2013 Top 10

Posted on December 18, 2013 by Nancy Chick

I just realized this will be my last entry for 2013.* As my social media feeds fill up with Top 10 Lists, I thought I’d pause at the end of the year and offer my own.  Since my blog is still fairly new (this is just my 18th post), I don’t think I have enough material within the blog to look internally, so instead I’ll just offer my Top 10 Mindful Things for 2013.  And yes, “Things” is intentionally broad to allow for variety.

10.  A meditation cushion in my office, which I use to get out of my desk chair during brief meditation breaks (I like the change in location and perspective, but it’s not necessary.)

9.  The Mindfulness app, which I set to gently chime at me throughout the day to ask “What’s going on around you right now?” and “How does the water feel on your skin in the shower?” and other notices to periodically bring me back to here and now

8. The book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes by Alexandra Horowitz, which is a lovely book that gave me several new lenses to appreciate the world around me

Alexandra Horowitz's 4-minute introduction to On Looking

7. This simple, 5-minute meditation, which has the soothing audio of a bell and video of liquid blue waves…aaaaaahhhhhhhhh

Click the image to play.

6.  The book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff, which is helping me refine my understanding of “here” and “now”–and so much more. (I’ll write about it in future posts.)

5. A weekly mindful meditation practice I’ve started at my workplace, which is no more than 15 minutes, and folks just drop in if they can make it

Yes, this is really my door sign. Click image to download a printable version.

4. The mindfulness-teacher training group I meet with weekly, which is not pictured below 🙂

The Beatles with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, not my MTT group.

3.   Mindful magazine, which never fails to give me good ideas and good new practices

2. The image of a snow globe, which led to my “click!” moment of understanding mindfulness

Nancy's Snow Globe Mind

My snow globe at home

1. Writing this blog, which gives me the opportunity and the discipline to keep making connections between my mindful life and my work life

Fantastic logo by colleague Rhett McDaniel

Practice

I don’t think I’ve shared #7 here until now, so let’s do that as our practice this week. Just click the image and follow the instructions on the screen–and then replay it once you’re familiar with it.

Click the image to play.

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* I’m going to take next week off for Christmas, but I’ll be back on January 1 or 2.

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Difficult Discussions

Posted on December 13, 2013 by Nancy Chick

Several recent campus conversations have focused on facilitating difficult discussions with students in and out of class.  I’ve long taught multicultural American literature and women’s studies courses, so I appreciate how hard it is to effectively navigate these moments. As I prepare my syllabus for next semester, I’ve been thinking about the potential for mindfulness to help with these situations.

"The Power of Presence in the 21st Century Classroom: Integrating Mindfulness-Based Pedagogy to Cultivate Attention, Curiosity, Compassion, and Intention Among Students and Educators" by Jacquelyn Lee and Sarah Himmelheber

I then remembered that, before Thanksgiving, I wrote about the first of three conference presentations on mindfulness and learning I saw this semester.  The second offers some insight on the connection between mindfulness and dealing with difficult topics with students In early October, I attended the conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) in Raleigh, NC.  The poster session featured one titled “The Power of Presence in the 21st Century Classroom: Integrating Mindfulness-Based Pedagogy to Cultivate Attention, Curiosity, Compassion, and Intention Among Students and Educators” by Jacquelyn Lee and Sarah Himmelheber, social work faculty members at University of North Carolina Wilmington and the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, respectively. Their study was broader than Nina Johnson’s focus on finger labyrinths in that they used a variety of tools:

  • an introductory lecture on mindfulness and its relevance to their learning and practice of social work,
  • varied practices at the beginning of each class for 12 weeks,
  • recommendations for 2-minute meditation and breathing exercises, and
  • mindful approaches to journal writing and class discussions.

Their pre- and post-test study in both undergraduate and graduate social work courses documented significant increases in both observation (“The act of noticing sensations, perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”) and non-reactivity (“The act of ‘pausing,’ or ‘stepping back’ to avoid getting lost in or overtaken by one’s inner experience”).

I can easily see the importance of observation and non-reactivity in social work, but these findings are important for others as well.  I think back on all of the challenging, emotionally charged discussions that have been important in my courses and in my office-hours conversations with students. Zitkala-Sa, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Indian relocation. Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and slavery.  Stephen Crane, E. E. Cummings, Tim O’Brien, and war. Harriet Jacobs, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, and rape.  And I could go on. Difficult issues abound in what I teach, and we have to talk about them–really talk about them–in class, and these conversations inevitably spill over into office hours as well. Prohibiting, avoiding, or ignoring them means I’m not teaching my discipline fully, and I’m not teaching to the whole student.

We talk a great deal about having a “safe classroom environment” for learning. What do we mean by that, and how can we create it? How do we describe it and teach it to students?  Such self-awareness (observation) and calm (non-reactivity) seem critical to these “hot moments” but aren’t automatic or even readily available to all. Lee and Himmelheber’s study suggests that a more mindful classroom may help us–and more importantly, help the students–create this kind of learning environment. In our syllabi, we have statements of the kind of classroom environment,  participation, and engagement we expect. I’m going to work on how clearly I describe what these look like, and how I help students get there. I just came across some passages that may be helpful.  I’ll share some examples by the start of next semester.

