Mind Moves Tony BatesI celebrated world mental health day last week with almost 100 teenagers and their teachers in Limerick. They came from five local secondary schools: St Nessan's Community College, Presentation Secondary School, Salesian Secondary School, CBS Doon and CBS Ennistymon.
The day was hosted by the Limerick Mental Health Association; its purpose was to introduce these students to mindfulness and to explore with them its potential value in their lives.
Naturally, they were apprehensive. Each group came from their own unique sub-culture and had to share the day with strangers. And, while they had chosen to be there, the topic of mindfulness gave them little indication of what they might expect or what might be asked of them.
We titled the day "Surfing the Wave" to convey a core message: Life is unpredictable and challenging at every turn; the only way to survive is to learn to surf the wave of your experience, to engage with it, to turn into the wave and use its energies to move and grow.
As they sat silently among their own in different corners of the hall, waiting for the day to begin, I wondered if we could manage to surf the challenges which lay ahead or whether we would all simply go under.
My co-presenter and I agreed on a number of ground rules with the participants, including that we would not "dumb down" mindfulness for them. We offered them a day in which they could experience a unique opportunity. They did not have to like it, but we invited them to give us and mindfulness a fair chance. And then judge its relevance to their lives for themselves.
The energy and natural curiosity of young people is irrepressible and this audience proved to be no different.
We used fun team-building games to break down barriers and create some degree of safety before moving into mindfulness exercises. We identified with them the key stresses in their lives and explored how mindfulness could help them to cope with these stresses.
We alternated movement exercises with simple breathing exercises to show them how to stop and ground themselves. Initially, there was murmuring and fits of giggles, but by the beginning of the afternoon they were able to concentrate silently, for five to 10 minutes, using their breath as an anchor to hold their attention in the present moment, and take time to become aware of their feelings and thoughts, without judging themselves for whatever experiences they were having.
We showed them how mindfulness can help them to use their minds to master skills which were important to them; to calm themselves when they became stressed; and to quieten their minds long enough to allow creative solutions to problems to emerge.
We learned a lot from the experience. Taking a large group of young people out of their school environment into a strange setting, with peers they do not know, is probably not ideal for encouraging them to learn a personal skill which is emotionally challenging.
Better perhaps to work with small groups in their own schools, where familiar surroundings provide a safer base to explore mindfulness and learn new skills.
We also learned that it might be better to work directly with teachers rather than work as "outsiders" with their students.
Evaluations of mental health promotion in schools consistently favour a "whole school" approach, where learning about emotions and health is integrated within the broad curriculum. This is the strength of the Social and Personal Health Education (SPHE) programme.
There are risks in "parachuting in" once-off presentations on psychological topics, unless there is an opportunity for working and reworking these issues within the school curriculum, and for close follow-up with those students who may experience strong personal feelings in response to mental health topics.
The teachers who participated in our workshop were key to its success. By the close of the workshop they believed that mindfulness could be relevant and helpful in the classroom, and they were keen to pursue training themselves, to equip them to bring this to their students.
Feedback from young people on the day suggested that many had really enjoyed the workshop and that they had taken something from the experience which could be a benefit to them in building their mental health.
We asked them, as a closing exercise, to work in small groups to illustrate how mindfulness could help them to "surf the wave".
Their poster productions indicated that many saw mindfulness as something which steadied them in the face of emotional storms.
This was captured by one group who drew a large heart surrounded by a range of positive and negative emotions. Inside the heart they drew a bird, to convey their sense of the calm which they could find through mindfulness.
Being able to steady themselves through practising mindfulness could allow them to work with difficult feelings without having to run away from them and without being overwhelmed.
tbates@irish-times.ie
Tony Bates is a clinical psychologist.