Toolbox of Mindful Practices for the Classroom

Course: Mindful Practice in Health and Nutrition Sciences, from Dr. Meena Mahadevan

“One of the techniques we’ve been using throughout the semester is to have students keep track of everything they consume – journaling or maintaining a food diary. The idea is that through journaling, they highlight the reasons they eat and which parts of the day they are most hungry. They are encouraged to track not just what they eat and how much they eat but also to track their level of hunger at various times of the day.  They are encouraged to keep track of all the distractions before, during and after eating.  The idea here is that when you pay attention to your hunger, learn to reduce the distractions, you tend not to starve, and consequently, you make healthier food choices.

The second technique we use is visual imagery – visualize the increase in ghrelin before eating and the increase in leptin levels during eating.  The idea here is that visualizing will help to focus their attention on when they feel hungry, and when they feel full. We’ve done an exercise in class where we all bring a small snack to class, and eat quietly, visualizing the ghrelin and leptin levels, and talk about when we started to feel full, to look at how much we had eaten. We even did a comparison where we ate without visualizing and then ate with visualizing and noted the difference in how much we actually ended up eating.

The third technique is what we call progressive muscle relaxation – I got this idea from an intervention we are implementing for HIV-positive women in the community.  We tense and relax the various muscles of our body, as if we are under stress, and pay attention to how that impacts our blood flow.  When blood flow to the GI tract and muscle is affected during tension, then we digest and utilize our nutrients less efficiently.

The fourth technique is what is commonly known as positive affirmations. This is all about teaching students that when it comes to food, nobody is supposed to be perfect. The point of mindfulness is the commitment to return to the bite, the moment, the direct experience of eating.  The point of mindful eating is to not judge or get lost. Instead, the point is to simply observe, experience the process of eating, and create awareness that both negative and positive experiences happen during eating. So we learn to create an opportunity to connect to the act of self-kindness – without shame or blame – to affirm that we can succeed in creating more positive experiences around eating healthily.”

On the influence and purpose of mindful learning practices in teaching nutrition sciences:

“I’ve introduced some techniques in my course that are based on the principles of mindfulness – which is to become more aware of your body, pay close attention to the signals that trigger hunger and satiety, and the impact that stress can have on these signals, and in turn, on one’s eating habits.

As future registered dietitians, my students are aspiring to be dynamic and effective agents of change who empower individuals to develop a positive and sustainable approach to healthy eating. So, I knew that my students really needed some tools to effectively help themselves and their future clients normalize their relationship with stress and food. I emphasize that there are three major goals of this process of mindfulness: 1) to fully experience the eating experience, 2) to direct an individual’s attention to the act of eating and in the process, learn how to recognize the hunger and fullness cues, and 3) to witness without judgment or shame, the emotional and physical responses that result before, during, and after the eating experience.”

Course: Advanced Curriculum and Methods for Early Learners with and without Disabilities, Dr. Elizabeth Erwin

“Participating in CPP provided many benefits for me as well as my students including deepening our critical thinking, inquiry and reflection skills.  There are also new tools that I have already incorporated into my teaching including:

• Silence as a teaching tool (please see Ann Evan’s practice below);
• Meditation before, during or after class;
• Balance of movement (switch seats) with quiet (guided meditation) to engage students more fully and to encourage them to examine their own beliefs.
  • At random (unplanned) moments during class – not every class, as it should be spontaneous and determined by the attentiveness you perceive to be lacking on the part of your students – announce to students that they must pick up all their belongings and move to a new seat. You may also ask them to sit somewhere or by someone they haven’t before. This practice re-orients them to the present moment and place, shifts the dynamic of the class so that students must re-engage, and forces them to break their habitual routines that often lead to monotony, especially during long lectures.
• Writing in class as a form of deep reflection;
• Inquiry Journal Writing – to connect students’ inner lives to what and how they are learning in the course.

Reading Asian Culture, Dr. Aditya Adarkar

This semester allowed me to catalog and refine the following teaching moments that illustrate and expand mindfulness. These activities are based on the principle of “living Zen” — the idea that meditation is not the only path to mindfulness, and that we can practice mindfulness through (carefully structured) activities that promote mindful contemplation. (This has precedence in various Zen practice: the parables of helping strangers, the Tassajara bakers, the practice of contemplative eating.) These activities are open-ended and produce different results and reactions each time; they require an investment in time, especially time for response and discussion.

The activities revolve around the following maxim: as we do, we reflect, we become aware

A. Keeping lists for 24 hours as practicing awareness and setting the stage for self-inquiry:

A list of lies: Students record lies that they hear, see, experience. They might even record lies they find themselves telling others or themselves.

The discussion of ethics and our awareness of ethics leads to a discussion of what it means to be mindful of ethics. This sets the stage for a discussion of Confucius’ Analects and the idea that politics is an extension of ethics.

A list of suffering: Students record forms of suffering that they hear, see, experience. They might even record suffering they find themselves inflicting on others or suffering that is inflicted on them.

The discussion of suffering and of our awareness of suffering leads to the Buddha’s First Noble Truth. (“Suffering is.”) This sets the stage for an investigation of the other key ideas of Buddhist philosophy.

A list of corruption:  Students record forms of corruption that they hear, see, experience, with particular attention paid to acts or institutions corrupting the youth.

Discussing corruption and why it harms us leads us to the opening of Socrates’ Apology. We discuss the forms of corruption in our lives and become aware of the gaps between promises and realities. The goal of these discussions is to understand and critically assess the claim, “the unexamined life is not worth living (… is no kind of human life).”

The discussions this semester helped me to consider using complementary lists: lists of truth-telling, satisfaction, and improvement. Lists could also include both an attribute and its complement, for example, examples of lies and truth-telling.

B. Mindful activities can also be structured around insights from traditions of mindfulness. For example, Kawabata quotes Ikenobo Sen’o as saying, “The ancients arranged flowers and pursued enlightenment.” (See his Nobel Prize lecture.) In this activity, I ask students first to “collect nature” and, second, to arrange it (on desks, on free space). Third, we pay attention to the arrangements the group has made. And then we reflect and discuss the process, the results, and how we can use our experience to help us interpret Ikenobo Sen’o’s insight.