Practice

Here is an initial step for encouraging a mindful (fully present, focused on what’s happening in the room, open to what emerges with minimal knee-jerk reactions) approach to individual discussions and to overall classroom environment. Tan (2012) describes the way he chairs meetings:

“I invite everybody in the meeting room to make the following assumptions about everybody else:

  1. Assume that everybody in the room is here to serve the greater good, until proven otherwise.
  2. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that none of us has any hidden agenda, until proven otherwise.
  3. Given the above assumption, we therefore assume that we are all reasonable even when we disagree, until proven otherwise.” (p. 180)

He asserts that this initial step brings “a greater sense of trust in the room.” The next time you enter a conversation that may be challenging, experiment with these ground rules by introducing them to the group.  Tailor them to your context. Think about how you might adapt them to your syllabus and your classroom.

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References
Lee, Jacquelyn, & Himmelheber, Sarah. (October 3, 2013). The power of presence in the 21st century classroom: Integrating mindfulness-based pedagogy to cultivate attention, curiosity, compassion, and intention among students and educators. 2013 Conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Raleigh, NC.
Tan, Chade-Meng. (2012). Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). New York: Harper-Collins.
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Inspiration, Creativity, & New Ideas

Posted on December 4, 2013 by Nancy Chick

In “The Science of Inspiration” (2013), Eric Ravenscraft highlights the neuroscientific view of inspiration, epiphanies, and “‘a-ha’ moments”:

“When you make a new connection between two ideas, it’s not just a metaphor. Your brain is literally restructuring itself to accommodate new processes…. [T]he more ‘plastic’ your brain is, the more you’re able to form creative or inspirational thoughts.”

This neuroplasticity isn’t finite and has no expiration date.*  Ravenscraft offers a handful of strategies for increasing neuroplasticity and nurturing inspiration, one of which is meditating. While he doesn’t get more specific, it’s important to know that a specific kind of meditation is associated with creativity and inspiration. Rather than “focused attention” meditation that…well…focuses complete attention on one thing (e.g., the breath), this type is called “open monitoring” meditation:

“the individual is open to perceive and observe any sensation or thought without focusing on a concept in the mind or a fixed item; therefore attention is flexible and unrestricted.” (Colzato, Ozturk, & Hommel, 2012, p. 1)

The greatest effects have been shown in three specific characteristics of creativity, or “divergent thinking” (p. 4): fluency (number of new ideas), flexibility (variety of new ideas), and originality (uniqueness of new ideas). So unlike some of the practices I’ve shared in earlier posts, this would be less guided, less singular, and more about…well…openly monitoring whatever is happening internally and externally at the moment.

As an Americanist,** I immediately jump to two 19th-century writers’ discussions of inspiration. “To Build a Fire” and Call of the Wild author Jack London is unsurprisingly active, proactive, even aggressive, in his image: “Don’t loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club” (1903, p. 143).  While his rejection of loafing and invitation hardly fits with focused-attention meditation (in fact, “invite” is a frequent word used to guide it), the spirit of his advice is to be intentional and active, one way of being mindful. Ralph Waldo Emerson‘s “Nature” (1836), on the other hand, encourages us to follow in the author’s footsteps into the woods:

Pardon my irreverence, but thanks to a graduate school seminar, this caricature of Emerson's image by cartoonist Christopher Pearse Cranch (1839) will always be a mental thumbnail for me.

“Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.” (emphasis added)

Emerson’s practice is wide open, receiving, and passive–but focused on being open, actively receiving, and intentionally passive. This is open-monitoring meditation.  Let’s try it.

Practice

This practice may work especially well for busy academics because we can do it anytime, anywhere, while doing just about anything.  I like the simplicity and clarity of how Kenji Crosland explains it, so I’ll let his description serve as our practice this week. From his explanation, it’ll be even more obvious that, while focusing on the breath is more useful for the goal of concentration or calm attention, this kind of meditation is more conducive to creativity, new ideas, and epiphanies:

“The practice of open monitoring meditation is quite simple. In fact, I’m practicing a form of it right now as I write this blog post. As I type, I allow myself to be aware of my breathing, of my fingers touching each key, and the feeling of warmth of my back against the chair. I also am aware of random thoughts that come through my head. I observe them, and let them pass. All of this activity helps ground me in the present moment. Thus, I’m not worried about what I’m going to say or whether the words coming out on the page make sense or whether they’ll be considered ‘stupid’ or ‘brilliant’ or not. With the self-critic out of the way, the words flow effortlessly.

You can practice this meditation while doing any activity, even just walking down the street. As you walk down the street, feel your feet against your socks and shoes, and feel the pressure of the ground against your soles. Also, be aware of your breathing, and of every sight and sound. Don’t judge what you see or hear, just be aware of it. If you do judge, just be aware of the judgement, and refrain from judging that. When you do this, all thought is focused what you’re doing right now, and whatever you think you have to do, whatever email you have to answer can wait until you’re actually sitting in front of your computer with your inbox open.”

For the next week, try this practice a few times while doing various activities, and let me know how it goes.

