enlightened community
creating a culture of mindfulness
This is the real secret of life—to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now.
And instead of calling it work, realize that it is play.
ALAN WATTS, The Essence of Alan Watts
You may, like many people, find yourself inspired to create a larger culture of mindfulness in your workplace, family, or larger community.
As mentioned earlier, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests that teaching children mindfulness is like planting seeds. If we follow this metaphor further, we can think of families as soil, schools as sunlight, and other institutions and adults in the community as the rainwater and fertilizer that will create the conditions under which mindfulness practice is most likely to grow and blossom. Even with all of these in place, we still cannot be certain a practice will bloom, but we do know that without them, we can be nearly certain it will wither.
A larger group that cultivates a culture of mindfulness is what Buddhists call a sangha. Having a practice community supports children, supports adults, and supports you. A strong community creates a sustainable, self-reinforcing contemplative culture that enables everyone’s practice to thrive. This can be many things, especially in our increasingly secular society, where spiritual institutions are less and less the center of community. In their place, a family, a classroom, a school, a clinic, a congregation, a yoga studio, a community center, or something larger often becomes the default center of community. This group is the container that holds and allows the practice of mindfulness to flourish in the child, sustaining them through the challenging times, as an ecosystem nourishes individual life.
When we advocate for change in our children’s schools or other institutions, there are unique opportunities but also unique forms of resistance. No one approach will magically create a mindful and compassionate community, just as no one practice will work for every child.
The intention of this chapter is to offer you some best practices for bringing mindfulness to your community, and is drawn from the experiences of parents and professionals who have been doing the work of creating mindful and compassionate ecosystems for years.
Considerations
When beginning any endeavor mindfully, it helps first to consider our intentions. Are they realistic, yet challenging? Other questions can help us reflect and then see a wise course of action.
Consider your role in the institution you want to work with or within. Are you an outside consultant (a role I often find myself in) or an insider, such as an administrator or employee? Are you a parent in a small family or an employee at a large hospital or school district?
What’s your relationship to the kids? Are you a parent, a clinician, an educator, or something else?
Are you considering a top-down approach, in which a mindfulness program comes with a mandate from the leadership, or a grassroots approach, such as starting a small group of like-minded coworkers and growing the mindfulness from there? Are you using a curriculum, or improvising? Are you planning to go it alone, or to enlist colleagues or outside professionals? Who are your potential allies, and what are their different levels of knowledge, expertise, interest in, and skepticism about mindfulness?
When and how will the practice be taught: Each morning before breakfast? A one-time introduction at an all-school assembly? Through a therapy group? Will practice be integrated into every classroom, or as a component in health class or an after-school program? In a high-stakes-testing school, the best way to bring in mindfulness may be by integrating it into test preparation, when a few moments of mindfulness before an exam could substantially boost scores.
Getting in the Door and Making the Pitch
Approaching an institution from the outside with an offer to introduce mindfulness is usually an uphill climb. Public institutions typically have significant red tape and are wary of outsiders, and any organization that works with kids has safeguards in place for good reason: to guard the children’s safety. With schools, you are probably better off being invited than offering services, unless you are already a parent or an experienced educator. However, institutions like libraries, juvenile prisons, community centers, after-school programs, or local spiritual communities may have an interest in offering free programming for young people. My friends at Wellness Works, a mindfulness organization in Pennsylvania, have had success by offering services to the most challenging (or perhaps, most challenged) kids. Another friend started volunteering at her children’s school, moved on to the local library, and grew things from there. When the community sees the results, you’ll almost certainly be invited back.
Engaging the adult gatekeepers is a challenge. Persuasion experts know that there are two routes: one through the head and one through the heart. You need to make both an intellectual and emotional argument for mindfulness and an experiential one. You may already intuitively know why mindfulness is important, but the research and theory given earlier in this book are there partly so that you can use them to persuade other adults. Your understanding can dispel myths and communicate the power of these practices in order to open minds, hearts, and doors.
The word mindfulness is trendy right now, and while we know mindfulness works by any name, we also know that everything changes and fads pass. Calling it mindfulness may actually give the practices a shorter shelf life than we would wish, so choose your words carefully. Terms such as attention or awareness training, resilience, concentration, peak performance, enhancement, or optimization might be preferable.
