Category Archives: School Programs

Mindfulness Event in Mercer Island, May 22, 2014 at 7PM

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Mindfulness in the Mercer Island Schools:
A Panel Discussion
Thursday, May 22, 2014
7-8:30 PM
Location: KCLS Mercer Island Library
4400 88th Ave SE
Mercer Island, WA 98040

Join us for a discussion of the teaching of Mindfulness in the Mercer Island Schools. Mindfulness has been in the news a lot, most recently on the cover of Time Magazine. Everyone from Google engineers to the Seahawks are now benefiting from these easy-to-learn techniques that promote creativity, focus, stress-reduction, and emotional self-regulation. We will discuss the pilot and ongoing programs in the Mercer Island School District; how mindfulness is taught to children and teens; what some of the initial reaction to and achievements of the MISD programs have been; and what we can do to support its further adoption in our school district. We will also discuss how parents can support the lessons their kids have been learning in the classroom and how mindfulness techniques can help parents too. Brief mindfulness practices you can do on your own will be shared as well.

Speakers include mindfulness instructors and facilitators active in the Mercer Island and Seattle schools: Janine Bloomfield, facilitator, Lynne Brazg, Arlen Levy, Brody LaRock, and Sivie Suckerman.

Facilitator and Panel Member Bios

Janine Bloomfield, PhD (Facilitator) teaches mindfulness at West Mercer Elementary in the Mercer Island School District using curriculum from Mindful Schools, MindUp, InnerKids, and experience from her own long-term practice. She is currently enrolled in the year-long Mindful Schools certification program. You can find out more about Janine and her program, along with parent resources and links, at her website, http://www.mindexplorekids.org. Janine is a mother of three, with two children currently attending Mercer Island public schools, and one recent graduate. She lives in Mercer Island.

Lynne Brazg, M.Ed (Counseling) has retired from school counseling and is a parent educator and coach. She has over 18 years of experience working with children and parents including women in transitional housing and parents of infants and tots through teens. She also has an advanced certificate in Infant Mental Health and is a trained group facilitator of Listening Mothers groups and Reflective Parenting groups affiliated with the Community of Mindful Parents. She is also a trained and certified lead trainer of Positive Discipline Parenting groups. Lynne has trained with Dr. Amy Saltzman in the Still Quiet Place Curriculum as well as with Mindful Schools. She has been facilitating parenting groups teaching mindful parenting and working in schools teaching mindfulness. Lynne is the mother of three young adults who have been her best teachers.

Brody LaRock, Ed.D. is the assistant principal at John Hay Elementary in Seattle. His doctoral research examined how educational leaders and K-12 schools nation-wide are integrating mindfulness education into their school settings. He has received several trainings including the mindfulness curriculum training from Mindful Schools and is currently taking another offered by MindUp. Brody is also enrolled in the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center’s Mindfulness Facilitation Certification Program. Brody lives with his loving and amazing wife and two never-a-dull-moment daughters in the Central District of Seattle.

Arlen Levy MA (Special Education, Communicative Disorders) has recently retired from 30 years of teaching in public and private schools at both the middle and high school levels. She was the Middle School Learning Specialist at the Jewish Day School in Bellevue for the past 17 years when she retired last July. She has trained with Amy Saltzman in the Still Quiet Place curriculum and completed the curriculum training in Mindful Schools. She has been an active participant with the Center for Child and Family Well Being at the University of Washington, taking trainings from Susan Kaiser Greenland (Inner Kids) and Kristen Neff, a researcher in the field of compassion training. Arlen has been teaching mindfulness to teens in Seattle public schools, and CREST high school on Mercer Island this past school year. She loves working with ‘tweens and teens, who often teach her as much as she teaches them. The mother of two young adult children living in Los Angeles, Arlen lives in Bellevue with her husband and 2 dogs.

Sivie Suckerman, MA, LMHC, CMHS has a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology from The Chicago School of Professional Psychology and has been practicing as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor since 2007. Sivie has worked in outpatient mental health, women’s health, school-based mental health, residential settings, and as the Clinical Supervisor for King County’s Children’s Crisis Outreach Response System. Currently, Sivie works for MIYFS and counsels students at Island Park Elementary as well as bringing the Mindful Schools curriculum into the classrooms. Sivie also has a small private practice in Bellevue where she utilizes mindfulness in group format as well as individually with children, teens, and adults.

New Year, New Classes: West Mercer 2014

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I am so happy to be back at West Mercer Elementary to teach mindfulness again!  This year I am teaching in 18 classrooms, all the way from Kindergarten to 5th grade.  We are already in week 6 of the 8-week series for the first group of 8 classrooms.

In these classes, we are really focusing on how to notice, what helps us notice, and what the benefits of noticing are.  Simply noticing, without judgement, in the present moment.

We practice how to notice through sensory exploration – mindful seeing, hearing, touching, body sensations, and so on.

