Mindful interventions: Youth,poverty,and the developing brain

A glimpse into mindfulness-based education

In the last few years, new curricula, new courses, and even new schools have begun to be established with the goal of equipping children and teenagers with the ability to practice mindfulness, and to develop this ability as a tool to reduce stress, improve focus, regulate emotions, and build resiliency. The Blue School, for example, a “progressive independent school” in lower Manhattan for children aged 2 to 9 years, has aroused much interest in view of its “revolutionary approach,” which places as much emphasis on “nurturing compassion, the human spirit and human relationships” as it does on learning to read, where learning is understood as a “social act” rather than an individual one, and where social and emotional skills are privileged above all. The founders describe the establishment of the school as a response to the “unsustainable and disharmonious world” which young children will “graduate into,” and in which they need to be equipped with skills of creativity, innovation, and emotional resilience. ¹ Similarly, the .b programme (which stands for Stop, Breathe and Be!) is a 9-week course which was crafted by teachers in the UK in 2007 and introduced in schools across the UK as well as other European countries. It is designed to help children and adolescents cope with the stress of school life including tests and bullying; improve their social interaction with teachers and peers; enhance focus and attention; and lead to greater happiness, calm, and fulfillment. The “7/11” or “beditation” are becoming familiar exercises for about 3000 students in Britain who have been introduced to mindfulness teaching; similarly, “the breathing song” and “elevator breath” are phrases pupils in California are starting to use in schools. Indeed, as Carla, one of the teachers on the Association for Mindfulness in Education (AME) listserv we followed, reported after hearing of a meeting between Jon Kabat-Zinn and UK Prime Minister David Cameron:

Kabat-Zinn said at the keynote, “Mindfulness is spreading like wildfire” and that “teaching mindfulness to young people gives them advance training in the art of living.” He called the .b programme a work of genius! (Carla, 2013)

Mindfulness in Education teachers report using bells, reading stories, offering relaxation practices, yoga, centering, and breath focus in their classes. Teachers describe weaving these experiences into their curricula, interrupting “regular” classes and activities to engage in mindfulness practices. As Sydney, one of our interviewed teachers said,

Our theory is that you give underlying tools for people to do non-cognitive work and that will increase their ability to do math and reading in the long run, and will give them the ability to deal in our society and may undermine the education that just allows you to function in a market.

Many of these programs describe the benefits of mindfulness-based activities for young people in terms of the developing adolescent brain. The developers of “Learning2Breathe,” a mindfulness curriculum for adolescents, describe the program as research-based, citing evidence that “adolescent brains are still under construction” and that teaching mindfulness can help “emotion management while neural pathways are being shaped” (Learning to Breathe, n.d., para. 1). As yet, most of the scientific literature draws on associations between brain areas developing in adolescence and those activated through mindfulness, although researchers at Harvard and Cambridge are currently conducting randomized controlled trials to attempt to evaluate the causal effects of mindfulness on the brain.

“I need my upstairs brain! I’m about to flip my lid”: Modulating the brain through the language of the brain

Alice, a teacher starting a job teaching in New York, and a member of an online mindfulness listserv for educators, is one of many we noted who is eager to learn the connections between brain science and mindfulness. Preparing for the new position, she seeks help in how to teach students “how their brains work.” Alice raises the importance of neuroscience literacy for educators teaching mindfulness. Programs that teach mindfulness in schools frequently and explicitly define their pedagogical approach in terms of neurological science. Children at the Blue School, for example, are taught about impulse control, empathy, and emotional regulation in a curriculum that draws heavily on research from cognitive neuroscience. (School board members include David Rock, CEO of the Neuroleadership Group, and Dan Siegel, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA.) However, some of these programs go a step further: knowledge of brain development not only informs the design of pedagogical strategies, it also gives rise to a neurological vocabulary that young people are taught as part of the educational process.