Most effective initiatives start with a workshop to orient parents, educators, staff, and other stakeholders before you begin working with the kids. Adults will need more than statistics, images of brain scans, and details about mindfulness programs for youth, although these certainly help. The more specific you can be about the return on investment—in terms of health and mental health, which are very costly, as well as grades, behavior, burnout (for staff and kids), staff turnover, or whatever terms are most relevant to the organization—the better. A recent study found that the best way to reduce restraints in a residential program was by training the staff in mindful stress reduction.1
More important than intellectual or emotional arguments is a direct and powerful experience of mindfulness that allows people to understand it on the gut level. As Maya Angelou said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Mindfulness and compassion feel good. The shortest introduction I use is the four-part stress exercise described in chapter 1. This itself is often enough to convince skeptical adults of the value of mindfulness, especially if you ask how they would like their children to feel before those state exams or when renegotiating bedtime. Demonstrations also ease anxieties about mindfulness being religious in some way. Also, think back to what sparked your interest. Was it reading the research, experiencing mindfulness for yourself, or both?
The more other people get it, intellectually and intuitively, the more on board the rest of the family, school, clinic, or hospital staff is, and the more likely you are to see mindful awareness flourish in the rich fertilizer of community reinforcement. Offering a program first to the staff of an organization is an excellent way to build a foundation. This might mean advocating with leadership, human resources departments (many of which are already on board with mindfulness), unions, or the company health plan—all of which can save money on the health care and turnover costs that come from burnout. Funding may be tight for you, and part of your role may be finding creative ways to fundraise. But money is saved in the long run when staff performance and happiness improve. Many existing programs bring mindfulness to professionals for their own self-care; some are directed at teachers and therapists specifically. The parent–teacher association might contribute funding for joint workshops or mindfulness courses for parents and educators—a project I have been working on with a local hospital network. Most therapy and educational models that teach mindfulness to kids advocate that both the adults and the kids practice. Practicing mindfulness for themselves can make teachers, therapists, providers, and caregivers happier and better at their roles/jobs. Regardless of whether they share the practices with kids, they will enjoy the fruits of the practice. And when you are able to orient staff or parents to what you are doing, you will all speak a common language from a common experience.
Advocate that everyone in the community get some exposure to mindfulness, whether from a one-time talk or an ongoing group. Consider all the community stakeholders—not just the children and staff of an institution, but also the parents and alumni of schools, the boards of hospitals, the local corporate and private donors to clinics, and offer them an experience of mindfulness as well. School boards and even local politicians often have to at least humor you, as I found out when my friend Vanessa dragged me down to the statehouse to teach a few practices to our state representative. Parents and donors in some communities may be surprisingly generous once they understand and experience mindfulness for themselves. A friend of mine got a six-figure donation from a parent at his school who was in the parent mindfulness course. And don’t forget, when offering a program to parents, to also offer mindful childcare.
You can also create a mindfulness resource corner or even a bookshelf somewhere at the organization. One colleague keeps a box of toys and props that can be used for practices, CDs and books on mindfulness, cushions and yoga mats, as well as binders of activities that anyone can easily find and use at her work station. As well as a resource box, it helps for an organization to have a mindfulness resource person, who can be a go-to for questions and a human reminder to the community just by walking around.
Where to begin to create culture change is a difficult question to answer. Most people who have found success agree that top-down approaches can result in more resistance than grassroots ones. Only in small institutions—such as charter and independent schools and small clinics or institutions with charismatic leadership—is this top-down change possible in the long term.
Better to start with yourself and a few other interested parents and colleagues and grow from there. Every organization has formal leaders and opinion leaders who hold power in different ways. A friend who works at Harvard Business School puts it this way: formal leaders are those who write the memos and policies; opinion leaders are who you go to and say, “What’s the deal with the memo on this new policy?” The opinion leaders are the people you want to influence to create real change; they are the people you want to inspire with contemplative practice. These are the people who create the culture that trickles down. Wisdom from experts suggests that the best leaders are good listeners and consider themselves servants of the community rather than its masters.