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* The implications of neuroplasticity for integrative learning and learning through metaphors are many, but for now, I want to explore this notion of inspiration as thinking of a new connection, a new pathway–in the mind and in the physical brain.

** In English, an Americanist is a specialist in American literature, not a xenophobe.
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References
Colzato, Lorenza S., Ozturk, Ayca, & Hommel, Bernhard.  (April, 2012). Meditate to create: the impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology, 3. 1-5.
Crosland, Kenji. (January, 2011). Open your mind with open monitoring meditation. The Psychology of Wellbeing: Musings on the science of holistic wellness.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1836). Nature.
London, Jack. (1903). Getting into print. Practical Authorship, Knapp Reeve, James, Ed. NY: Editor Publishing Company. 140-143.
Ravenscraft, Eric. (November, 2013). The Science of inspiration (and how to make it work for you). LifeHacker.
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Gratitude Journals

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Nancy Chick

It’s the Thanksgiving break on campuses in the United States, and I’m recovering from another surgery, so this week’s post will be brief.  I’ve been enjoying the daily “I’m thankful for…” posts by many of my Facebook Friends this month.  They’ve ranged from humorous to heartfelt to tragic. While gratitude journals have been popular for some time, this public sharing seems to be encouraging others to participate as well.  Among other things, they reflect the intentional work of being fully present, aware of the here and now–elements of mindfulness.

My record on surgery day last week

When I was very sick, a friend introduced me to HappyRambles.com, a site that sends you an email every night (or whenever you want) asking, “What are you grateful for today?” You simply reply to the email, and the site collects each day’s response in a private, daily journal you can return to when needed.  I’ve responded to the prompt every day since January 28.  In addition to helping me through some very bad health days, it focused my attention to recognize specific details about my life. In other words, it’s supported my mindful practice by encouraging me to notice–well, just about everything.

The size of the font represents the frequency of the word in my posts.

I was just looking back through all of my posts (collected in the word cloud to the left), and a few patterns emerged. The results aren’t at all what I would have predicted. First, I see far more references to work than I’d expected. (Between you and me, I honestly thought my cats and “naps” might be the biggest words.)  Instead, apparently my work has been more important to my sense of gratitude (or, as HappyRambles translates it, my happiness) than I probably realized.  Next, I see the details about the work that have made the greatest impact on my life.*  I’m fortunate to have a job I love, but even in this circumstance, it’s been useful to be “forced” regularly to think of what in particular I like about it.  I see my colleagues (in general and a few by name), as well as specific work-related projects, activities, and traits.

Truthfully, I haven’t looked back through my entries until just now.  I was waiting until I really needed it, and the holidays are hard for me, so I looked today.  I’m glad I did–not just to help with the blues, but to also see yet another way my life has been affected by committing to a mindful practice.  (In this case, responding to a simple email every day.)

Practice

Gratitude meditations are fairly common, so I’ll simply share one here.

Click the image to start the guided meditation.

I’ve most liked the ones like the link to the left: rather than calls for abstract gratitude for anything and everything, it guides you to focus on a specific object of gratitude.

It’s just 6:32 long.

 

 

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* I have not taught an undergraduate course this calendar year, so “students” and “class” don’t appear here.  However, some of the specific graduate students and the SoTL program I teach are in there–if you know the names and terminology.

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Labyrinths & Learning

Posted on November 20, 2013 by Nancy Chick

I’ve been reading everything I find about mindfulness, but I’m eager for more evidence-based work on its effects on learning in the college classroom.  As my previous posts indicate, recent years have seen a lot of scientific research (especially in neuroscience and psychology) pointing to the psychological and physiological effects of mindfulness.  There’s also plenty of exploration in K-12 education, often for issues related to classroom behavior and management, but what about our students, and what about the effect on learning itself?

The progress isn’t as slow as I’d initially thought. I appreciated the March and May 2012 issues of National Teaching & Learning Forum with the cover stories on contemplative pedagogy, as well as summer 2013 issue of New Directions for Teaching and Learning on “Contemplative Studies in Higher Education.”  The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society has also started a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal, The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, and I look forward to their first issue. There are also some fabulous books out there, from Ellen Langer’s now classic The Power of Mindful Learning (1998) to Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc’s The Heart of Higher Education (2010), which is much broader but includes mindfulness.* These sources are particularly interesting because they reach beyond the initial notion of meditation in the classroom to broader learning issues that are affected by a variety of mindful practices.

I’m particularly excited about some research in progress I heard about at two recent conferences.  Two posters and a presentation I saw focused squarely on mindfulness and learning, and I’ll write about each of them over the next few weeks.  First, the most recent.

