects depending on a number of factors, including the individual’s predispositions and developmental state; intentions for engaging in the practice; the setting, circumstances, and guidance of the practice; and length of time and intensity of engagement. As an example, the noticeable effects of a meditation practice that is taken on casually for 30 minutes a day, three days a week, as part of a university class that has as its goal the reduction of student stress, may vary significantly from the effects of a serious meditation practice taken on as a spiritual discipline with the intention of achieving a permanent state of self-realization under the tutelage of a master meditation teacher for periods of three to six hours a day for a year of sequestered living in a remote monastery. The differences in level of commitment and intention in the foregoing examples are obvious and the precipitate effects would no doubt vary widely.

For our purposes, we will be looking at various meditation practices and techniques that fall along a very narrow spectrum of the entire field of possibilities, with the intention of positively impacting the student’s sense of well-being and performance in their existing circumstances, presumably some type of academic pursuit and young adult developmental tasks. The exercises we will explore are intentionally rudimentary and curated specifically for a college-aged demographic. We will be looking at the meditation process primarily through a Western scientific lens as well as a first-person hermeneutic (interpretive) exploration of direct experience. For the student or explorer that wishes to go further, there is a good deal of literature available (see Appendix B at the end of this volume for many examples), and the instruction of an experienced teacher is highly recommended. What will be suggested in the following pages is intended to be helpful to its audience, but not necessarily transformative (which has traditionally oft been the goal of engaging in a serious meditative practice). There is much to be had from a beginner’s approach. In the practice of Zen, as an example, the practitioner is asked to cultivate a “beginner’s mind,” and so shall we proceed with a secular intent and an innocent curiosity.

Often in Western meditation research, two general types of practice are identified, “Focused Attention Meditation” (FAM), sometimes called concentration meditation or meditation with an object, and “Open Monitoring Meditation” (OMM), or meditation upon conscious experience itself (Lippelt et al., 2014; Lutz, Slagter, Dunne, & Davidson, 2008). In FAM, practitioners attempt to focus their attention on a single object, such as the process of their own breathing or a mantra (a repeated word or phrase) and maintain attention on that object for the duration of the meditation session. When other thoughts or distractions inevitably encroach on the concentration of attention, the meditators are instructed to gently acknowledge the thought or distraction and then, non-judgmentally, return their attention to the object of the meditation session. The practice of gently holding the attention on a single object and the act of repeatedly returning the attention to the object when attention wanders off, work together over time to train and strengthen the attention function and result in a more stable state of consciousness that can be more readily directed at will. While the basic instructions for FAM appear exceedingly simple (and they are) the actual practice performed on a regular basis over time can be challenging for many and exceptionally difficult for some, depending on how generally distracted and distractible they tend to be.

OMM has a slightly different focus and is often taken up after basic competency in FAM has been achieved (Chiesa & Malinowski, 2011; Lippelt et al., 2014). In OMM, the focus of attention is on whatever experience is arising in consciousness at the moment. Instead of focusing on one object and ignoring all other phenomena, the meditator endeavors to “gently” be aware of everything arising in consciousness without judgment or attachment. Attention is left open to experience whatever is present—sounds in the room, thoughts and memories, the sensation of the space around the meditator—whatever is happening now is accepted and acknowledged (very much like in the eating exercise above). This is open awareness or what is sometimes called cultivating a state of bare attention, so that the meditator’s awareness receives and accepts whatever arises in the present moment.

FAM and OMM can both be used as the foundation for various meditative forms, such as seated meditation, walking meditation, movement meditation, or meditative versions of such everyday tasks as eating or bathing. We will look at examples of both in our explorations, but as suggested above, we will start with forms based on FAM in order to build some expertise in directing the attention function before moving on to forms based on OMM.

A meditation (or mindfulness) practice then is made up of a combination of exercises and disciplines based on either concentrating the attention repeatedly on a single object or process, or attending carefully (and non-judgmentally) to all experiences that arise in consciousness on a real-time, or present-moment, basis. By repeatedly and regularly training the attention to return to specific objects or overall awareness of experience, we begin to calm the otherwise active puppy dog mind and this, in turn, can lead to greater relaxation, equanimity, and clarity of mind even under difficult circumstances, the general goals of our program of college mindfulness training.

The Mindfulness Movement in the 21st Century

In the last 20 years, mindfulness in particular, and meditation in general, has become a cultural movement in the United States. However, this wave of popularization and resulting proliferation is a relatively recent turn of events. In the 1800s and early 1900s, meditatio...

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Roots of CMT
• 1. What Exactly Is Mindfulness?
• 2. Attention and Distraction in the Digital Age
• 3. What Is MBSR (and What It Is Not)?
• 4. Mindfulness in Everyday Life
• 5. Mind/Body Fitness
• 6. Apps, Gadgets, and Mindful Technology Use
• 7. Mindfulness Programs and Initiatives
• 8. Individual CMT Practice
• 9. CMT in an Institutional Setting
• Appendix A: Sample CMT Course Syllabus
• Appendix B: Research Articles and Book Resources
• Appendix C: Organizations, Programs, and Apps
• Index