Many things make it easier to notice.  It’s easier to notice sounds when we are quiet.  It’s easier to notice our emotions when we do it with some kindness and friendliness. It’s easier to notice what it feels like to walk when we do it slowly.

There are many benefits to noticing as well.  Noticing when we get angry, upset, frustrated or have some other strong emotion lets us create some space, get some perspective, and, hopefully, make a better choice about what to do next.  This last week, I talked about Gratitude with grades K-3.  Gratitude is all about noticing the good things that happen in our life.  It’s so easy to focus only on what’s going wrong.  Taking some time to notice what’s going right as well balances this out and helps us get perspective on our own lives.  It can really turn your mood around quickly.

Noticing is one of the cornerstones of a mindfulness practice and I’m looking forward to lots more noticing and practicing with the kids of West Mercer in 2014.

 

 

Your Brain on Mindfulness

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What is going on in your brain while doing mindfulness?

Mindfulness helps us focus, become more aware, relax, and calm ourselves down.  In the last 10 years, imaging and other studies have started being able to show objectively which areas of the brain are affected by mindfulness and meditation.  In addition to giving us a more detailed look into what happens during mindfulness and meditation, this kind of science is a good motivator to practice mindfulness.  Just like physical exercise makes you stronger, mindfulness makes your brain work better.  And now we’re starting to have some rigorous scientific evidence to prove it.

Let’s start with two important structures in the brain:

  • the amygdala – a pair of almond-shaped structures deep within the brain’s limbic system that acts as the brain’s ‘security guard’ by triggering an automatic reflexive response of “fight, flight or freeze” when it perceives a threat and
  • the prefrontal cortex  – the learning, reasoning and thinking center of the brain, located behind the forehead.

Sensory input perceived by the amygdala as pleasurable or neutral is allowed to proceed to the prefrontal cortex for analysis and response. On the other hand, if the sensory input is perceived as threatening, the amygdala blocks analysis by the prefrontal cortex so that the body can immediately react to this ‘emergency’. This is fine if a bear is chasing you or a heavy object is about to drop on you.  In those cases, a quick, automatic response could be the difference between life and death.

The problem is the amygdala doesn’t always make a distinction between actual dangers and perceived threats.  For example, we sometimes freeze in stressful situations, such as a test or having to speak in public, or we might lash out in words or even physically when angry or frustrated.

Take a look at the diagram below. When stressful situations trigger our amygdala we are literally acting before we are able to think rationally. If at that point we can notice this reaction occurring, (that is, the amygdala being triggered) then say to ourselves, “I’m feeling angry now”, we can allow information to flow again to the prefrontal cortex and make a rational response. Noticing what is happening is a basic mindfulness technique. Simple noticing and labeling of the experience as well as other mindfulness techniques such as counting to 10, doing some mindful breathing, mindful listening, or mindful seeing can often be enough to create the space needed for rational thought to kick in once again.

Brain Imaging Research–This discussion and the diagram to the right is adapted from The MindUP Curriculum: Grades 3-5: Brain-Focused Strategies for Learning-and Living, 2011, Scholastic Press.  Click on the diagram to view it larger.

Explaining brain science to kids

To make this more understandable to young children, I read them the book, When Sophie Gets Angry — Really, Really Angry . . .by Molly Bang. This picture book tells the story of a little girl who gets really angry after being triggered by her sister taking her stuffed gorilla, complete with shouting, smashing and running (all classic amygdala reactions to threat). She cools down by listening to sounds in nature, climbing a tree, and feeling the breeze (mindfulness techniques). After that she is back together again and can return home to her family, calm and rational once more (her prefrontal cortex is working again!). The children can definitely relate to Sophie’s experience and really enjoy the story.

Help you child notice when he or she has been triggered by anger, frustration, stress, or other situations. If they like using the brain terminology you can refer to the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. Noticing it in yourself can be a way to do it in a less threatening manner as in, “Wow, I think my amygdala really kicked in there when I started yelling, were you feeling that too?” Remind your child to use one of the mindfulness techniques to help them cool off. After that you can start discussing rational ‘solutions’ to whatever caused the original problem, this time with the rational part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, operating more normally.

 

 

Mindfulness at West Mercer Elementary

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by Janine Bloomfield, Ph.D.

This fall I have been at West Mercer Elementary on Mercer Island, Washington teaching mindfulness to 3rd, 4th and 5th graders.  It has been a wonderful experience with a lot of learning taking place on the part of students, classroom teachers, and myself. Feedback from students is that they are using mindfulness to help focus on homework, calming down when dealing with annoying siblings or parents, and just enjoying everyday parts of life a bit more.   Mindful hand washing has been particularly popular in some 3rd grade classrooms with some kids finding it a quite relaxing activity (with the side benefit of particularly clean hands!).  Taking the time to really feel the softness of the soap on the skin or hear the sound of the water  – one child compared it to the sound of a waterfall – can turn a sometimes boring and usually routine act into something like a work of art.