A few weeks ago, I was in Banff, Alberta, Canada, for the 2013 Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning,** and I was thrilled to come across the poster presentation by Nina Johnson from Thompson Rivers University (Kamloops, BC). She’s conducting a scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project in which she investigates her own students’ learning–in this case, focusing on the effects of a specific mindful practice in her creative writing course. Her students are using finger labyrinths before they write in their journals*** and take their exams. She’s interested the potential applications of three documented effects of mindfulness on her students’ short fiction writing:

Nina Johnson's Poster, Labyrinths and Student Learning: The Effects of Contemplative Practices on Anxiety, Concentration, and Creativity

  • reducing anxiety to help prevent or manage writer’s block,
  • improved concentration to help students notice what’s going on around them and within themselves more precisely, which “may then be more easily verbalized and crafted as fiction,” and
  • harnessing the relaxation of the practice to “enable metaphorical and associative thinking which is commonly labelled as ‘creativity.‘”

After the class is over in December, she’ll be looking at a variety of direct and indirect evidence of the students’ learning experiences: the students’ journals and short stories, as well as a variety of surveys and focus group conversations with the students.  Students will also be tracking their experiences and their perceptions of the effects of the practice. I look forward to what they find, and as soon as the study is made public, I’ll share it here as well.

Practice

  • First, get a labyrinth:
    • Download and print this labyrinth, or
    • just open this labyrinth on your screen, and you’ll use your mouse or trackpad,
    • or buy this app, if you have an iPhone or iPad ($1.99 in iTunes).

    • Watch me start my final circuit--until my cat Jack decides it's laptime

  • Take a few slow breaths, and focus your attention on your labyrinth. In the same way that you’ve kept your attention gently focused on your breath in previous practices, you’ll now use the labyrinth as your anchor.
  • Using your finger (if it’s a printout or the app) or your mouse/cursor (if it’s on your screen), ideally with your non-dominant hand, slowly trace the circuit from the outside path toward the center.
  • As thoughts or feelings arise, simply notice them, and then bring your attention back to your circuit.
  • Once you’re in the center, pause, breathe, and then start your way back out–slowly.
  • Repeat as many times as you like, whenever you like.

What was this experience like for you?

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* Last year, the Vanderbilt Contemplative Pedagogy group selected the Palmer and Zajonc book as our summer reading. It led to a great discussion!

** I wrote about my overall experience in another blog–with pictures.

*** These journals aren’t journals in the sense of a diary; they’re creative writing journals for students to begin imagining and drafting their short stories.
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References
Johnson, Nina. (November 8, 2013). Labyrinths and student learning: the effects of contemplative practices on anxiety, concentration, and creativity. 2013 Symposium on Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. Banff, Alberta, Canada.
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Reading Like Bruce Lee

Posted on November 14, 2013 by Nancy Chick

I teach literature. My students read a lot, and I want them to read well—closely, carefully, attentively. I’ve always heard that the best readers were read to when they were young and then read voraciously when they were growing up.  This makes great sense to me, but it also suggests that those who don’t fit that profile will struggle as readers. How can we help our students–already in college and past these formative years–become better readers? A recent study on mindfulness and the GRE (Graduate Record Exam, no simple reading task) offers a strategy.

I pause at the word “strategy.” It seems out of place in a sentence with “mindfulness.”  Beyond its basic definition of “the science or art of combining and employing the means of war in planning and directing large military movements and operations,” it connotes something more methodical and goal-oriented than we associate with mindfulness. Hm. Misconception alert!

Mindfulness doesn't necessarily look like this.

Arnie Kozak (2009) identifies the fierce warrior as a metaphor for mindfulness, which “doesn’t have to be tranquil and passive. It can be active, precise, and strong–even fierce. This runs counter to images of serene pools and drops of water” (p. 25).  Instead, he says, mindfulness can be a “precise and courageous way of looking at everything–including your own mind.” While the metaphor of the snow globe has resonated with me, this one will serve others better.  If you prefer tackling a task with determination or performing intense workouts, this idea of the fierce warrior may make more sense.  This warrior has “Fierce Attention,” which can help us become “more efficient and creative by cutting out much of the distraction that typically plagues the mind…especially when peak performance is required” (p. 26).

This metaphor helps explain the findings in this recent study about the effect of a little mindfulness on working memory and reading comprehension.  Mrazek and colleagues (2013) split a group of 48 undergraduates between two short courses, one on nutrition and the other on mindfulness.  Each met for just two weeks—in eight 45-minute sessions.  The mindfulness sessions focused on

“(a) sitting in an upright posture with legs crossed and gaze lowered,
(b) distinguishing between naturally arising thoughts and elaborated thinking,
(c) minimizing the distracting quality of past and future concerns by reframing them as mental projections occurring in the present,
(d) using the breath as an anchor for attention during meditation,
(e) repeatedly counting up to 21 consecutive exhalations, and
(f) allowing the mind to rest naturally rather than trying to suppress the occurrence of thoughts.” (p. 777)

Each session included 10 to 20 minutes of the above practices, discussion, and feedback. Before and after the courses, students took a standard working memory measure of being told to remember a sequence of 3 to 7 numbers, do an unrelated task, and then recite back the sequence–15 times. They then took the GRE section on reading comprehension.* During this test, they were prompted eight times to rate their focus on the task, they independently kept track of how many times their minds wandered, and afterwards they described their attention levels.  Compared to those in the nutrition class, the students in the mindfulness class recorded less mind wandering in the probes, self-recording, and retrospective assessment and improved their scores on both the working memory capacity test and the GRE–by an average of 16 percentage points.  These effects were especially strong among those who had the most mind wandering before the mindfulness class.

