Teachers Are Living in a Tinderbox of Stressful Conditions. These Scientific Approaches Can Help.
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-07-01-teachers-are-living-in-a-tinderbox-of-stressful-conditions-these-scientific-approaches-can-help
Other essential elements include meditation, breathwork, yoga, cultivating and maintaining high-quality relationships, and intentional reinforcement of mindsets that promote human connection, such as gratitude, altruism and collective efficacy. What’s real in the mind is real is real in the body, and it is our perceptions—not “objective” reality—that drive our biochemistry. Accordingly, finding a silver lining—even under the most dire of circumstances—instigates a biochemical “upward spiral” which fosters constructive thinking in a demanding moment and, over the long-term, protects health and psychological well-being.
Participating in an eight-week mindfulness meditation program appears to make measurable changes in brain regions associated with memory, sense of self, empathy, and stress. from r/science
Eight weeks to a better brain
a team led by Harvard-affiliated researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH)
“Although the practice of meditation is associated with a sense of peacefulness and physical relaxation, practitioners have long claimed that meditation also provides cognitive and psychological benefits that persist throughout the day,” says study senior author Sara Lazar of the MGH Psychiatric Neuroimaging Research Program and a Harvard Medical School instructor in psychology
“It is fascinating to see the brain’s plasticity and that, by practicing meditation, we can play an active role in changing the brain and can increase our well-being and quality of life,” says Britta Hölzel, first author of the paper and a research fellow at MGH and Giessen University in Germany.
Amishi Jha, a University of Miami neuroscientist who investigates mindfulness-training’s effects on individuals in high-stress situations, says, “These results shed light on the mechanisms of action of mindfulness-based training.
Psychedelic Ayahuasca improved mindfulness and cognitive flexibility significantly in the 24 hours after use. from r/science
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00213-019-05445-3
Results
Mindfulness (FFMQ total scores and four of the five mindfulness facets: observe, describe, act with awareness, and non-reactivity) and decentering (EQ) significantly increased in the 24 h after ayahuasca use. Cognitive flexibility (CFS and WPCST) significantly improved in the 24 h after ayahuasca use. Changes in both mindfulness and cognitive flexibility were not influenced by prior ayahuasca use.
Conclusions
The present study supports ayahuasca’s ability to enhance mindfulness and further reports changes in cognitive flexibility in the ‘afterglow’ period occur, suggesting both could be possible psychological mechanisms concerning the psychotherapeutic effects of ayahuasca. Given psychological gains occurred regardless of prior ayahuasca use suggests potentially therapeutic effects for both naïve and experienced ayahuasca drinkers.
McMindfulness: how capitalism hijacked the Buddhist teaching of mindfulness
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/mcmindfulness-and-the-case-for-small-talk-1.5369984/mcmindfulness-how-capitalism-hijacked-the-buddhist-teaching-of-mindfulness-1.5369991
On McMindfulness
dthic
quote the former Buddhist monk Clark Strand here. This was in a review of your work. “None of us dreamed that mindfulness would become so popular or even lucrative, much less that it would be used as a way to keep millions of us sleeping soundly through some of the worst cultural excesses in human history, all while fooling us into thinking we were awake and quiet.”
corporate mindfulness programs are now quite popular. And as we all know, most employees these days are extremely stressed out. The Gallup poll that came out about four or five years ago said that corporations — and this is in the U.S. — are losing approximately 300 billion dollars a year from stress-related absences and seven out of ten employees report being disengaged from their work.
The remedy has now become mindfulness, where employees are then trained individually to learn how to cope and adjust to these toxic corporate conditions rather than launching kind of a diagnosis of the systemic causes of stress not only in corporations but in our society at large. That sort of dialogue, that sort of inquiry, is not happening.
An integrity bubble is where there is a small oasis within a corporation – for example let’s take Google because that’s a great example of it.
You have a small group of engineers who are getting individual level benefits from corporate mindfulness training. They’re learning how to de-stress. Google engineers [are] working 60-70 hours a week – very stressful. So they’re getting individual level benefits while not questioning the digital distraction technologies [that] Google engineers are actually trying to work on. Those issues are not taken into account in a kind of mindful way.
So you become mindful, to become more productive, to produce technologies of mass distraction, which is quite an irony in many ways. A sad irony actually.
mindfulness could be revolutionized in a way that does not denigrate the therapeutic benefits of self-care, but it becomes interdependent with these causes and conditions of suffering which go beyond just individuals.
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more on mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness
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more on meditation in education in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=meditation+education
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2020/02/26/3-misconceptions-about-educator-self-care.html
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How Mindfulness Can Help Teachers and Students Manage Challenging Situations
Patricia C. Broderick May 1
https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/53306/how-mindfulness-can-help-teachers-and-students-manage-challenging-situations
Mindfulness in the Secondary Classroom: A Guide for Teaching Adolescents,” (c) 2019 by Patricia C. Broderick. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company.
Many of the risky and potentially dangerous behaviors of adolescents—procrastination, disruptiveness, disordered eating, cutting, drinking, violence, taking drugs, technological addiction, and so on—have a common denominator. They likely involve avoiding unpleasant emotional experience by trying to make it go away. The extent to which we do this is a measure of our distress tolerance (García-Oliva & Piqueras, 2016; Simons & Gaher, 2005). We all have our limits, but individuals who are highly intolerant of distress and unable to cope adaptively have quick triggers and are more likely to suffer from a range of psychological and behavioral problems (Zvolensky & Hogan, 2013).
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more about mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindful
Mindfulness in the Classroom
By: Erica Kosal, PhD APRIL 29TH, 2019
https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/effective-classroom-management/mindfulness-in-the-classroom/
Even though the goal was to help students use mindfulness, faculty found they viewed things more positively as a result of the work we were doing in our FLC. The second camp focused on how the students were responding. In general, students liked the practices. They found value in them. This was something that grew over time.
Columbian hypnosis
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more on mindfulness in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=mindfulness
Mindfulness And Meditation Will Now Be Part Of The Curriculum In 370 Schools In England
March 29, 2019
Read More: https://www.trueactivist.com/mindfulness-and-meditation-will-now-be-part-of-the-curriculum-in-370-schools-in-england-t1/?utm_source=TA&utm_medium=Organic&utm_campaign=TA-t1-MindfulnessMeditation-TAfb&fbclid=IwAR3lYe82p_jpiH3rjkr9ENgyN5BQhaAeXgblvXZkxpPLjhgszJQ1X76fs18
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NYT Feb 4, 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/04/world/europe/uk-mindfulness-children-school.html
a news release announcing the program.The initiative comes months after a survey commissioned by the National Health Service found that one in eight children in England between the ages of 5 and 19 suffered from at least one mental disorder at the time of their assessment in 2017.
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https://www.mindful.org/why-schools-in-england-are-teaching-mindfulness/
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MISP (Mindfulness in Schools Project)
https://mindfulnessinschools.org/teach-dot-b/dot-b-curriculum/
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https://www.mindfulschools.org/training/mindful-educator-essentials/