Paloma, another educator who belongs to the online group of mindfulness-based educators, uses the forum for clarification about how many amygdalae are in the human brain, as she prepares her class materials using the MindUp curriculum. Teachers who use the MindUp curriculum are required to educate children about brain regions and their functions. This curriculum employs a hand model (using the fingers and thumb) of the “upstairs brain” and the “downstairs brain,” a visual model of frontal regulation of limbic areas to explain and manage social, emotional, and moral behaviors for children. The language of the brain is central to the intervention goals. As Alvin says:

it’s compelling it has gotten so far into popular narrative, kids old and young. You hear young kids now talking about [the brain]. I think it will be interesting over time. Young kids now are talking about how their amygdala becomes overactive. I think that’s good. In a way that level of critical distance and spaciousness between one part of the mind and another can be very powerful. I think kids can and do get it. It’s an interesting question about the interactions between developmental processes and their sense of self. I do think this narrative can be useful to kids. The way they use it offends me less than when adults say, for instance, “depression is a serotonin imbalance.” Do we know that? The story has been told by people selling SSRIs. That feels worse somehow than a kid saying, “my amygdala is overactive so I need to take a couple breaths so I can start thinking with other parts of my brain.”

Alvin demonstrates how children talking about their emotions with reference to their brain regions serve an important purpose, aligned with the way that children are taught to meditate. The naming of brain areas provides “spaciousness,” a gap between the child’s emotional state and her understanding, in which to observe and make choices about behaviors. Alvin also raises another issue we intend to explore further through our qualitative research: the notion that the language of the brain for mindful interventions is an alternative to the language of psychopharmaceutical interventions, and that mindfulness meditation may serve as a preferable alternative to chemical interventions, an idea also promoted by affective neuroscientist Richard Davidson (Davidson, 2010; Davidson et al., 2003).

Mark, a psychiatrist and advisor to a number of education programs, believes that learning about the brain is much more than a useful metaphor:

Here, Mark describes how neuroscience serves as more than a backbone or evidence base for mindfulness-based interventions; the language of the brain becomes instrumental, he says, in teaching children how to directly modulate their brain function towards more regulated states. Interestingly, our interviewees are not consistent about whether the brain is being used as metaphor or mechanism, with Mark seemingly settling on brain as a “symbol based on the science of the brain.” In this formulation it is the symbolic power of the brain to not only legitimize the integration of mindfulness practices into the education system but to provide a tool—a language—for children to use in their regulatory process. Mark, however, suggests that vocabulary of the brain is not merely symbolic, but provides a means to directly modulate brain mechanisms which “drive energy flow.”

Regulating the effects of childhood adversity: Mindfulness programs and urban youth

Most recently, mindfulness-based initiatives have emerged with a specific focus on “urban” or “inner-city” youth. Brothers Ali and Atman Smith together with Andres Gonzales set up the non-profit Holistic Life Foundation in Baltimore after returning home from college and realizing “something had to be done about [the sense] that things were wrong with the world.” The organization works with young people from some of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the city through programs of yoga and mindfulness and social mentoring, programs “that are anchored in values of unity and interconnectedness.” A recent research initiative through a partnership between the Holistic Life Foundation, the Center for Adolescent Health, and the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released data from a pilot randomized controlled trial assessing the outcomes of a school-based mindfulness program. Adolescence Matters, a quarterly brief from Johns Hopkins, describes the premise:

Poverty stresses out youth … Persistently stressed children are vulnerable to difficulties in learning how to effectively regulate their thoughts and emotions. Emerging evidence has found that childhood adversity triggers neurobiological events that can alter brain development, potentially impairing the stress-response systems. Consistent with this biological research, being exposed to multiple poverty-related risks increases the chance that children will have more difficulty controlling their emotions … Teaching stressed children how to regulate emotions … may enable them to avoid the downward trajectory faced by many at-risk youth. (Center for Adolescent Health, 2011)

The study, which included 97 early adolescents from the Baltimore area, demonstrated that a 12-week mindfulness intervention which included yoga-based activity, breathing techniques, and guided mindfulness sessions, showed improvements in involuntary stress responses, relationships with peers, and depressive symptoms from changes in self-report questionnaire scores measuring involuntary stress responses and depressive symptoms.

