THE INCREASED ANXIETY we have about distraction in education today (and in our lives more generally) means that interest has spiked in techniques designed to help us focus our monkey minds more effectively. Mindfulness has perhaps been the most ballyhooed technique in this respect, with research in both mental health and education purporting to demonstrate its ability to gain more control over our distractible minds. Naturally, a practice that could improve our focusing capabilities has a special appeal to educators, and educators at every level have indeed shown a strong interest in mindfulness. My wife has heard about its benefits at her professional development days; I have attended workshops about it on my campus. I sat down to wait my turn at the barbershop recently, and on a shelf next to me were brightly colored postcards advertising a local yoga studio with the following headline: “Change the World: Mindfulness and Movement for Classroom, Home, and Studio.” When you are learning about the potential power of an educational technique at the barbershop, you know that cultural saturation has been achieved.
At the earliest talks I gave on distraction and attention—at which stage I was not addressing mindfulness in my presentations—I was invariably approached by people who wanted to talk to me about mindfulness, most frequently because they were using it or experimenting with it in their own teaching. In these conversations, I always asked them to describe for me how they were incorporating it into their classes, and was struck by the similarities among their approaches. Almost everyone I met who used mindfulness did so in the opening minutes of class, guiding their students through a meditation activity of some sort, such as focused breathing. Although very few of those faculty members were doing any kind of formal evaluation of the impact of this strategy on their students, they all reported anecdotal positive results for themselves and their students. They were sure that these activities benefited learning, the climate of the room, or both. Given the general research on the ability of mindfulness to improve people’s lives in many areas, it didn’t surprise me at all to hear about its positive effects in the classroom.
In response to these conversations, I dove into the research literature on mindfulness in higher education, hoping to discover that brief mindfulness activities in the classroom could indeed fulfill the promise of improving student attention. What I found was little, if any, solid evidence that classroom mindfulness activities could positively impact either long-term learning or student attentional capacities. My initial response was that mindfulness was a false lead, but this conclusion was premature. I do believe mindfulness has the potential to help both faculty and students manage distractions in the classroom, but I believe it has more power to do so if we focus on the mindful attitudes and actions of the teacher, and not attempt to impose mindfulness practices on our students. In other words, in this chapter I am going to flip the standard script on mindfulness in the classroom, and encourage you to think about it more in relation to your work than to the work of your students. I’ll do so first by reviewing some of the research on student mindfulness practices, and then by making recommendations for how a mindful approach to your teaching can support better attention in the classroom.
The philosophy of mindfulness takes many forms, but most educators draw from a model developed in the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, a molecular biologist who founded the Stress Reduction Program at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Although mindfulness has its origins in Buddhism, Kabat-Zinn and other medically based practitioners offer a secular version, one that intersects very clearly with questions of attention and distraction. The core work of mindfulness involves training attention on some aspect of your experience of the present moment—such as the rhythm of your breathing or the sensations in your body—and thereby reducing the amount of time you spend distracted by your whirring monkey mind.1 The more you can orient your attention toward your experience in the present moment, the less you find yourself distracted by everything that is not the present, from your everyday fears and anxieties to the promise of fun times on your phone. As we learned in Part One, attention is a limited-capacity resource; the more you attend to the present moment, therefore, the less cognitive space you have for potential distractors. The practice of mindfulness—which often takes the form of guided breathing exercises, but can include other activities—leads to a more mindful awareness of the world around us, where we embrace the present moment in all of its glorious plenitude.
I have been an irregular practitioner of mindfulness for more than a decade now. My mindfulness work—which has included everything from readings by gurus like Jon Kabat-Zinn and Thich Nhat Hanh to group meditation sessions and meditation smartphone apps—has led me to focus on three elements. The first is the core lesson that mindfulness teaches: we must learn to embrace the present moment. That embrace works against the kind of mindlessness that I wrote about in Chapter Seven—when we are going through life on automatic pilot, not noticing the wonders of the world around us—and the way we can become lost in our distractions and ignore the people right in front of us. Second, most mindfulness teachers, Kabat-Zinn included, teach their students to practice mindfulness not only through meditation, but also by identifying and setting an intention for certain daily activities that can be completed mindfully. For example, you might decide that when you are washing dishes every day, you will do it mindfully, by concentrating your attention as much as possible on the experience of washing the dishes: the sound of the running faucet, the feel of the warm and soapy water, the movement of your wrists and fingers as you carefully place a clean dish in the rack.
