Daniel Rechtschaffen - The Way of Mindful Education: Cultivating Well-Being in Teachers and Students

This book is dedicated to all of my teachers and all of my students. Particularly to one student in an Oakland public school who gave me an orange crayon on my first day of teaching, so many years ago, and said, This crayon means youre my best friend. That crayon still stands on my desk.

Thanks go to Martin Prechtel, for reminding me again and again to be reverent of the wisdom of our natural world, to listen ever more deeply, to sing ever more beautifully, to become a person worth descending from. To Thich Nhat Hahn, who taught me the art of walking, breathing, and smiling. To Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn, who have so generously supported me in my work as they have for so many in this mindfulness movement. To my mentors and friends in the mindfulness in education community, especially Linda Lantieri, Susan Kaiser-Greenland, Daniel Siegel, the Mindful Education Institute family, and so many teachers and researchers who are dedicated to this common vision. Laurie Grossman and Richard Shankman, thank you for opening the doors to the Mindful Schools classrooms where I first learned the art of teaching mindfulness to kids. My psychology mentors, Mordechai Mitnick, Jennifer Welwod, Lucanna Grey, Jonathen Tenny, and Michael Kahn, opened my heart and taught me to be an authentic human being.

Thanks also to Caroline Pincus, for tinkering around with me in the early iterations of the book that this has become. To Willow Ruth, for your eloquent editing and sweet friendship. To Nan Satter, for truly understanding this book and for the constructive craft of your words. To Deborah Malmud, for dispelling all of my negative myths about publishers. Your attentiveness, dedication, and kindness have breathed life into this book. To Benjamin Yarling for amazing me with your depth of understanding and insight into this book. Your brilliant edits have spiced every page. To the whole W. W. Norton team, thank you for your dedication to this material and your beautiful professionalism.

I thank my friend and writing compatriot, David Coates, for your insights and friendship that have helped me become the person I needed to be to write this book. To David Treleaven, Max Tarcher, the Essex crew, and everyone else who has read, listened, and supported me in this process.

And to my wife, my partner, my teacher, my friend, Taylor Pattinson. We met at midnight on New Years Eve and talked in the darkness about mindfulness and education. Your enthusiasm then and your insightful wisdom every day since have been the fuel that has carried me through this journey. Nothing gives me more joy than the possibility of learning the true art of mindful education as we embark down the road of creating a family together.

Lets begin our exploration of mindfulness with an experiment. Notice your eyes engaging with the letters of this text as you read. At the end of this paragraph, see if you can stop and focus on the letters simply as shapes for a minute, as if you were a baby in awe of the varied forms flowing in through your eyes. Let your eyes and body relax and take in the text as a work of art, letting go of the need to assign meaning to the words.

After you finish reading this paragraph, pause for a moment and try listening to the sounds around you, smelling the smells, sensing the temperature and pulses in your body, without assigning any meaning to your experiences. No labeling the sound as the heater, or identifying the smell as pancakes. See if for a few minutes you can simply receive your sensory world like a beautiful symphony.

The process of understanding what mindfulness is begins with firsthand experience. In my initial meeting with any class, I ask the students if anyone has heard of mindfulness. I want to know about their preconceived notions. Years ago the majority of my students had no idea what mindfulness was. Now when I ask, almost everyone raises a hand. The responses range from sage-like definitions to questions like Isnt that what Oprah does?

After introducing myself and learning a bit about the students, I invite the class to sit in attentive silence for one minute. Students often finish this period of silence with a sense of amazement, saying something like, It was so quiet I think I heard the buzz of the light bulbs. They are delighted. They have been in the same classroom for an entire year, and have never heard the noise right above their heads. Within one minute of silence, there it is. In one of my favorite exercises, I lead my students in eating raisins mindfully. Kids say theres as much taste in that tiny bit of food as in eating a whole watermelon. Sometimes students ask, Is this magic? Its the kind of magic that instead of tricking the mind by showing it something mysterious and unreal invites you to see how profoundly mysterious reality already is. I frequently say to students, Its as if we were in the Muggle world of Harry Potter all this time and then all of a sudden, with mindfulness, we realized that theres the whole magical world of Hogwarts all around us.

A wealth of peer-reviewed mindfulness research has been validating what practitioners have known for thousands of years. Practicing mindfulness regularly supports immune function, cognitive development, attention skills, and emotional regulation; promotes happiness; and even makes us more empathic. Mindfulness is being brought into the military, into boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies, and even into the Olympic Games, where you can watch athletes taking calming mindful breaths before their big event. There are other examples of how mindfulness is being used in the culture at large, including Congressman Tim Ryans weekly congressional mindful sitting group, Chase Banks Resource Center for Mindful Spending, and the World Economic Forum at Davos that recently kicked off its annual meeting with the Mindful Leadership Experience. For mindfulness, the time is now.

If mindfulness works so well for adults, imagine how much easier it would be to teach self-love, inner resilience, and nonjudgmental awareness right in the beginning of life before the layers of psychological armoring build up. What would our world be like if every child was offered skills for nurturing and developing their hearts, bodies, and minds? The preliminary research on teaching mindfulness to youth is showing us exactly what we would most hope for. Research on mindfulness in youth has been shown to raise test scores, reduce impulsivity, enhance well-being, and build executive functioning.

You may be getting the feeling that mindfulness is the next wonder drug. It has been touted as the cure for everything from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to chronic pain to depression and from suffering itself. Though scientific results make it look like a magic pill, the difficulty is that we cannot swallow mindfulness with a glass of water; we have to practice diligently to experience its effects. Mindfulness is no anesthetic; we have to feel more instead of less. We may try mindfulness hoping it will make us feel immediately peaceful and happy, but often it forces us even more viscerally into our own anxiousness, fear, and discomfort. Mindfulness invites us to turn our ship of awareness directly into the storm. Its magic is that when we relax our resistance muscles and open up to what is true, here and now, a whole new way of being and teaching unfolds.

When we practice mindfulness, we are not memorizing what someone else has already discovered, we are setting up conditions in which we can observe the direct experiences in our own minds, bodies, and hearts. Defining mindfulness is like trying to explain to a child what the word fun means. Its easier just to play a game with them and, as they are dancing around gleefully, you can say, This is called having fun. Instead of telling you what mindfulness is, Ill ask you a few questions.