Joyful Mind Project

What is mindfulness? 

and why is it the foundation of all our work? 

Mindfulness has a long history.  For thousands of years, contemplative traditions world-wide have used this practice to help transform individual and collective suffering.  In the last thirty-five years, mindfulness emerged as a research-based modality and now has applications in psychotherapy, education, sports training, professional development, and more.

How does mindfulness work?  By cultivating a special kind of attention, we can actually change brain function and structure.  Areas of the brain associated with memory and empathy grow in volume.  Areas of the brain corresponding to the stress response decrease in volume (Lazar, Harvard, 2011).

How does this support mental health? Mindfulness is more than improved focus and concentration.  It is also the intentional cultivation of qualities including empathy, self-compassion, generosity, and gratitude. A growing body of literature has shown that practicing to cultivate these qualities is powerfully associated with emotional wellbeing, healing trauma, increasing motivation, improved health behaviors, personal responsibility, coping, and better interpersonal relationships (Neff and Davidson, 2016).

What does this mean for families and school communities?  The largest study to date on mindfulness with youth produced significant improvements in both attentional control and classroom engagement, key factors for academic success (University of California Davis, Mindful Schools, 2011).  Evidence also suggests that children who use mindfulness report higher levels of wellbeing and lower degrees of stress (Kuyken et al, 2013). 

A growing body of research and neuroscience has shown the benefits of mindfulness to include:

• Increased self-awareness

• Decreased stress & anxiety

• Better focus and concentration

• Improved impulse control and executive function

• Increased empathy for others

• Development of natural conflict resolution skills

• Improved school climate

What’s more, executive function has been shown to predict a child’s success as well as – if not better than – IQ (Diamond, 2012).  This set of learnable skills enables young people to self-direct behavior, reflect deeply, and to consider things from multiple points of view.

But mindfulness is so much more…

embodiment

So much of our sense of being alive can be lost through stress, trauma, or even just the monotony of our busy schedules. Our self-care practices might even involve numbing us to our felt, sensory experience. Too often, we become distant or cut off from what it means to be fully human. We might even be avoiding our felt sense because it is uncomfortable or telling us that something is not right.  Mindfulness helps us utilize this somatic information for our own healing, inviting us back into the body, back into the feeling of being fully alive. Sometimes called, “interoceptive awareness,” this internal, felt awareness is fundamental to all mindfulness-based approaches.

social, racial, and environmental justice

While we believe that mindfulness can be utilized for all of the above reasons, the fruition of this practice is found in its actualization in the greater world. A practice focused on self-improvement or behavior expectations in children misses the mark completely. Mindfulness is incomplete until it includes bringing the practice into the world, for the benefit of the greater whole, targeted populations, and the natural world which we are so quickly destroying. Mindfulness appropriately expressed in our lives helps foster social and racial justice and harmony with nature.