As anyone who has ever attempted meditation will tell you, one of the first things you discover when you try to focus attention on the present moment is how easily and often the mind becomes distracted from it; mindfulness thus also teaches its practitioners not to judge themselves (or others) for their distractibility. They are instructed instead simply to notice that the distraction has occurred, and then gently pull their focus back to the present moment, over and over again. One group of mindfulness researchers describes the core work of mindfulness as entailing both attention and acceptance, by which they mean that in mindfulness we accept the present moment as we find it, distractions and all.2 From this, we take our third and final feature of mindfulness: a compassionate acknowledgement of our distractibility. We should be compassionate toward ourselves and our own inattentive minds, which should lead us to have compassion for the inattention of others.
A solid body of research demonstrates that when people are able to absorb these lessons into their daily lives, mindfulness can offer significant improvements to their health, both physical and mental. Experiments have demonstrated the ability of mindfulness practice to lower blood pressure, reduce chronic pain, improve anxiety and depression, help people with addictions, and more.3 Other experiments have shown that regular practitioners of mindfulness have a better ability to control their attention and regulate their emotions.4 Given the research-based promises of mindfulness, educators at every level have experimented with using these techniques to help students develop better powers of attention. But only a small minority of teachers have ten, fifteen, or thirty minutes that they are willing to devote to non-content-related activities in every class period. Most teachers I know feel they are already squeezed for time in their courses, and they aren’t willing to devote significant amounts of time to something like mindfulness practice. This leads to the question that has been posed by a small but growing group of research teams: Can guiding students through brief mindfulness activities in class, no more than five or ten minutes long, help reduce distractions and improve their learning throughout the subsequent class period? Or, more idealistically, can such brief but regular exercises improve their attentional capacities?
The researchers who have tackled this question have produced mixed results at best. Destany Calma-Birling and Regan A. R. Gurung from the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, for example, tested whether a five-minute mindfulness activity at the beginning of a class period would improve student learning.5 They had one group of students in a course on human development listen to a lecture about mindfulness and then practice a mindfulness technique for five minutes; a second group of students watched a video related to course content and instead spent the five minutes reviewing their notes. This happened during the tenth week of the semester, and was repeated a second time in a subsequent class period. It was repeated a third time, but in the third iteration both groups received the mindfulness intervention. At the end of the semester, the researchers compared all three sets of quiz scores for groups one and two. The scores of the mindfulness group were significantly higher than those of the content-review group for the first two quizzes, but they evened out for the third quiz, when both groups had the mindfulness intervention. These results suggest that the five minutes of mindfulness practice had indeed made a difference in helping students learn throughout the sixty-minute lectures.
Unfortunately, however, these results did not seem to carry into the long-term learning of the students, even when the mindfulness practice was extended beyond the quiz days. In the mindfulness group in the experiment above, the students actually continued to practice five minutes of mindfulness at the beginning of every class period for the remainder of the semester. To see whether the mindfulness group gained any long-term advantage from this extended practice, the experimenters compared the results with the control group on two exams that the students took after the experiment had begun. For both of those exams, the control group slightly (but not significantly) outperformed the mindfulness group. “Our results,” the researchers conclude, “show that five minutes of mindfulness practice does not lead to improvements in exam scores, suggesting that the enhancements in students’ knowledge retention are transitory.”6 In other words, although a few minutes of mindfulness seemed to provide an initial boost to the attentional capacities of the students, leading to an increase in short-term learning, it did not produce the kind of longer-term boost that the experimenters hypothesized they might see.