A similar initiative called the Lineage Project in New York City uses mindfulness meditation and yoga “to break the cycle of poverty, violence, and incarceration.” Established by Andrew Getz and Soren Gordhamer, two meditation teachers who had studied the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts, the project has offered classes to young people in juvenile detention centers and alternative-to-incarceration community programs as well as children in foster care and in alternative public schools to children with academic and behavioral difficulties. Teachers at the Lineage Project report significant results among youth from periods of yoga or meditation practice, helping them deal with rage, reducing detachment from others, developing empathy, and bringing them more peace of mind by developing self-awareness and self-regulation skills (Lineage Project, n.d.).

How should we understand this emerging phenomenon of mindfulness as an intervention for youth poverty? Debates about public school education in the United States have long catalyzed nationwide anxieties about race, class, and politics (Spencer, 2013). While each generation has developed its own panaceas for “crises of education,” a sense of despondency has characterized much of the US debates around education. School violence, failing schools, and moral debates over curriculum have generated a discourse on how schools are “failing our children.” To fail our children is to fail our future. Mindfulness provides techniques that circumvent the emotional, political, and moral morass of ongoing conventional educational debates. On the one hand, circumvention does individualize problems, appearing to take them out of the explicitly political, but as our respondents articulate, on the other hand, this is a necessary process for a larger moral project that allows for social action and engagement. The question remains: to what extent is the current emphasis on mindfulness a distraction from dealing with larger-scale issues?

Brief background on Buddhism in American institutions

More broadly, how should we understand the recent acceptance of Buddhist-oriented practices and theory in British and North American institutional settings? First, and briefly, some background: Buddhism has only recently become mainstreamed in America. Though 1960s counterculture helped introduce Eastern practices to a wide audience, it is not until the last 10 to 15 years or so that we have seen a proliferation of “secularized” versions of Buddhism represented in the mainstream press, popular publications like John Kabat-Zinn’s Full Catastrophic Living (2013), and his well-attended mindfulness-based stress reduction courses; and the Mind & Life Institute’s widely publicized neurological studies of Tibetan monks (Lopez, 2009).

There are many reasons for the popularity of these practices. Following the embrace of Eastern philosophy by 1960s counterculture, Herbert Benson’s scientific studies of meditation and the relaxation response in the 1970s opened meditation to a much broader audience by secularizing Asian practices through the jettisoning of cultural trappings (Lopez, 2009). More recently, Bill Moyers’ Healing and the Mind (1995) has publicized practices like chi kung and meditation. Joan Halifax, famous for her work on death and dying, and friend to Hollywood celebrities and billionaires, has helped promote the idea that Buddhism has something unique to teach the West about dying. A glance at various new age and Buddhist publications will reveal a vast menu of trainings dealing with all manner of pain, suffering, stress, and anxiety.

As part of the “master narrative of anti-modernism” (Rosenberg, 2007), religion and spirituality play a key role in critiquing what have been seen as the alienating forces of modernity. This master narrative runs through American history going back to the Romantic era, when Thoreau and Emerson were already exploring Asian spirituality (Lears, 1994). Buddhism has filled the niche of spirituality for many. In this sense, what we are describing can be seen as an instance in the long ebb and flow of tensions between holism and mechanization.

Alvin, who instructs teachers on mindfulness in education, echoes these holistic critiques of science:

We went from [a] positivist worldview and optimism in the early 20th century, in which we thought we could solve everything and then deteriorated into a complex postmodern depressing place and this offers [a] return of positivism [which] links back to ideas in education to something that can be seen and measured by science. [F]or a long time education has been struggling with that kind of question. Education is so tied into politics 500 billion in dollars a year but how do you move it. You have to make research substantiated claims so you shift to [a] paradigm of medical clinical gold standards of randomized control and the more biological it sounds there’s a tremendous appeal. There’s a lot of value to that on some level but to me that paradigm when you talk about health has problems too like these biomedical models that don’t serve the population but serve drug companies. We risk that in education too, trying to do these RCTs. It can shift conversation in good ways but is problematic also in a way to talk about culture. … One of the first things you learn in the Harvard grad program is there’s a great study that says studies with pictures of brain scans bring reactions.