Workplace interventions include advocating for (or offering) mindfulness to your fellow staff members or parents. Start a weekly meditation group, to meet during breaks or after hours once a week, or perhaps have the occasional mindful meal. From there, consider creating a mindfulness working group, study group, or practice group with interested community members. If you are in a leadership position, open and close staff meetings with short practices to integrate mindfulness into the week. Educate staff by holding mindfulness in-service trainings or paying for employees to receive outside training. Many communities do community-wide reading projects to anchor the year in a specific theme; consider suggesting a book on mindfulness. Share resources by making workshops, talks, and study groups open to everyone in the community, including parents, teachers, pediatricians, and other providers. Some of my colleagues have begun working at a local hospital to bring a day of mindfulness to all hospital staff, as well as the community the staff serves, at a few events a year.
A man I met recently in Finland started what is essentially a day of mindfulness in his small town. He calls it Do One Thing at a Time Day, and it is a day dedicated to practicing aspects of mindfulness. Winooski, Vermont, is trying to become the first mindful city. No doubt you can think of more approaches, small and large. In my conversations with people around the world, I see how much has blossomed from just a couple of interested individuals finding each other, sitting together, working together, and allowing their practice to spread to peers.
Chapter 11 discusses mindful moments in greater depth, and the practices in that chapter can be handy for connecting with other adults. Adults in even the busiest families and institutions do have moments here and there when they can check in with themselves, if they look for these moments. Twenty years ago, stressed-out workers found moments to breathe deliberately in the form of a cigarette break. Help colleagues find moments of peace in the busy day—that moment after the kids have departed for the next class, a one-minute pause between patients, or some other short space in the day. Just as small details can add up and overwhelm us, small mindful moments can add up and balance us out.
Whether your organization explicitly teaches mindfulness to children or not, the benefits of nourishing mindfulness in adults will affect everyone. If all else fails and resistance continues, compassion practices for the people in your workplace can inspire you, as can taking refuge in your mindfulness community, your own teacher, or your own practice.
Working With Institutional Resistance
Approaching coworkers or supervisors, especially as an outsider, can be far from easy, and you may encounter resistance. I recently heard Vinny Ferraro ask a crowd of eager teachers whether they could recognize the difference between resistance and ambivalence. It’s a question worth contemplating in your own practice, and it again points to the need for you to have a solid practice of your own, as well as an ally or two.
Resistance is usually based in fear, particularly fear of the unknown. Institutional resistance often arises in the form of legitimate fear about the very real limits on both time and money. Adding time for mindfulness is simple arithmetic, as it likely means taking away time from teachers or staff, potentially impacting test scores or other vital outcome measures. Fortunately, the evidence overwhelmingly shows long-term financial savings in staff health care costs and improvement in outcomes for the kids. When time is money, asking leaders to allot time for mindfulness to busy clinicians or teachers does cost something up front, but you can also show that with short practices, mindfulness doesn’t have to take much time.
One insidious form of resistance comes from burned-out staff, which can be particularly difficult to counter if you are an outsider or in a management role. Burned-out staff may be understandably skeptical of the annual in-service training on “the next big thing.” You can point out that mindfulness is an old thing that is becoming standard in education and healing, and that the organization is in danger of missing the boat on what leading institutions are doing. This may be the more motivating approach to opening minds, doors, and budgets. But remember that any time we challenge the status quo, people may take it personally, so making allies is critical. If we respect one another’s wisdom and experience, we will have ready allies. If we challenge or talk down to people, we lose potential partners.
Twenty years ago in the psychotherapy world, mindfulness practices were considered fringe; they are now fully mainstream. To fail to recommend mindfulness for anxiety or depression is considered out of step with best practice. Most graduate schools in psychotherapy offer training in mindfulness for clinicians, and these are among the most popular courses. The same may soon be true for medical schools, nursing schools, education schools, and similar institutions.
In the child psychotherapy world, there’s an adage that working with kids means working with families and larger systems and their respective constraints. Frustrating families, overworked social services providers, stressed-out staff—these are the unavoidable facts of working with young people. For many, myself included, this is where we feel most challenged. The kids I worked with in the inner city were often less challenging than the adults around them, whose resistance was contagious. Not only was the school itself intimidating, with metal detectors at the door and bars on the windows, but a corrosive cynicism pervaded the older staff, and I dreaded dealing with them.
One exhausted Friday afternoon, I plopped myself on my supervisor’s couch. He could surely tell that I was at my wits’ end, as I grumbled about what I perceived to be the stonewalling staff I encountered week after week as I tried to do something to help the kids. He sat back and indulged my rant for a few moments before stepping in.