A different group of researchers tested whether extended engagement with mindfulness in a college course could improve the “executive functions” of their students’ brains.7 Executive functions, they explain, are “the complex, cognitive abilities necessary for planning, self-monitoring, goal setting, and strategic behavior.”8 Surely all teachers would love to have in their pockets an educational strategy that could promise such improvements. In this experiment, students in two different courses were given tests at the beginning of the semester designed to measure their executive-function capacities. One of those courses then proceeded as usual. In the second course, the students learned about mindfulness from their instructor, an experienced meditation trainer, and then spent the first ten minutes of every class period (meeting twice per week) engaged in a meditation activity. They were also encouraged to practice mindfulness outside the course, and to keep journals about their experiences. At the end of the semester, students from both courses were given the executive-function tests again, and the results were compared. No significant differences between them emerged. Students from both classes improved on the tests in equal measure, which the researchers speculate was due to the fact that the tests were easier for them the second time around.
Multiple other studies have shown results like these, suggesting that mindfulness, in the common ways we are seeing teachers attempt to apply it in the classroom—for example, short meditation practices at the beginning of the class period—has not yet been shown to produce a measurable, long-term impact on learning.9 Likewise, we are not yet seeing mindfulness experiments in the classroom that are producing long-term gains in the general attentional capacities of students. I remain open to the possibility that future experiments on mindfulness might yet yield such results, but we have nothing definitive thus far.
But that doesn’t mean mindfulness, or perhaps more accurately the lessons that mindfulness teaches, does not have a role to play in the classroom, and in our work of supporting student attention. I take seriously the comments I have heard, and opinion essays I have read, from teachers expressing the benefits of mindfulness in their classrooms.10 Their experiences certainly run parallel to the extensive research that has been done on the positive impact of mindfulness in other areas of life, especially physical and mental health. While the research on mindfulness in education has not convinced me that imposing such a practice on students produces concrete results, I believe we have much to learn as teachers from the theory of mindfulness if we consider our work in light of the three core lessons I outlined above, which we will consider more fully below. Both teachers and students can benefit when teachers take a more mindful approach to their teaching, a position I have been stealthily advocating for throughout this entire book.
To understand what I mean by that last statement, we have to remember the distinction between mindfulness practice and mindful awareness. When most people think about mindfulness, they think about meditation, a technique often used by researchers in the kinds of experiments I’ve just described. Meditation is a common method of mindfulness practice. But as we are reminded by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, the author of Mindfulness, “Meditation is a tool to achieve post-meditative mindfulness.” That state of post-meditative mindfulness, or mindful awareness, puts us “in the present, noticing all the wonders that we didn’t realize were right in front of us.”11 That state can exist when we are strolling down the street, talking with friends, or teaching or learning in the classroom. To be mindfully aware means to break through the mindless way we normally experience the world and embrace the present moment. It means attuning ourselves deeply to a conversation with a student, noticing and accepting the rhythms of attention in our classrooms, and making deliberate changes to our teaching practice to shake ourselves out of our usual routines and see the classroom anew. These are all activities that can lead to a mindful classroom, even if you never engage in the formal work of meditation or mindfulness practice.
In the recommendations of this chapter, I am thus going to turn the lens of mindfulness from student to teacher. I invite you now to reflect on the ways the three features of mindfulness—having compassion for your mind and the minds of your students, setting a concrete intention for mindfulness in the classroom, and embracing each classroom moment in all of its unique glory—can make you a mindful educational practitioner. This doesn’t mean that you can’t or shouldn’t practice mindfulness with your students. If you have established such a practice in the classroom and are seeing positive results, by all means you should continue it—and if you are measuring those results, please let the rest of us know about them. But for those of us who are not yet ready to meditate with our students, I’ll advocate instead for strategies to make yourself a more mindful educator, especially as it relates to attention and distraction.
A friend at another university contacted me one summer to ask if I would hold a virtual Q&A with a group of new faculty, who had been reading one of my previous books. When the day and time came, I waved to them through the computer and then sat back to see what questions they had. A woman raised her hand and posed the following question to me: “I teach an evening class that meets from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. Many of the students work during the day, and are already tired by the time they get to my classroom. How can I keep them focused and engaged for three hours at the end of the day?” I write this first recommendation for that faculty member, for all of us who are feeling more distracted than we used to, and for our students, who are tempted by the allure of their devices while we are asking them to do the hard work of learning.