Fierce Warrior Bruce Lee as a model

This study reminds us that mindfulness can be seen as “a persistent effort to maintain focus on a single aspect of experience, particularly sensations of breathing, despite the frequent interruptions of unrelated perceptions or personal concerns” (p. 780). So embrace the metaphor of a warrior with fierce attention and read with intensity.

Better yet, offer students a short course on mindfulness with the curriculum described in (a) through (f) above.  How many study skills, campus counseling centers, and tutoring centers offer such resources? Not enough, I suspect.

Practice

This week, let’s see how this “fierceness” feels by trying (e) above.

  • Sit where you are, and close your eyes or look at the floor just in front of you.
  • Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, and focus on the exhale.
  • Notice the details: the sound of the air moving up through your throat and out your nose, the relative warmth of that air on your nostrils, the contraction of your chest and belly, the awareness of your mind as you notice these details.
  • Now breathe naturally, keeping your attention on the exhales.
  • Start counting those exhales. Wrap your attention around the number each time you breathe out.
  • Do this 21 times.
  • Fiercely focus on the counting of your exhales.  21 times.
  • Come back to the room with the singular concentration of Bruce Lee.

Now, go read a book.

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* Specifically, the researchers used the GRE’s verbal reasoning section without the vocabulary questions.  According to the GRE site, this section “measures your ability to understand what you read and how you apply your reasoning skills,” specifically the abilities to

  • analyze and draw conclusions from discourse; reason from incomplete data; identify author’s assumptions and/or perspective; understand multiple levels of meaning, such as literal, figurative and author’s intent
  • select important points; distinguish major from minor or relevant points; summarize text; understand the structure of a text
  • understand the meanings of words, sentences and entire texts; understand relationships among words and among concepts.

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References
Kozak, Arnie. (2009). Wild Chickens and Petty Tyrants: 108 Metaphors for Mindfulness.  Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Mrazek, Michael D., Franklin, Michael S., Phillips, Dawa Tarchin, Baird, Benjamin, & Schooler, Jonathan W. (2013).  Mindfulness training improves working memory capacity and GRE performance while reducing mind wandering. Psychological Science 24(5). 776-781.
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How It Works, IV

Posted on November 6, 2013 by Nancy Chick

This is the fourth and final post about how mindfulness works, or the documented effects and how they occur.  The first was about attention regulation, the second body awareness, the third emotional regulation, and now a different perspective of the self.

There are few silver bullets in teaching and learning, but a handful of strategies are so grounded in evidence that I sometimes feel like shouting from rooftops.  One is metacognition.*  Another is how students view their own intelligence. Carol Dweck describes it as having either a “fixed mindset” (believing that intelligence is “inborn,” unchangeable) or “growth mindset” (believing that intelligence can be developed, increased), each of which “leads to different school behaviors” (2010, p. 16).  These mindsets are related to the equally compelling notion of “locus of control” (Fazey & Fazey, 2001), or what we believe about control in our life events.  A student with an internal locus of control believes that she has control over what happens in her life, whereas one with an external locus of control believes that external factors are in control, and he is powerless. These mindsets also lead to different learning behaviors (“If I work hard, I can do it!” vs. “I just can’t do math because it’s too hard, so it’s not worth it to try” or “I failed the test because it was unfair, not because of how I studied.”).  All three of these ideas–metacognition, fixed vs. growth mindset, internal vs. external locus of control–come to mind when I read about the final mindfulness “mechanism” described in Hölzel and colleagues’  meta-analysis of the scientific research:  a “change in perspective of the self” (2011, p. 547-550).

Click to see the comprehensive table (Hölzel et al, 2011, p. 539).

More advanced practitioners of mindfulness report moving from a belief in a “static self” (“a constant and unchanging entity”) to an “‘experiencing'” self that is always changing, “transitory” (Hölzel et al., 2011, p. 547).  Rooted in Buddhism, this shift called “‘reperceiving’ or ‘decentering'” is reported more frequently by those with lots of mindful practice, but its beginnings are reported by newbies as well. Self-report studies document the development of a “meta-perspective on experience” after mindfulness practice, and neuroimaging shows structural changes (increased gray matter) in the parts of the brain responsible for “the experience of the self” and “remembering the past, thinking about the future…, and conceiving the viewpoint of others, also referred to as a theory of mind” (p. 549). While these changes are “precisely described in the Buddhist literature,” Hölzel and colleagues are quick to point out that this effect has the fewest studies of the four mechanisms, so they caution that it hasn’t yet been “rigorously tested in empirical research.”**

Integration of the four mechanisms of mindfulness (Hölzel, p. 549). Click to enlarge.

Nevertheless, an increasing meta-awareness of the self as something that’s always changing and can be changed is so intertwined with the previous mechanisms (attention regulation, body awareness, and emotional regulation) that Hölzel and colleagues include it in their list that synthesizes “the existing literature into a comprehensive theoretical framework” (p. 537).  They explain this “integration” by which the four “components mutually facilitate each other” in the lengthy but effective excerpt to the right.  (Click it and read it, really!) It helped me understand more fully how mindfulness is not just about being aware.  This awareness facilitates intentional changes in thinking habits, rewiring the brain to create new, more effective mental habits, which then affect physiological and mental health.