Invoking ideas of holism (Rosenberg, 2007) provides a critique that resonates with spirituality and religion—playing on their shared dissatisfaction with strictly material or biological views of the self.

Buddhism in the US finds a home within the broad discourse on holism, and mindfulness is another way of talking about these questions. What Anne Harrington (2008) calls Eastward Journeys—the melding of Eastern philosophy and medicine—provides a potent cocktail of spirituality, scientific research, and oriental mystique that resonates, for many, with what she calls the “existential deficiencies” of contemporary medicine, where mindfulness practices found an institutional fit earlier than in educational settings. The current success and popularity of Buddhism and mindfulness, at least to a large degree, relies on its ability to leverage the discourse of holism (Rosenberg, 2007). But something else has also occurred: the need for Westerners to seek answers from Asian mysticism has become rationalized. While this process has been occurring for over a hundred years (Lopez, 2009), it has reached a different stage, as evidenced by the institutional acceptance of mindfulness practices (McMahan, 2008).

Politics and education

While initially we were inclined to see the mindfulness boom as a kind of “antipolitics machine,” the more we spoke with people and reflected on the complexity of educational politics in the US, the less this became clear. Prominent critics like Žižek have critiqued Western Buddhism as essentially reactionary:

The “Western Buddhist” meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in capitalist dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. If Max Weber were alive today, he would definitely write a second, supplementary, volume to his Protestant Ethic, entitled The Taoist Ethic and the Spirit of Global Capitalism. (Žižek, 2001)

Žižek’s strongly worded rhetoric notwithstanding, those we spoke with in the field had thought through some of these challenges and had subtle responses—in many ways more thoughtful than the one-sided critical-theory diatribe of Žižek. For instance, according to Alvin:

In my area of the world we are competing over 500 billion dollars. 2 billion is coming from foundations. Everyone who is running a foundation at some point says: “if I really want to change things I should get involved in education.” There are plenty of people in the foundation world who are pushing on the achievement gap and income disparities with at-risk and privileged groups. Like let’s make sure they can graduate high school but then they graduate high school and fall apart in college. Then they say what’s really failing is we need to go with charters and then they shift to teacher quality and say that the only thing that matters is a good teacher. And here we are writing grants for a little pot [of money]—our theory of change goes like this: the non-cognitive skills are most important for success. Emotional regulation and the ability for teachers and students to intervene in their own cycles of stress, so we need to make changes in that direction.

Alvin, who runs an educational training program that teaches mindfulness to public school teachers, is clearly aware of some of the dangers that Žižek points to. He sees the potential for mindfulness practices to become a tool of social reproduction and an unwitting collaborator in what many see as a broken system. However, Alvin’s comments do not suggest Žižek’s vision of Western Buddhism. Instead, he displays a complex awareness of moral dilemmas associated with using mindfulness practices to address the needs of disadvantaged youth.

He goes on to say during his interview:

I think that theory of change is true too and has a dialogue with resource allocation and achievement … these are not mutually exclusive. Everyone is saying, how do you change this? The mindfulness movement is to a large extent agnostic on these fights, how you educate teachers, etc. What we are saying is that to make it more broad—that is, you built a system meant to train farmers into factory and office workers and you codified that system in the 80s, but essentially those kids are coming in at risk and we are not doing well. It’s not a theoretical critique. Our current system, it’s making us stressed out and unhappy and not achieving the instrumental goals we say we want to achieve. Maybe it’s better to do yoga and meditation and put art class back in.