The primary lesson I hope you have taken from this book is that attention is an achievement; if we want students to achieve attention in our classroom, then we have to cultivate it deliberately. But I can’t imagine anything a teacher could do—truly, nothing—that would keep a group of students spellbound for three hours in the evening after a full day’s worth of work. So the second lesson I hope you will take away is that, when it comes to attention and distraction, we need to treat ourselves and our students with compassion. The attention that we ask of students in the classroom is an especially challenging achievement: it requires sustained focus over an extended period of time, it asks them to struggle and work, and the payoffs for that struggle are often not immediately visible. The temptation to turn away from that hard work, and default to more immediate pleasures or pursuits, has always been strong and has intensified in recent years.
Have compassion first for yourself. You feel distracted at times because we all feel distracted at times, and some researchers in this area would argue that we feel distracted most of the time. This doesn’t mean that you, like your students, should not work to harness your attention toward your research, teaching, family, and other pursuits. Of course you should, and plenty of books and resources are out there if you are looking for assistance in managing your relationship to distractions. I read those books, I practice mindfulness, and I have set certain boundaries around my work and family spaces to ensure that I bring my attention to them as much as I can. But in spite of all those efforts, I fail all the time. I am plenty distracted. I am as likely as you are to stop in my work and see what’s happening on Twitter or Instagram, to pull out my phone in idle moments (and even not-so-idle moments) and allow its easy distraction to ward off boredom, frustration, and anxiety. This is how we are, and this is how we live today. Recognize that the temptations around you are strong, and fight them as best as you can—but recognize as well that you have a brain that was built to focus and disperse, to attend and distract, just like the brains of your early human ancestors.
The compassion that you afford to yourself, when it comes to attention and distraction, should extend to your students as well. Like you, they are working with distractible brains, in the midst of many enticing technologies, and their attention strays. As we devise techniques to return it to the classroom, we should do so with empathy for their struggle. We know these challenges ourselves, just as humans have for as long as we have been writing about attention and distraction. When we see student attention ebbing away from us in the classroom, we can wag our fingers and threaten consequences, or we can pause and invite: “I see I am losing some of you. This is hard stuff. Let’s see what we can do to get ourselves back on track here.” And then, as we walk back to our offices and reflect on the day’s teaching, as we post on social media and talk with our colleagues, we can remember that the vast majority of our students work very hard to succeed in our courses, and that supporting them in that work is our core mission.
Paula Fitzpatrick, a psychologist and the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at my university, teaches courses in positive psychology, in which her students both learn about and practice mindfulness. She has also been trained in the mindfulness-based stress reduction technique developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn, giving her the formal credentials to teach mindfulness to others. In the spring of 2019, Fitzpatrick offered a lunchtime session on mindfulness for faculty members, which featured a mix of practice and lecture. She guided us through two short presentations, discussed the origins of mindfulness, and offered some practical recommendations for working, teaching, and living mindfully. Like other mindfulness teachers I have read or heard, she encouraged us to start small with our thinking about mindfulness. Rather than just trying to make our lives more mindful in a general way, she suggested we identify key moments in the classroom when we might try to bring a more mindful embrace of the present moment.
One moment that she described in this respect was our arrival in the room. She encouraged us to reflect on the fact that when we and our students come into the classroom, everyone arrives trailing clouds of distraction from whatever prior activities and thoughts have been occupying our attention. We might be obsessing over a text from a loved one, indignant about the latest outrage perpetrated by our least favorite politician, or thinking about the lunch we just ate or the one we’ll be having after class. Students are talking to their peers, swiping through their Instagram feeds, and worrying about their dwindling bank accounts. From this state of minds in motion, we expect students to grind the spinning wheels to a sudden halt and focus on string theory, or institutional racism, or existentialism. We should not wonder that they have difficulty drawing the class into focus—or that we have the same difficulties.