…and, as I’ll focus on more in the coming weeks, these processes also affect learning.

Practice

  • Sit comfortably in your chair, hands in your lap, back straight but relaxed.
  • Take a slow, deep breath.
  • Notice what the floor feels like under your feet. Notice what your chair feels like under your seat.  Notice what your hands feel like in your lap.  Notice what your head feels like above your shoulders.
  • At once, notice the feeling under your feet and the feeling of your head above your shoulders. Stay there with this first-person perspective on your entire body.
  • Take a slow, deep breath.
  • Now, bring your awareness to the edges of the room where you sit, and picture yourself sitting as you are.  See yourself from this “fly-on-the-wall” perspective.  Notice the floor under your feet, the chair you sit in, your hands in your lap, and your head held by your neck. Pause and stay with this attention to your entire body–from a third-person perspective.
  • Repeat the above shifting from an internal to an external perspective on your body, the most obvious expression of your self.
  • Breathe.

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* See my previous post connecting mindfulness to metacognition, and see my metacognition guide for how to bring it into your classes.

** One reason for this relative lack of research may be the relatively limited access to expert practitioners.  This mechanism is most pronounced in experts, but many (most?) studies are conducted on people newly introduced to mindfulness–to demonstrate a before-after change.

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References
Fazey, D. M., & Fazey, J. A. (2001). The potential for autonomy in learning: perceptions of competence, motivation and locus of control in first-year undergraduate students. Studies in Higher Education, 26(3), 345-361.
Dweck, C. S. (2010). Even geniuses work hard. Educational Leadership, 68(1), 16-20.
Hölzel, Britta K., Lazar, Sara W., Gard, Tim, Schuman-Olivier, Zev, Vago, David R., & Ott, Ulrich. (Nov 2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural  perspective.  Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6.  537-559.
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How It Works, III

Posted on October 30, 2013 by Nancy Chick

This is the third of four posts about how mindfulness works, or the documented effects and how they occur.  The first was about attention regulation, the second body awareness, and now we turn to emotional regulation.

A man riding a horse approaches a man standing by the side of the road.  The bystander asks where the rider is going, and the rider responds, “‘I don’t know. Ask the horse'” (Tan, 2012, p. 104).  Chade-Meng Tan tells this story to illustrate the notion of emotional regulation, affirming that the rider “can tame and guide the horse,” just as we can learn to “skillfully” work with our emotions. This skill helps us–in the wake of negative thoughts or experiences–become a) less emotionally and physiologically reactive, or at the mercy of immediate, habitual responses; and b) more resilient, able to bounce back.

The connections between mindfulness and emotional regulation have been documented in studies through self-reports, physiological measures, and neuroimaging (Hölzel, 2011). Emotional regulation occurs in the prefrontal cortex (more activity in this area that monitors and regulates thoughts, emotions, and behaviors) and in the amygdala (less activity in this area that detects and reacts to stimuli that arouse emotions).  Mindful practice activates these same regions in the very same ways. As Tan explains, “Mindfulness helps our thinking brain and our emotional brain communicate more clearly to each other, so they work better together” (p. 115).

Click to enlarge this excerpt. Stay tuned for the post about the final component (Hölzel et al, 2011, p. 539)

A few specific strategies associated with mindfulness account for some of this increased emotional regulation, strategies that remind us that mindfulness isn’t mindlessness, becoming passive, or trying to be empty of thoughts. First is reappraisal, or reframing negative events as “beneficial, meaningful, or benign” (Hölzel, 2011, p. 544). Recall my earlier post about the narratives we tell ourselves and others about our work lives. Thinking about our lives as otter narratives, rather than beaver narratives, is an example of reappraisal.

A second cornerstone of mindfulness that increases emotional regulation is the intentional “turning towards” physical and emotional experiences–both positive and negative– “rather than turning away” (p. 545). Surprisingly, facing unpleasantness, fear, or even pain in this way replaces familiar, stressed emotional and physiological responses with neutral ones. This process, called “extinction,” essentially rewires us in an “overwriting of previously learned stimulus-response associations” (p. 547). Tan describes this ability of “tame aversion, which in turn may tame ruminations and obsessive thoughts,” with yet another analogy.  He was one of the first engineers at Google, so he writes,

In my engineer’s mind, I think of skillfulness in self-regulation as an upgrade to my recovery system. By knowing exactly how a system recovers after failure, I can be confident in it even when it fails because I know the conditions in which the system can come back quickly enough that failure is inconsequential. (p. 126)

Practice

In the next week, if something challenges you emotionally, draw on one of the following practices to help you grab the reins, guide the horse, and appreciate the increasingly smooth ride.*

  • Clouds Drifting By:

    Clouds Drifting By

    One of the most common explanations I’ve heard for this practice is imagining our thoughts and emotions as clouds drifting through the sky. We notice them as they emerge from the horizon, pass over us, and then move toward and beyond another horizon. They are not part of us; they are out there, ephemera we can simply observe, notice, and let go.

