It is a stressful time for university students who are in the middle of writing final exams but now a little relief can be found on campus.

Staff at the University of Calgary’s Wellness Centre say students are all feeling the pressure of finals and dealing with the holiday season.

To help students cope, they have converted a dance studio in the Kinesiology Department on campus into a stress free zone.

The overhead lights are turned off and soothing music is played and a labyrinth is laid out in the middle of the floor for walking meditation.

“Sometimes they don’t even need …

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Almost ever summer over the last ten years, I’ve been teaching low income teens how to use their minds more effectively so that they can be more successful students, but also so that they can be more successful, happier, less stressed individuals.

We cover a lot of ground in my six-week course, but a core element is the practice of meditation. I was hesitant to do this. I wondered whether these restless teens would be able to sit still even for five to ten minutes. And what if they thought it was lame?

As it turned out, the most common comment in the end-of-term evaluation reports was “The best part was …

Tralee Pearce: I haven’t studied enough. I’m going to fail the test. My mom’s going to be mad. Maybe I’ll skip class.

Thoughts like these can quickly gallop out of control in kids’ minds, but what if there was a way they could clear them away? Enter the three-minute breathing meditation, which can be done anywhere, whether it’s on the bus or in a school hallway.

It’s one of the cornerstones of the increasingly popular practice of mindfulness, a blend of Buddhism-inspired calm and cognitive-behavioural therapy. Used as a therapy for adults for about 30 years, it’s now moving into the world of kids …

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Liese Stanley: I’ve been teaching meditation to adults for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve worked with school students.

Session 1

The first surprise is the boy/girl ratio: there’s only one girl but eight boys. We began with a switching off of phones, and we chat about their thoughts and expectations for meditation. I introduce myself and give a bit of background.

They have some really good comments and it turns out that one person has tried meditation before. We begin a meditation within 10 minutes as it feels right to practice rather than talk and I think it will ease …

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Steve Kent: Religious and non-religious people alike can benefit from Buddhism, according to a presenter Saturday at the Museum of Anthropology’s new exhibit honoring Buddhism in the Cache Valley.

In his experience as a teacher at the Cache Valley Buddhist Sangha, associate English Professor Michael Sowder said he has worked with people of all religious backgrounds who practice meditation and study Buddhist teachings.

People with such a wide range of religious inclination can practice Buddhism because its teachings neither endorse nor reject any particular beliefs, Sowder said.

“You can have a religious belief and practice Buddhism at the same time,” he said. “Buddhism will …

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Ben Harris: Practicing Buddhism is more of a lifestyle than a religion for Don Socha and Brigitte Bechtold.

Socha, a lecturer at Central Michigan University, has been formally practicing Buddhism since 2000. He said he met a monk who taught in CMU’s Spanish department who introduced him to groups in Montreal where he went for meditation sessions.

He was ordained Bodhisattva in 2002. He said a Bodhisattva is someone who has devoted his or her life to the Buddhist precepts, such as not stealing and not lying.

“In a sense, we’re trying to alleviate suffering in the world. It’s one of the Four Noble Truths,” he …

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Tina Barseghian: There’s no question that for both kids and adults, our attention is divided. Texts, emails, Twitter, Facebook are all chiming, ringing, beeping, and chirping for our attention.

How does this affect kids? The media has covered the subject in terms of fear of multitasking leading to ADD, losing control to digital devices, and the dangers of not being able to focus. And in most cases, the Internet (and technology in general) has been declared the culprit.

But rather than blaming the medium, David Levy, author of Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age, believes the challenges of multitasking …

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A few days ago I gave a talk at a high school about 40 minutes from my house. Some of the students had made secular “prayer flags,” which had the purpose of expressing their positive thoughts and sending them out into the world.

The prayer flags had been hung where they would brighten up a rather unattractive central courtyard, which now contained a “ger” (Tibetan yurt), designed (I think) in the geometry class. You can just see the ger in the background of the second photograph.

Some of the images were intriguing, and I wish I’d been able to talk more with individual …

Encouraging pupils to keep noise to a minimum has substantial benefits and should become a valuable component of all children’s education, it is claimed.

Dr Helen Lees, from Stirling University’s school of education, said that “enforced silence” was seen as a punishment and often acted to suppress children’s natural ability.

But she said that teaching children about the benefits of “strong silence” – deliberate stillness that gives them the opportunity to focus and reflect in a stress-free environment – can have a significant effect on pupils’ concentration and behaviour.

The conclusions are made in a new book – Silence in Schools – to …

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Goldie Hawn, whose Hawn Foundation develops programs to help children thrive and find happiness, recently appeared on ABC Nightline to discuss her foundation’s work. In particular she talked about MindUp, which is helping kinds by teaching them mindfulness meditation, or what Hawn calls “brain breaks,” and neuroscience.

In the wake of 9/11, Hawn became concerned at learning that US children were among the unhappiest in the world, with rising suicide rates, depression, and one in three children on medication. As a meditator, she became convinced that she could make a difference. She launched the Hawn Foundation, and began working with scientists to help children train their brains to focus, and become happier.

220 schools in the US, Canada, and Britain are now …