Alvin acknowledges that while the mindfulness movement does not directly address educational inequalities and police conventional issues of educational policy this does not mean it is lacking in fundamental critiques of the “system.” Alvin anticipates glib critiques of his position, suggesting that he is challenging the “neoliberal agenda.” But how are we to take the mindfulness movement’s critiques seriously? Perhaps the movement is born from a despair of older, confrontational forms of politics. But nevertheless, there is a strongly articulated hope, one that has come a long way from Marxist-infused leftist agendas or revolutionary utopias of social movements of the 1960s. Yet to suggest that mindfulness advocates are toadies of capitalism is to miss the complexities brought up by our respondents.

Conclusion

Mindsight is a learnable skill. It is the basic skill that underlies what we mean when we speak of having emotional and social intelligence. When we develop the skill of mindsight, we actually change the physical structure of the brain. (Dr. Dan Siegel, n.d., “Mindsight,” para. 3)

And the data came back on it now, and it’s absolutely blown our socks off. We have about 60% optimism rise in our class, therefore we call it the optimistic classroom. (TEDMED, 2010)

Advocates describe mindfulness as a liberatory practice (Bunting, 2014; Kabat-Zinn, 2001; Orr, 2004), while critics suspect it of being reactionary bromide dressed up in liberal therapeutic clothing (Bodhi, 2011; McDonagh, 2014; Sharf, 2014). Our study set out to explore these framings, and perhaps unsurprisingly, our conclusions suggest that the picture is more complex than either pole of the debate would capture. Our analysis of texts and interviews makes it clear that no intervention is inherently liberatory and one can be simultaneously working toward structural changes while creating spaces of possibility under constrained conditions. Our preliminary observations suggest that neuroscience and mindfulness find a fit as an intervention tool for young people for at least two reasons. One reason for their coming together is likely the shared focus on affect, the social, and the recent emphasis on cultivating emotional intelligence (EI) in education, in the workplace, and in therapeutic contexts (Choudhury, McKinney, & Kirmayer, 2015). Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence (1995), which received widespread attention and popular success, draws on a body of data from cognitive neuroscience experiments and attempts to overcome what he calls Cartesian distinctions between reason and emotions. Specifically, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has argued that emotions are core to the human ability to make decisions or to “reason,” and central to our very sense of self, challenging the prevailing belief in Western thought that privileges rational thinking over emotions.

Aware of the demonstrable importance of emotions in this recent body of neuroscience, Goleman believes that it is EI that “makes us more fully human” (Goleman, 1995, p. 45). He proposes that emotional literacy can help us to achieve the right balance between the rational and emotional mind to avoid “emotional hijackings” and subsequent inappropriate actions. This focus on EI resonates with conceptions of human nature (“Human Nature 2.0”) from social neuroscience that render human beings as “hardwired to be social” and naturally empathic or benevolent (Young, 2012). Not only is developing the capacity for EI a strategy for developing healthy personal relationships and good mental health, but it has been linked to future economic success, an important resource for dealing with an increasingly insecure and uncertain global market (Fricke & Choudhury, 2011). It is the areas of the brain associated with EI and social cognition that are undergoing the most pronounced change at adolescence; thus the right time to develop EI is during one of the most neuroplastic periods of life—adolescence.

While neuroplasticity is suggestive of a move to overcome biological reductionism by emphasizing the situatedness of the brain socially and culturally (although see Choudhury, McKinney, & Merten, 2012; Pitts-Taylor, 2010), it is imported into the mindfulness-in-education project, promoting “neuronal selfhood” as part of the purported “therapeutic turn” in education. As such, mindfulness as a means of working on the brain to cultivate compassion has been vehemently criticized by some education researchers as overly individualizing and as promoting passivity (Ecclestone, 2004), ultimately “anaesthetizing people in times of risk and uncertainty” (Hyland, 2009, p. 122), obscuring possibilities for political organizing and tools needed to engage with structural inequalities, the very problems some of these interventions seek to remedy. However, as some of our interviewees emphasize, as well as researchers in education and Buddhism, mindfulness in education can assist children in cultivating the skills to become more socially engaged and to critically examine their circumstances (Thompson, 2007). As Alvin said:

People [in the mindfulness movement] are thinking about individuals versus community. The good ones are saying things along the lines of: “you cannot do contemplative learning without touching on interconnectedness.” Most of the serious people in the field are non-instrumentalists. I don’t know how much it shines through.