  • Meshing:
    Marc Lesser, one of the mindfulness leaders at Google, led a multi-day mindfulness-at-work workshop at Vanderbilt a few months ago.  He introduced “meshing,” or picturing ourselves “as porous as a mesh screen.” We can then imagine sadness, anger, pain, or worry “pass[ing] through” our bodies, “not sticking to” us (Tan, 2012, p. 124).
  • Writing on Water:

    Write with Water (c/o wm91, deviantart.com)

    Tan clarifies that while we can’t prevent an emotion, our goal is not to dwell on it.  He offers the Buddhist metaphor of “writing on water”: “the moment it is written, it disappears” (p. 106).

I’m heading to Sewanee this week to give a workshop, and I plan on thinking of my performance anxiety as a cloud. Maybe a pumpkin-shaped one, in honor of Halloween.

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* As you may infer, one of the reasons mindfulness works for me is its heavy use of metaphors!  I am an English PhD, after all.
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References
Hölzel, Britta K., Lazar, Sara W., Gard, Tim, Schuman-Olivier, Zev, Vago, David R., & Ott, Ulrich. (Nov 2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural  perspective.  Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6.  537-559.
Tan, Chade-Meng. (2012). Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). New York: Harper-Collins.
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How It Works, II

Posted on October 23, 2013 by Nancy Chick

This is the second of four posts about how mindfulness works, or the documented effects and how they occur.  Last week was devoted to attention regulation; this week explores the increased body awareness, the ability to notice small, subtle changes and sensations in the body.

I was thrilled when I learned the term “proprioception,” or our ability to sense the body and its movements in relation to the environment around us. I was deep into yoga at the time, and it gave me language (clunky, but useful) for something I found myself thinking about all the time–but had rarely noticed before.  Now, I’m learning “interoception,” our awareness of our internal sensations, like hunger, butterflies, pain, temperature, itch, and so on.  This sense isn’t as new to my thinking as proprioception, but I’ve noticed I’m aware of and using it more often these days.

This may seem counter-intuitive as as a goal:  why would we want to be more aware of pain? Butterflies? That itch we can’t reach?  Hot flashes?  As proprioceptive awareness changed my relationship generally with my body-in-the-world, interoceptive awareness is actually improving my experiences of pain, nervousness, etc.  The studies on this “mechanism” of mindfulness offer an explanation:  in their review of two decades of research, Hölzel and colleagues (2011) found plenty of evidence showing an increased awareness of the body as a body.

Click to enlarge this excerpt. Stay tuned for posts about the final two components (Hölzel et al, 2011, p. 539)

People who practice mindful meditation report that they more easily and immediately notice sounds, smells, tastes, sights, and interoceptions, as well as thoughts and emotions–a heightened state of all perception.*  Neuroimaging has shown that mindful meditation activates the part of brain (temporo-parietal junction) that regulates “the first-person perspective of bodily states” or “embodiment” (p. 542).**  This response is tied to the remaining mechanisms of mindfulness, but they’re all interrelated, so this preview of later posts is necessary. Instead of my old reaction to getting an IV (<suffer>”Ouch! Wah.”</suffer>), my recent surgical prep sounded more like <notice>”Ah, yes, my hand is experiencing pain from the IV”</notice>. That is a significantly different experience. The sensations in my hand are in my hand and nowhere else–including my sense of self or my identity.  (This part will be more clear in two weeks.)

An additional consequence of this increased bodily awareness previews next week’s topic of emotional regulation, but begins in the body:  “An increased awareness of the body’s response to an emotional stimulus might thus lead to greater awareness of one’s own emotional life, in turn, an awareness of one’s emotions is a precondition for being able to regulate those emotions” (p. 542).  For instance, last week I was nervous before guest teaching a class.  In addition to a few mental worst-case scenarios, I could feel my anxiety in my stomach, in my pulse, and in my breathing.  Rather than trying to ignore it (does that ever work?) or letting it escalate, I focused on one of my body’s responses, the one I knew I could change: my breathing.  A few slow breaths with a particularly long exhale quieted my butterflies, slowed my pulse, and calmed my proverbial nerves. Awareness of and changing my bodily response affected my emotions, and I had a great time in the class.  But I had to be keenly aware of how my body was responding to the situation, rather than focused on the panicky images swirling around in my head.

Mindfulness as Your Personal Mammogram Machine (Hat tip to The Sonia Show for image.)

Oh, to again celebrate Breast Cancer Awareness Month, here’s a simile to capture this ability:  mindful practice is like having a mammogram whenever you like, but without the discomfort.  (Okay, that’s a major distinction, but ultimately, all metaphors and similes somehow lie.)  In other words, it’s all about early detection and thus prevention. Increased body awareness helps us notice those physiological partners–even predecessors–to our emotions, and we can reframe these responses to a) regulate some of them and b) experience them in less personalized ways.

Practice

I had previously posted a few body scans.  Here are a few more–this time from UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center.  The goal is simply to help you check in with your body, to experience it part by part and as a whole more fully.  It’s also incredibly relaxing. Scroll down to listen to them in your browser or in iTunes.

Body Scans from UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center

Scroll down to "Body Scan Meditation" and "Body Scan for Sleep."

  • Try the three-minute one to start.
  • If you enjoy it, try the twelve-minute one later this week, ideally when you’re ready for bed.

