teens

Calming the teenage mind in the classroom

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Kelly Wallace, CNN: At the start of the school year at Marblehead High School in Massachusetts, students started moving their desks out of the way, grabbing a mat and laying down on the floor for guided meditation before French class. Lexxi Seay, a senior, was skeptical.

“I actually never believed really in meditation. … I thought it was a joke,” she said during an interview.

That all changed one day back in September. While she was on her computer working and everyone else in her class was meditating, she just fell asleep sitting up. “When I …

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Mindfulness meditation a ‘pause button’ for teens

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Nina Smiley, Poughkeepsie Journal: Everyone, especially teens, wants to feel connected to others. The proliferation of social media, however, has exposed the insidious side of too much connectivity. As teens spend more and more time online – as much as nine hours a day, according to a recent CNN article – they often fall victim to FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out. Comparing their own Facebook status and Instagram photos with others can lead to feelings of inadequacy and inferiority. In fact, a 2015 Australian National Stress and Well-being Survey of teenagers found a strong correlation between hours spent online and higher levels of stress and depression. …

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Building a community of self-compassion

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wildmind meditation newsBetsy Hanger, Mindful Schools: At the Brooklyn public high school where I worked as an English and mindfulness teacher, the principal came in one afternoon during a guided practice on self-compassion. He quietly took a seat among my ninth grade students and closed his eyes. Though he’d encouraged me to start the school’s mindfulness program, he hadn’t witnessed our daily practice.

We were silently repeating short statements meant to cultivate self-compassion. “May I be safe and protected from inner and outer harm. May I be healthy. May I be peaceful and at ease. May I experience joy in my life.” I offered students the …

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Meditation may boost teen memory

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wildmind meditation newsAlison Pearce Stevens, Society for Science & the Public: If you tend to forget your homework or are easily distracted, take heed. A new study shows that teens can improve their memory with a practice known as mindfulness meditation.

Mindfulness involves paying attention to what is happening in the current moment. It requires pulling the mind back to the present when thoughts wander. No worrying about the future. Or over something that happened in the past. Just focus on the here and now. And do so without judging events as good or bad.

This mindfulness can be applied to the practice of meditation. In meditation …

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Mindfulness meditation may improve memory for teens

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wildmind meditation newsKathryn Doyle, Reuters: Adolescents assigned to a mindfulness meditation program appeared to have improvements in memory in a recent study.

“These results are consistent with a growing body of research in adults that has found mindfulness meditation to be a helpful tool for enhancing working memory capacity,” said Kristen E. Jastrowski Mano of the psychology department at the University of Cincinnati, who coauthored the new study.

The researchers randomly divided 198 public middle school students into three groups: mindfulness meditation, hatha yoga or a waitlist. Most students were female, ages 12 to 15, and from low-income households that qualified for reduced-cost lunch.

Before the study began and …

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Mindfulness study to track effect of meditation on 7,000 teenagers

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wildmind meditation newsRobert Booth, The Guardian: Seven thousand teenagers wrestling with the churning emotions of adolescence, exam stress and peer pressure are to take part in an unprecedented trial of the effect of mindfulness meditation on mental health.

Psychologists and neuroscientists from Oxford University and University College London announced on Wednesday they plan to recruit children aged 11 to 16 from 76 secondary schools as part of a seven-year study. They said it would be the largest trial of its kind ever conducted and it would test some of the increasingly ambitious claims about the power of mindfulness meditation to tackle illnesses such as depression and anxiety …

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Cultivating mindfulness beneficial, proponents say

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wildmind meditation newsKimberly Marselas, LancasterOnline: A dozen tattooed and cross-armed teenage boys shuffle into the nondescript chapel at the Lancaster County Youth Intervention Center.

Operating against a backdrop of two-way radio chatter and fluorescent lighting but speaking in hushed tones, Wynne Kinder and Christen Coscia greet each by name.

The instructors with Wellness Works in Schools aim to encourage troubled and neglected kids to open their minds, let go of their pain, and start making better choices. Though they may not tell them this, they want to help the teens develop internal tools they might use to regulate emotions.

And the instructors likely won’t refer …

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Eight tips for teaching mindfulness in high school

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wildmind meditation newsPatrick Cook-Deegan, Mindful.org: When I walked in to teach my first mindfulness class at a charter high school in Oakland, no one seemed interested. One student was sleeping in his chair; a few kids were messing around in the classroom.

Everyone looked at me like I was in the wrong place. I was nervous and not really sure what I would do. So I just started talking about stress. I asked students if they ever felt stressed, what they do when they are stressed, and asked each of them to share an experience …

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How mindfulness can benefit the modern teenager

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UBC: Today’s teens face a unique set of stressors from social media, parents, schools, and society, says Dr. Dzung Vo, a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Pediatrician with a specialization in adolescent medicine. The author of The Mindful Teen: Powerful Skills to Help You Handle Stress One Moment at a Time, says mindfulness can be the key to helping teens cope.

Mindfulness is an ancient practice that’s been brought into modern medicine by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn of the University of Massachusetts Medical School. He describes mindfulness as …

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Why does the Government want to teach mindfulness in schools?

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Judith Woods, The Telegraph: Mindfulness. If you’re not yet au fait with the concept, it might be a good idea to familiarise yourself with it now, because you’ll be hearing a lot more about it; from business leaders, academics, politicians and – of course – educationalists.

As Schools Minister David Laws this week told MPs: “We are very interested in promoting this [idea] and we certainly think that it is an area that merits consideration based on the evidence we’ve seen to date.
“My colleague [education minister] Liz …

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