“We are there to work with the kids. That’s what we are contracted to do, and that’s probably what you signed up to do,” he explained.
I nodded in agreement and relief. Finally, it seemed like he got it. It was those other adults who were getting in the way.
Then he shifted in his seat. “But in reality, these kids are embedded in the world of the adults who surround them, embedded in the system. So what if, instead of trying to treat the kids and fight the system, you thought about your work as treating not just the kids but the entire system they are in, and seeing the kid as just a symptom of that larger sick system?”
This complex answer was not exactly what I wanted to hear that bleak winter Friday, but it did get me thinking. Over time, my supervisor’s reply has become a refrain as I think about social justice in the larger picture. I still don’t always know how to treat the system, but what he said helps me to approach my work in that larger way.
As the conversation with my supervisor continued, we spoke about the most frustrating staff members and remembered that they too were once kids and trainees. We discussed the stresses they were under and the fact that most of them had probably started off optimistic, if not idealistic, hopeful that they could be helpful. Over time, and with enough days like the one I had had, they had descended into bitterness. My own creeping cynicism was a red flag that something needed to shift—probably my own practice. Years later, it occurred to me that the only resistance I could do something about was my own.
So you may also wish to ask yourself, whose assumptions? Whose resistance? And also ask, who is suffering with this resistance?
Around this same time, my body was letting me know that I was getting burned out. Stomachaches and oversleeping plagued me on mornings that I went into one school in particular. You don’t need to be a brilliant therapist to see the connection, but I was unaware of it until I reflected with peers and mentors. I deepened my practice and took a metta (lovingkindness) course at the local meditation center. My body began to heal, my heart reopened, and my reaction to the school shifted. There is an adage that pain times resistance equals suffering. Fighting resistance may lead you to more suffering. But I also offer another formula: resistance times compassion equals insight—insight into how better to deal with resistance.
Metta Practice
Consider doing the metta practice if your body, your mind, and your spirit (or maybe your partner, friends, and coworkers) are letting you know you are getting burned out.
Metta was developed specifically to deal with fear. The Buddha had sent his disciplines into the jungle, but they returned, afraid to practice alone where wild animals and dangerous bandits roamed. You and I may not be in the jungles of India staring down tigers, but perhaps you are staring down some tough students and staff in the concrete jungle, and fear and frustration have shaken your faith in yourself and your practice. Most spiritual traditions have some version of praying for your enemies or sending them kind wishes. Metta is a variation of that.
The process is simple. Begin by finding a comfortable meditation posture. It can help to place a hand, or both hands, over your heart, but this isn’t necessary.
Begin by bringing to mind someone who only wants the best for you. We will call this person your benefactor. Perhaps this is an inspirational supervisor, an old professor, or another mentor. Perhaps this is someone who sparked your passion for your work when you were young yourself. Perhaps this is the person who first introduced you to meditation or to a spiritual path, or who inspired you to bridge your personal with your professional passions.
Now, make some good wishes for them—something like, “May you be happy, may you be safe, may you live in ease and at peace.”
After a few days of doing this in your regular meditation practice, try to take their perspective, and imagine them sending such wishes to you. Or just make the same good wishes for yourself.
Notice that you are not saying you are happy, safe, or living in ease and at peace. But you are, like a kind friend, wishing that you will find and experience those things.
If those specific phrases do not speak to your heart and experience, find some that feel more authentic to you, and imagine hearing them from your benefactor. What words might they say to inspire you?
Perhaps: You deserve inspiration. May you find happiness and love. May you be fearless in your work to help others. May you be safe and secure in mind and body.
Spend a week of your regular meditation practice wishing these good things for yourself, perhaps viewing yourself from the perspective of this other wise person. For many of us, wishing good things for ourselves can feel uncomfortable, especially if you aren’t used to receiving gratitude and kind wishes from yourself or people around you. But stick with it.
After a week, add in a colleague to whom it feels relatively easy to send such kind wishes, perhaps an ally in the system who encourages your positivity rather than your cynicism or frustration. Try integrating this into your regular practice for a week or so.
The next week, try bringing into your metta practice a person about whom you have no feelings, positive or negative. Maybe that secretary you see around but rarely interact with, or a janitor you don’t speak to much.