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* In the absence of a good instrument, this body awareness hasn’t yet been documented in behavioral studies.  Thus far, meditators’ awareness of body sensations has been tested by their sensitivity to their heartbeats. These studies found no increase in awareness of their heartbeats, but Hölzel and colleagues note that “awareness of heartbeat sensations is not emphasized during mindfulness practice and thus may not be the best index of the awareness cultivated by the practice of mindfulness” (p. 541) and encourage studies using alternative measures.

**  This is also the same area of the brain that governs empathy and compassionate behavior.  Read my earlier post “Playing with Others” for more on this effect.
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References
Hölzel, Britta K., Lazar, Sara W., Gard, Tim, Schuman-Olivier, Zev, Vago, David R., & Ott, Ulrich. (Nov 2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural  perspective.  Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6.  537-559.
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How It Works, I

Posted on October 17, 2013 by Nancy Chick

My recent posts have been focused on issues of stress, mostly because I’ve seen the effects on my own life and worry about colleagues, students, and friends. Some of you have asked me to clarify how mindfulness works: what it actually does, how that happens, and what it looks like. With these great questions in mind, I’ll devote the next few posts to addressing “How It Works” in more depth, one “mechanism” at a time (Hölzel et al, 2011). This week:  attention regulation.

Click to enlarge this excerpt. Stay tuned for posts about the remaining 3 components (Hölzel et al, 2011, p. 539).

Attention regulation means focus.  It’s the foundation of the practice of mindfulness–and improved attention regulation is also a consequence.  In the practice, we focus on a single object, idea, or sensation.  When our minds wander off–as they do–we simply bring our attention back to that focus.  That’s it.  That’s the practice.  As our minds wander and we start to think about grading or meetings or To Do lists, we simply notice the wandering and bring our attention back to that focus.  Surprisingly, this wandering is not a problem, a fault, or a failure. Think of it as hills for a runner: this recognition of “my mind has wandered” and then redirection back to the focus is a key part of the workout that strengthens our ability to regulate our attention in other situations.

What’s happening in the brain that facilitates this improvement? Functional MRIs have shown that this practice activates and strengthens the function of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), which monitors and regulates distraction–or “conflicts emerging from incompatible streams of information processing” (Hözel et al, 2011, p. 540).  What is the brain then able to do?  The skills, documented through both self-reports and empirical measures in multiple studies, are described as

  • increased “‘orienting’ (directing and limiting attention to a subset of possible inputs),”
  • improved “‘alerting’ (achieving and maintaining a vigilant state of preparedness),”
  • decreased “attentional blink effect (a lapse in attention following a stimulus within a rapid stream of presented stimuli),” and
  • greater control over “distribution of brain resources” (Hölzel et al, 2011, p. 541).

And it doesn’t require training-for-a-marathon practice:  even just five days of practice has an effect, such as significantly decreased error scores on an Attention Network Test (Tang et al, 2007).

Consider the implications of getting better at regulating our attention.  We can focus our attention for longer periods, we’re distracted from that focus less easily, and we recover from distraction more quickly.  I’ve long struggled with these kinds of transitions, especially when I’m “in the zone,” so I’m particularly grateful for this workout.  If a phone call interrupts us while we’re writing, we can pick up where we left off in the writing more easily. If we’re grading a stack of essays and need to stretch our legs, we can return to the grading more smoothly. If our minds or our students’ minds wander in class, we can rejoin what’s happening in the room more quickly. If someone interrupts a student while studying for an exam, it’s easier to get back to the deep thinking. For more about attention regulation and its specific relevance to us and our students,  read my earlier post “Paying Attention” and its connection to metacognition.

Practice

This issue of attention regulation takes us back to an earlier practice described in “The Easy Way & the Easier Way“:

“The creatively named Easy Way is to simply bring gentle and consistent attention to your breath for two minutes.  That’s it.  Start by becoming aware that you are breathing, and then pay attention to the process of breathing. Every time your attention wanders away, just bring it back very gently.” (Tan, 2012, p. 26)

Here’s a timer.  In “The Easy Way & The Easier Way” you did this for two minutes.  Now, set it for 4:00 or 5:00.  When you click “Start,” look down comfortably, or close your eyes. The timer will alert you at the end.

Remember, focus on your breathing. As your mind wanders, that’s okay.  Just notice “wandering,” and then return to your breath.  Wandering. Breath.

Next week, I’ll write “How It Works, II.” There will be four of these posts, and then I want to spend some time focusing on how students and their learning are affected by mindful practices.

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References
Hölzel, Britta K., Lazar, Sara W., Gard, Tim, Schuman-Olivier, Zev, Vago, David R., & Ott, Ulrich. (Nov 2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural  perspective.  Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6.  537-559.
Tan, Chade-Meng. (2012). Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). New York: Harper-Collins.
Tang, Yi-Yuan, Ma, Yinghua, Wang, Junhong, Fan, Yaxin, Feng, Shigang, Lu, Qilin, Yu, Qingbao, Sui, Danni, Rothbart, Mary K., Fan, Ming, & Posner, M.I. (2007). Short-term meditation training improves attention and self-regulation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States of America, 104, 17152-17156.
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