Moreover, its incorporation into education is a move away from the market model of education, overcoming the trend in focusing teaching on sciences and market-based vocations, and instead re-instilling humanistic values into mainstream education from the earliest stages. As Nel, an education activist said, “The mindfulness project has a radical goal in shifting the curriculum away from the current narrowing tendencies driven by the market.” While it is easy to dismiss Nel as an unwitting participant in a Buddhist capitalist ethic, this would miss her point. Given the constraints under which she sees herself operating, mindfulness programming provides a much needed space—if not of resistance, then of something that exists outside an increasingly underfunded pressurized regime of testing and evaluation.

As we have been suggesting, adolescence as a life stage, education as institutional space, and neuroplasticity as a biological process together provide a particularly charged moral arena in which societal projections play out about the characteristics we want to cultivate in the adults of the future. The plastic brain is presented as a substrate in the making, a process of becoming, and a space of potentiality, a canvas with ample possibility through which to effect change and cultivate certain appropriate social, emotional, and moral behaviors, the end goals of which remain to be debated (adjustment or active engagement?). On top of that, as Alvin said:

People like the cold, hard numbers. If you walk into the principal’s office, someone who has a few seconds, and say, here are cold hard numbers and you give him a picture of the brain, he might say, “Oh you’re changing the brain.” That’s good.

The neurobiological dimension adds a sense of durability to these goals, while also maintaining objectivity, and stripping the project of religious connotations. According to one neuroscientist, the scientific framing is not only necessary for legitimizing the widespread introduction of mindfulness in schools, but even sufficient for maintaining a set of values: “moral mindsets [which] arise out of biological propensities … are shaped by experience during sensitive periods” (Narvaez, 2013). Despite the scientific guise of mindfulness approaches, there are implicit moral assumptions about what sort of person one ought to be. In other words, even the scientized versions of mindfulness provide a secularized spirituality, and leave the realm of fact for the realm of values (Weber, 1958) by prescribing moral mindsets.

We began this article by discussing our own ambivalence about the role of mindfulness practices for “at-risk” youth. While we still remain ambivalent, we hope to have illuminated both the origins of these practices and the reasons for their current cultural resonance. The potent combination of brain sciences and the secularized spiritual-moral discourse of mindfulness intertwine with deeply held American beliefs on hope and optimism (Crapanzano, 2003; Rozario, 2007; Seligman, 2002). Given the current political dynamics, the retreat of federal funding and the fracturing of a seemingly viable political project, mindfulness practices, particularly in relationship to children who might otherwise be considered broken and unredeemable, fill a critical niche—one that allows its advocates to imagine a world where people can change, become more compassionate, resilient, reflective, and aware: a world with a viable future.

The recent boom in literature on resilience (Ungar, 2004) also fits well with this secular narrative of hope. In contexts of the collective disasters that characterize our “New Age of Anxiety” (Moses, 2009, 2010), resiliency provides a version of scientized hope; an ecumenical discourse that resonates with religious views of redemption, as well as American-style bootstrap grit, which also has its origins in protestant religious sensibilities remade as therapeutic culture (Rozario, 2007). As Francine, a mindfulness teacher, said:

It’s hopeful and a way of studying who and what we are—it’s aligned with a scientific cosmology. Brain science is an intersection of our cosmology and meaning-making. It’s the best cutting-edge science but the problem with science is it lacks a narrative about how we fit in and what we are about and all of those things in culture. It provides a hopeful narrative.

Ironically, the convergence of mindfulness with neuroscience, arguably a science laden with meaning, values, and prescriptive goals, further expands the hopeful scientific narrative about human nature, of human beings as social, benevolent, and evolving toward better futures.