Although Fitzpatrick offered a quick meditation activity to use as an option at the opening of class, she emphasized in a much more general way the importance of arriving mindfully in the room, both for teachers and for students. In other words, we should be deliberate in how we open the class period—and that most certainly does not have to take the form of focused breathing. For my entire teaching career, I have been opening most of my class sessions with a brief writing activity based on the homework reading. These exercises, in which students write freely in response to a discussion question, take just five minutes and help us transition into the class session. You could envision almost any kind of work that students could do individually or in conjunction with you to mark a mindful transition into the class period. In my book Small Teaching, I described the work of astronomer Peter Newbury, who puts up an image and invites his student to notice and wonder about it.12 I know a number of faculty members who play music at the start of class. Fitzpatrick herself reviews the plans for the day and guides her students through a minute of focused breathing. A colleague in philosophy told me that he uses roll call to mark the opening of his class mindfully; for him, the calling of student names at the beginning of class is less about tracking their absences and more about calling everyone deliberately into the room. In all of these cases, a brief opening activity encourages students to funnel the turbulent water of their minds into a calmer pool. If you listen to a mindfulness app on your phone or attend a mindfulness session in person, you’ll notice that they frequently begin with the sound of three gongs. Those gongs mark the transition into mindful awareness, just as these kinds of opening activities are designed to mark the transition into that day’s learning.
If you’re not convinced that a few minutes of breathing exercises carry much benefit for your students, consider instead identifying a short engagement activity and using it to mark a mindful transition into the classroom every day. Activities like Aisling Dugan’s microbe of the day internet searches, described in Chapter Five, or like my writing exercises, serve a dual purpose: they bring students mindfully into the class period, but they also support their learning in some way. Having students engage in mindful breathing might work for you and your students, in which case go for it; but if that doesn’t appeal to you, consider how you can take some familiar or existing teaching strategy in your repertoire and use it to create a ritual transition into your class period each day, ensuring that each class contains at least a few mindful minutes.
If the opening of the period doesn’t work for you, pick the closing few minutes instead, and create some activity that will send your students out into the world in a more mindful state. Or do it in the middle of class. The details don’t matter. What matters is that you select one concrete aspect of your daily classroom routine and turn it into an opportunity for mindful awareness for both you and your students. Even if it doesn’t create some measurable difference in their long-term learning or attentional capacities, it might give everyone in the room a few moments of respite from their distractions, and that will make for a better classroom experience for everyone.
Outside of formal mindfulness practice, I fall most effortlessly into a mindful embrace of the present moment when I am traveling somewhere new and unusual. Twenty years later, I can remember to this day the moment when I stepped off the plane for the first time in another country, to visit my brother then living in Cairo. My senses were jolted into new life in that airport terminal, and I reveled in amazement at every experience I had over the course of the week, from a crawling descent into the heart of a Giza pyramid to my first taste of hummus. That initial international trip has spurred in me an intense desire to continue my travels to new and unusual places, largely because of the way I am shaken from my daily routines and expectations and forced into a raw and exhilarating experience of the present. I find not only that my embrace of the present moment grows more firm when I am abroad, but that it can last for days, weeks, or months after I have returned—when I relish anew the moments when I can settle into a chair in the backyard and savor the simple joys of a New England summer day.
In Chapter Seven, I argued for the importance of jolting students from the familiar routines of their learning through the development of signature attention activities. Outside of formal mindfulness practice, I know of nothing more potent for awakening humans to the present moment than the disruption of a routine or a confrontation with something new and unexpected. Such disruptions and confrontations shouldn’t just be imposed on your students; they should become one of the ways you regularly renew your own attention to your teaching and remind yourself to embrace the present moment of the classroom. I make it a habit to change at least one thing each semester in every course I teach, not because anything necessarily needs fixing, but because I know that, if I don’t, I will slip into habits that will dull my own interest in the course and the material, and that dullness will ripple out to my students. In this book, I have offered you a series of recommendations for ways you might experiment in your course design and classroom practice, and I would encourage you to identify one or two and try them tomorrow, next week, or next semester. Make yourself just a little bit uncomfortable in the classroom, and your renewed attention to the course, and to your students, will help you embrace that moment.
