Author Archives: Janine Bloomfield

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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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.”

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.

 

 

Mindful Breathing Instructions Now Available

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I have had a number of requests for a concise description of how to practice mindfulness of breathing, the basic mindfulness practice that I do with students every time I give a class so I have added it to my website and you can access it here and read in this post below.  This practice is great for kids, teens, and adults and is something I do every day as well.  You can start with just a few minutes a day and see benefit.  Increased practice does lead to increased benefit.  For adults, 20 minutes a day is a good initial target to shoot for.  Indeed, this type of technique is the basic practice of many contemplative traditions as well as for medical applications (e.g.,  pain management, the treatment of stress, depression and ADD/ADHD), work productivity, and sports performance.  Give it a try yourself and notice how you feel afterwards.

Mindful Breathing Practice

Practicing mindful breathing helps us get better at all the techniques of mindfulness.  It is a great practice to do every day for a few minutes.  The more you do it, the better you will get at it.  It is similar to learning a physical skill such as running, bicycling, or sports: repetition improves your skill, strength, and stamina. In the case of mindfulness practice, things like your ability to stay focused, be present, and notice more of what goes on around you and inside you is what will increase the more often you do it.  In addition, you can use mindful breathing (and other mindfulness techniques) to calm down and relax such as when you are stressed, to help you go to sleep at night, or to help focus better for things like work, tests, sports, or homework.

Mindful Breathing Technique

  1. Decide how much time you will be practicing for today.  Two to five minutes is a good place to start.
  2. Put your Mindful Body on by finding a quiet place and sitting in a chair or cross-legged on the floor.   Sit up straight and put your hands on your thighs.  Imagine the top of your head is hanging from a string attached to the ceiling.
  3. Let your eyes close or, if it’s more comfortable, look gently downward in front of you.
  4. If you have a bell, ring it and listen to the sound.  When you can’t hear the sound anymore, raise your hand.
  5. Place your hand on your anchor spot, the place where you can feel your breath – your chest, your belly, maybe even your mouth.
  6. Feel the air going in and out.  Focus on that feeling.  If a sound or a thought comes up, notice it and gently return to the breath.  Try not to get involved in the distraction, try not to decide whether it was good or bad, just notice it.  Thoughts are normal, your job while practicing is just to notice that you’re thinking but not dwell on or judge them.  Often the thought will disappear on its own just by your act of noticing it.
  7. You can try saying “breathing in, breathing out” to yourself as a reminder if you get distracted.
  8. If you have a lot of thoughts or thoughts that keep replaying, try imagining placing the thought in a bubble and letting it float away, or imagine the thought is floating along in a stream and you are watching it go by.
  9. Be like a scientist or an artist: try to stay interested, engaged and curious.  Notice as many details in your breathing as you can.  Remember to breathe normally.
  10.  At the end of the time, ring the bell again and open your eyes.  If you don’t have a bell, just open your eyes.  Notice how you feel.

Ways to practice mindfulness of the breath can be found in many contemplative traditions, and, increasingly, in a variety of medical and educational applications.  As long as we are alive we are breathing so we will always have breath available to focus on.  It is always changing and we can always find more details in how our bodies feel and what our minds are up to while we are breathing so it is a rich environment in which to practice.  Finally, by focusing on the breath itself, it helps to ground us in something real and physical, calming racing thoughts, slowing the heart beat, and bringing equilibrium back to our body, mind and emotions.

 

Mind Jars

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Today in our mindfulness classes I showed the kids a Mind Jar.  This mindfulness tool is basically a homemade snow globe, using glitter glue and water.

Shake the Mind Jar.  Imagine the swirling glitter as the swirling thoughts in your mind.

The Mind Jar

Then watch the glitter slowly settle as you calm down and focus.

The Thoughts Settle

When the glitter settles at the bottom of the jar, the water is clear, like the clarity in our minds.  Now we are calm and can focus again.

The Mind is Clear

Mindfulness techniques can be used to help you calm down and focus: try mindful breathing, mindful listening, or simply mindfully looking at the glitter settling to the bottom of the jar.

The swirling thoughts can also represent the way our brain can feel when the amygdala has been triggered by stress or anger (take a look at the post, Your Brain on Mindfulness).  Watching the glitter settle can help us create the space needed for our rational mind (e.g., the prefrontal cortex) to start working better again.

To make a Mind Jar – add 2 cups of hot water to about 2 tablespoons glitter glue in a pint-sized mason jar.  Add an extra tablespoon or two of regular fine glitter.  Shake until the glue is dissolved and there are no glitter clumps.  Add food coloring if desired or leave it clear.  I used a pint sized mason jar but peanut butter, jam jars or other containers work well too.  You can also play around with the proportion of glitter glue to water if you’d like the glitter to settle more or less slowly.  Alternatively, you can make a small mind jar using a spice jar.

I have seen the mind jar described on a number of sites on the web and made my recipe using some of these ideas:

http://www.herewearetogether.com/2011/06/27/another-mind-jar/

http://brainchildblog.com/family-tip-friday-settle-your-glitter/

 

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 cover story in this month’s Parent Map!

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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.