Mindfulness 

My last blog post was on anxiety and the potential effect it can have on children’s learning and wellbeing. I started this post about a week after I wrote my last one in November 2018; a fit of organisation and enthusiasm! Since then there has been a lot of water under the bridge. We’ve endured months stuck inside our own houses, and our own heads, trying to ride out the storm caused by Covid 19, but Mindfulness is still relevant, if not more so. 

Anxiety has become an unwelcome, but common, state for many of our children over the last thirteen months and, as parents and teachers, it can be hard to know how to support our young people; especially if we’re struggling with the situation ourselves. However, there are things we can do to support our kids and to look after ourselves, too.

This blog is on Mindfulness which is just one of the tools we use at Cargilfield to support good mental health. You may have heard me chirping on about Mindfulness in one of the little video clips I produced for the children during remote learning, but what is it really and why bother with it?

Professor Mark Williams, former director of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, says that “mindfulness means knowing directly what is going on inside and outside ourselves, moment by moment.”[i][1]

Stopping to ‘notice’ is the first step in mindfulness and it hasn’t been a very tempting thing to do recently. If we stop and let our minds wander, they might go to some pretty worrying places; our concerns for the health of our family and friends, the missed hours of friendship and play or perhaps the missed learning opportunities for our children. We’re rightly proud of the remote learning offered by Cargilfield but nothing beats having the kids in front of you. We’ve all missed out.

However, failing to stop and take notice can, inadvertently, cause all of these thoughts to bubble over into anxiety. Williams continues by saying "It's easy to stop noticing the world around us. It's also easy to lose touch with the way our bodies are feeling and to end up living 'in our heads' – caught up in our thoughts without stopping to notice how those thoughts are driving our emotions and behaviour,".

How can mindfulness help? Mindfulness is essentially training your brain to start ‘noticing’. Children are particularly good at this and pick up the skill quickly. The techniques we use to support this come from the PawsB mindfulness programme[2]  and some of these include; finger breathing[3], petal breathing[4] and a ‘mindful mouthful’[5]. I’ve included YouTube clips as examples.