For my final recommendation of this chapter, then, I offer a handy summary of the recommendations I have made in the previous chapters, to which you can return when you are looking for quick reminders about how to cultivate attention in the classroom:
• Cultivate community in your classroom. Begin by inviting students to share their values and strengths, and affirm the assets they bring, rather than their deficits. Continue your commitment to community by learning their names. Use their names throughout the semester (and ask them to do so as well); in large classes, use name placards to support your efforts. Finally, arrange the space of your classroom, or attend to the positioning of bodies in the room, in ways that are designed to support attention. Opt for flexible classrooms whenever possible, arrange furnishings in ways that support attention and build community, and use your own movement around the room as a lever to hold the attention of your students.
• Build your course around curiosity and seek opportunities throughout the semester to pique the curiosity of your students. Attention is the bridge between curiosity and learning, and your course design can take advantage of that connection. Questions create curiosity, so begin thinking about its role in your teaching by including in your course description the big questions that will make students curious about the material. On the first day of the semester, design an activity that engages them with those questions and with the mysteries or puzzles of your course. Consider ways to use questions to drive your teaching throughout the semester, informally or with peer instruction. Finally, work actively to solicit the questions that your students might bring into the room or that your course raises for them.
• Recognize that change renews attention, and build in regular changes to your classroom structure: shifts from one activity to the next, from passive to active, from thinking to writing to speaking. Think about your teaching strategies as modules that you can deploy strategically throughout the class period, with a specific focus on attention. Make sure your organization of these modules is visible to your students, using oral or written signposts and structures to guide them through the class period. Have some quick attention-renewal activities in your pocket, which you can use when student attention flags. Finally, jazz up those slides with images and graphics that will help sustain the attention of students during your slide-based lectures.
• Include signature attention activities—designed specifically to cultivate students’ attention and help them see the material with fresh and fascinated eyes—in your modules. Focusing, creating, and connecting all provide conceptual pathways to the development of signature attention activities. Through these pathways, you are seeking to jolt students from their mindless routines in the classroom or their overly familiar expectations about your subject matter or their educational experience.
• Use assessments to help overworked students, who are struggling to master the material and activities of five courses, understand where to focus their attention. Low-stakes graded activities in the classroom nudge students to attend to the work that will benefit them. Tests and quizzes will assist them in strengthening the core knowledge of your course. You can also design creative assessments with which they help bring the course material to the attention of others.
I probably don’t need to convince a good and conscientious teacher like you to continue to experiment with your teaching, to try new things each semester or year in support of your students and their learning. But I do hope this book has convinced you that such small, continuous experimentation has the potential to reawaken your attention in the classroom, which may be just as important as devising techniques to awaken the attention of your students. We can’t embrace the present moment when we are sleepwalking through it, and we can fall into sleepwalking easily in our daily work lives. Breaking and reshaping your teaching routines, one semester at a time, may be your best path to embracing each day in the classroom and becoming a more mindful teacher.
• Recognize that distractibility is an architectural feature of the human brain, and have compassion for yourself and your students. Assume that your students are doing their best to be attentive in the challenging environment of the classroom, and that they need your support and understanding more than they need your scolding. Find in your own moments of distraction the reserves of compassion you need for your students.
• Design a ritual or activity that helps students arrive in the room. Use that ritual as a way to draw them from their distractions and into the course for that session. You can do something similar at other marked points throughout the class period, such as the halfway point—when their minds might especially crave distraction—or in the closing moments.
• Use your reading of this book to make a commitment to renewing your attention to the present moment of the classroom. Experiment with new course designs or teaching practices in the coming days, weeks, and months. Break free from your normal patterns and routines, open yourself to novelty and uncertainty, and embrace the attention to the present that these disruptions can bring.
While the evidence that mindfulness practice can have a positive impact on student learning or attention is mixed, a more solid evidence base exists for the positive impact it can have on teachers. The practice of mindfulness can help people learn to regulate their emotions more effectively, becoming less reactive to stress, frustration, anger, and more. To teach young people is an incredibly rewarding experience, but it can also be emotionally challenging. Researchers have thus explored whether mindfulness can help teachers manage their emotions more effectively. In her book The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion, psychologist Sarah Cavanagh reviews some of those studies, including one that she describes as a “gold-standard controlled study” in which the researchers compared teachers who had completed a mindfulness training with those who had not. Looking at self-reports from the two groups of teachers, as well as their actual classroom behaviors, the experiment showed striking results. As Cavanagh summarizes them, “The teachers [who had been trained in mindfulness] were more satisfied with their work, better able to manage their attention to emotional matters, felt better, and conducted more organized classes.”13 The study supports the argument I have been making in this chapter: that when the teacher becomes more mindful, it ultimately benefits the students. I have felt this in my own experience with mindfulness and teaching, and thus want to conclude this chapter with a brief description of how mindfulness practice has changed my own life.