The next week, begin sending good wishes to more difficult people in your workplace: a challenging parent, a tough administrator, maybe even a disruptive kid who gets under your skin.
Sending good wishes to difficult people is no easy feat, so start small and work your way up to them. “This is spiritual heavy lifting,” I once heard teacher Noah Levine say. “That’s why we start with the little dumbbells in our lives and then move on to the bigger ones!” If those big dumbbells are too hard, consider visualizing the person as an idealistic beginner at their work, or perhaps as a more innocent child. Or focus on one thing you like, or at least don’t mind, about them. Wishing the best for others challenges our perspective, and if those difficult people were happy, were unafraid, were themselves and in touch with their original intentions and original goodness, their actions would be far different and less likely to trigger us. So, what better wish can we make for them?
Perhaps something mystical occurs when we say our chosen phrases, or perhaps our cognitive perspective is changed. Either way, your experience of the challenging people in your workplace is likely to shift. Even if they don’t change, your reaction to them may. This means that wise and skillful ways to work with them will be far more likely to arise, because your mind is calm, compassionate, and open. The frustration about what they “should” do will dissipate. You may see your allies turn into friends, and once neutral parties turn into quiet sources of inspiration. Your “enemies” themselves may or may not change, but they can change from objects of frustration to reminders of something else.
Remember that these resistant gatekeepers are ultimately not the enemy. They are allies and teachers you haven’t figured out how to use yet. Practice metta to open up new possibilities, but more importantly, to make time to act with compassion. Thich Nhat Hanh says that compassion is a verb. Live compassion in the real world, in the community around you. You are a beacon representing mindfulness and compassion. You can do formal practice such as metta, or you can just quietly support others. My friend Francis, for example, takes on a “secret mentee” each year, picking a younger staff member whom he deliberately takes time to check in with, offer support to, and just watch out for.
Working With Others
In organizations where there is competition for resources of time, attention, and money, it can be a challenge to remember we are all trying to serve the children; we just have different ideas about how to do that.
We all need clarity and humility in this journey, to remain open to new ideas and perspectives. Remember, we have much to learn from the people around us. Trust the therapist to do his job, the teacher to do hers, the parents to do theirs, and the other caregivers to do their best.
Also remember that we can learn from one another. As a parent, I learned more from friends and relatives than from any book I read on my own or in graduate school. As a therapist, I have learned far more about managing groups of children from teachers than I did in any group-therapy course. And I’ve learned more about human nature by people-watching in my travels around the world than from my education in psychology. This book is a distillation of the wisdom of those I’ve encountered in conversations, workshops, and books. Teachers, therapists, and parents can easily forget that they are working toward the same goals; it’s wonderful when we can hold this is mind and support one another.
As you bring mindfulness to the community, you may be surprised by where you find and make allies. Be grateful for each one. Nurture and inspire one another regularly so that you have strength and support in the moments when you most need them.
In my quest to bring mindfulness to kids, I’ve found that one of the best ways to do that is by helping other adults. A cliché in helping professions reminds us that flight attendants instruct us to put on our own oxygen mask before assisting others. Self-care and our own practice is key to our efforts to share mindfulness, so make sure your colleagues know to breathe too. A few mindful staff truly living what they practice and preach, their actions and their presence informed by insights from their own practice, is a healing experience for most kids, whether or not you get around to explicitly teaching the kids mindfulness. A culture informed by the insights of mindfulness practice will make you and your colleagues the best teachers, therapists, caregivers, and parents you can be, exponentially increasing the chances of the kids flourishing.
By encouraging mindfulness among other adults in your community, you not only support your own efforts to help kids, but you also support them in their steps along your shared path of helping kids.
What can you do in the next week to contribute to a culture of mindfulness in your community?
IDEAS FOR CREATING A MINDFUL COMMUNITY
Keep attuned to recent events within the community.
Know the influential players—among the kids and among the adults.
Consider the merits and challenges of your role as an insider or an outsider.
Create a mindfulness sitting group or study group.
Consider a community read, community-wide trainings, or yearlong theme.
Bring all stakeholders—clinicians, educators, parents, staff—on board and offer them practice.
Hold a “Day of Mindfulness” or “One Thing at a Time Day.”
Introduce a moment of contemplation at the start or end of meetings, whether it is a formal mindfulness practice or not.