Once you truly notice, it becomes hard not to be kind

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.  – George Saunders

This week in my classes, I talked about kindness and its relationship to mindfulness.  The connection is both obvious and profound.  Mindfulness is about noticing and observing, without deciding if it’s good or bad in that moment.  The first step in kindness is noticing too.  Notice how a person really looks – their facial expression, their body stance – and you are using mindfulness.  Listen to their words and how they are saying them.  Once you truly ‘see’ that person, kindness often comes as a natural consequence.  When I asked the classrooms when mindfulness could help with kindness, even the Kindergarteners had good suggestions.  One girl said that if you noticed someone looking lonely on the playground, you could ask them if they wanted to play.  It’s not rocket science.  The biggest barrier is choosing to notice.  Practicing mindfulness increases our capacity to notice. After a while it becomes hard to not notice. And once you truly notice, it becomes hard not to be kind.

George Saunders, an acclaimed writer of short stories and essays, delivered the convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013, largely on the value of kindness to our own lives and society as a whole. Interestingly, a pivotal story he tells is about one of his major regrets in life, choosing not to notice a girl in 7th grade to whom he could have been kind.  The speech was widely circulated at the time (though I only just saw it now as he’s publishing a book centered around it, Congratulations, by the way: Some Thoughts on Kindness).  Building mindfulness, building kindness.  It’s a powerful combination.

Mindfulness – what it is and why it’s gotten so popular recently – from The Week

Mindfulness: Not just for yogis anymore.

There’s been a lot of talk about mindfulness in the news lately but this short summary in The Week, a print magazine that aggregates news from lots of different sources (and manages to do it in a surprisingly balanced and engaging style) is one of the best I’ve seen recently.

Check it out yourself – or send a colleague, friend or family member to it when you’re looking for a good reference.

The mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation:

Stressed-out Americans, from war veterans to Google workers, are embracing mindfulness meditation. Does it really work?

How NBA Coach Phil Jackson Taught His Teams Mindfulness

Many kids (and grown-ups) care a lot about sports.  When I tell kids about how more and more professional athletes are using mindfulness to help them succeed, it’s a great motivator for them to learn and practice the same skills.

Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls and LA Lakers, is a great example.  He taught both his teams how to use mindfulness and meditation to help them succeed in basketball.  In this video he describes how mindfulness was a way of helping his athletes build mental strength, the same way he taught them how to improve their physical skills.  Interestingly, he also tried Tai Chi and Yoga with his teams but those practices didn’t ‘stick’ the way meditation did.  The players were often tired or injured after practice, making the positions necessary for the practices challenging.  The simplicity and power of mindfulness practice was an important part of these professional players’ toolkit.

To learn more, check out his recent book:
Eleven Rings: The Soul of Success

Mindfulness on cover of Time Magazine

This week’s (February 3) issue of TIME magazine has a cover story, The Mindful Revolution, The Science of Finding Focus in a Stressed-Out, Multi-Tasking Culture.  The article, which discusses the benefits and increasingly widespread adoption of Mindfulness in the US features Mindful Schools – the primary curriculum I am using in teaching mindfulness at West Mercer – as an example of how to teach mindfulness to kids!

Here’s an excerpt on teaching mindfulness to kids and Mindful Schools from that article:

“Educators are turning to mindfulness with increasing frequency–perhaps a good thing, considering how digital technology is splitting kids’ attention spans too. (The average American teen sends and receives more than 3,000 text messages a month.) A Bay Area-based program called Mindful Schools offers online mindfulness training to teachers, instructing them in how to equip children to concentrate in classrooms and deal with stress. Launched in 2010, the group has reached more than 300,000 pupils, and educators in 43 countries and 48 states have taken its courses online.”

Mindfulness cover story in this month’s Parent Map!

ParentMap, January 2013
Check out the January 2013 Parent Map magazine for a wonderful cover story titled “Finding Mindfulness”.The article highlights the many benefits of learning and practicing mindfulness for both parents, kids, and teens.  It also features information on mindfulness initiatives in the Seattle related to parenting and children including The Community of Mindful Parents, an organization that offers parenting groups for families with young children with an emphasis on mindful parenting;  applications in clinical and therapeutic settings including at Seattle Children’s Hospital; a teen program at Ballard High School and more.