At the end of a difficult spring semester more than ten years ago, I came home from campus early and lay down on the couch for a nap, exhausted from the end-of-semester crush, and fell instantly asleep. A short while later, something startled me awake and I bolted to a sitting position. The sudden waking and physical exertion set my heart racing in a way that frightened me. Not knowing much about what a heart attack actually was, and feeling unusual activity in my heart, I assumed I was about to die. I called 911 and was very soon in an ambulance on the way to the hospital before the kids arrived home. At the hospital, they explained to me that I was not having a heart attack; this was an anxiety attack, something I had never experienced before, and I am still not sure why it occurred on that day. But as anyone who has experienced anxiety or panic attacks will know, they forge pathways in your brain that don’t close down as easily as you would like. An association had been created between a panicky feeling and a racing heart, and that association began to creep into my life in unexpected ways. For example, the normal elevation of my heart rate during exercise would reanimate that panicky feeling, causing my heart to race even more and sometimes even palpitate with fear. When I found myself in situations that provoked normal, everyday anxiety, my heart would be sent galloping in ways that would escalate those normal feelings into uncomfortable excess. I spoke to my doctor, read books and websites, talked with anyone I knew who had experienced anxiety or panic attacks, and learned that what I was experiencing was pretty typical. But none of that knowledge made the problem disappear. No matter how much I tried to dissect and think away the problem, it persisted.
It was at that point, long before I had reflected on any of what you have just read in this chapter, that I committed myself to experimenting with mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophe Living had been given to me by a psychologist friend, along with a dozen recorded meditations, of twenty to forty minutes in length, that aligned with ideas from the book. For a few weeks or months, I read Kabat-Zinn’s book and dabbled around in the tapes, feeling excited by what I was learning and definitely seeing some benefits from my occasional practice. But it was not until I completed a full eight weeks of practice on a daily basis that I finally felt the full power of mindfulness. Over the course of those eight weeks, as the result of twenty minutes of mindful practice per day, I finally was able to weaken the unhappy connections my brain had made and free myself from the effects of my mysterious anxiety attack.
But I also experienced myriad other benefits from my mindfulness practice. Even though I still had plenty of work piled on my desk and all of the cares and concerns of a spouse and father of five children, I found that those stressors had lost much of their power over me. I relaxed in the classroom, and I was more interested and curious in my teaching than I had been in years. I felt a greater sense of compassion and understanding for my students. Outside of school, I became much more attuned to the joys of everyday life, from the taste of food to the feel of leaves crunching beneath my feet on a hike through the woods. I realized how much of my everyday stress and anxiety came from worrying about future events that might never occur. Whenever I felt my mind running down some pathway toward worry, I was able to stop myself and hear the voice of Kabat-Zinn asking me: Is the thing you are worrying about happening right now? The answer was almost always no, and I was able to let go and recapture my peace of mind.
In short, mindfulness changed my life for the better in many ways, and I continue to practice it, though not quite as regularly as I want to or should. I thus can’t resist, while I have you here at the end of a chapter on mindfulness, recommending that, if you have ever felt inclined to explore it in a more formal way, I would encourage you to give it a try. You might know about or discover resources on your campus that can help you. We have a room in our campus ministry center set aside for prayer or meditation, and many educational institutions have formal programs on mindfulness for faculty and staff, or regular opportunities to pause during the middle of the day and engage in a brief mindfulness practice. For that matter, you might even find opportunities to practice mindfulness at the barbershop. But whatever the venue might be, if you have the time and inclination, take the plunge. You might not suddenly be able to ward off all distractions and concentrate like a monk, but you might well find an increased ability to focus on the present moment, which will bring you greater joy and peace in your life, both as a teacher and as a human.