WRITTEN BY HIRA KHAN

Flow and balance are of great importance to the mental well-being of everyone; adults or kids. It is also helpful in our day-to-day lifestyle from work to study and carrying out simple tasks. Meditation can help you achieve all these seamlessly.

There are numerous kinds and forms of meditation, they include Mindfulness and Transcendental meditations.

Mindfulness is a type of meditation where you are focused on and aware of your present situation. You observe these things your senses perceive without trying to judge them. The practice of mindfulness usually involves breathing methods, guided imagery, and other practices which help relax the body, the mind and reduce stress.

This kind of meditation allows you to enter the flow state (the zone). The flow state is a state of mind when one is completely immersed in an activity. The person zones out everything else and their actions are fluid. This is because the state lets you carry out activities for the activity's sake, not as a duty. 

This is why these mindfulness meditation practices are being taught in schools recently.

Mindful meditation at school

Mindful meditation has been introduced in schools across various states in the United States as part of efforts to improve the learning ability, attention span, and focus of kids. Kids are more volatile emotionally and have lower attention spans than regular adults. Subsequently, leading to poorer performance and reduced learning efficiency when stressed.

Mindful meditation was introduced to mitigate these issues and facilitate a more rounded improvement in the child's life. These improvements include cognitive and emotional growth.

In some kindergartens, teachers instill mindfulness lessons by showing pupils how to make mindful observations without judgment. Erica Eihl, a teacher at the Citizens Of The World, a charter school in Mar Vista, usually guides her kids in mindfulness by saying things like, "Looking at the apple, look on the outside. Look on the inside... Remember, keep it in your palm and just look at it." Then she asks for their input and receives honest observations not coloured by judgment. 

The answers they give, although obvious, come from a place of conscious observation.

This practice allows them to be conscious about everything from their surroundings to what they eat and even their emotions. Over time, this practice creates more emotionally stable kids and improves the standard of learning. 

Pupils are more attentive and willing to study, as they do more than blind memorization. 

Eihl observed:

"They're very receptive to it. They're so emotional at this age. It's allowing them to have the tools to be expressive" about their emotions and cope with them." 

From this statement, it is clear that the emotional state of these kids is more stable.

Principal Alison Kerr noted  "mindfulness can help equip children for the world they're growing into by giving them tools to "identify and cope with their feelings, to be still and attentive to what's going on around them."

The kids are even encouraged to sit in a corner “peace corner” in the classroom when upset. The peace corner is a part of the classroom dedicated to this purpose. This corner is usually equipped with mats, cushions, and headphones to cancel out the noise from the class. 

One of the students at Citizens of the world, a charter school in Mar Vista, 6-year-old Alia Briglia posited:

"Mindfulness has been my favourite thing in my whole life. When I'm mad, sad, or frustrated, I go to the peace corner." 

Alia's comment is a wholesome display of the development mindfulness facilitates in a child. Over time, they learn how to, without supervision, centre themselves and enter a flow state. 

Due to the improvements discovered, educators are now catching on to the benefits of mindful meditation.

In the words of Vicki Zakrzewski, the education director at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley: 

"One of the reasons it's growing is because the kids are under so much pressure now, with the testing culture and the pressure put on them by teachers and parents to be successful."

Mindfulness is also beneficial to students in improving focus, attention, and calming emotions. With these benefits in place, teachers and educators no longer view these practices as a mere exercise. They instead see it as something that can boost the academic performance of students. 

It can also be seen as a teaching tool for improving the moral compass and empathy in children. When a child can perceive objects, people, and their environment mindfully, they tend to be kinder. This is because it builds not only the cognitive but also the emotional and social aspects of the kids' development. 

Lorraine Hobbs, the director of youth and family programs at UC San Diego's School of Medicine and Center for Mindfulness remarked:

"When we can teach kids to pay attention to this inner landscape, they can learn kindness and compassion."

This helps the kids in their daily lives and teaches them how to handle certain emotional and or social issues. Students suffering from anxiety have also found practising meditation to be helpful. It provides a fun way to deal with their fear and better understand what drives them. With mindfulness, kids can now cope better with the stress and anxiety of keeping up with their peers or even overcoming bullying.◼︎