Working Together: Module 2
MINDFULNESS
Page 10
Module 2 - Working Together
Mindfulness
Contents
Introduction 2
Learning Outcomes 3
Module topics 3
What is Mindfulness? 3
How Does Mindfulness Work? 4
Mindfulness and Aboriginal People 5
Deep listening 6
How to Apply Mindfulness to the Intercultural Space 7
References 10
Appendix One 12
Sitting Meditation - Visit to Country 12
Appendix Two 14
STOP Technique – Breathing Activity 14
Appendix Three 15
Identifying supports for Tutors Activity 15
Appendix Four 16
Reflection Template 16
Introduction
Welcome to Mindfulness
In this module we will be exploring mindfulness as a means to build your resilience and skills for teaching and leading in the intercultural space. Being mindful is about being focused on the moment and learning to respond to challenges that life throws at you so that you can manage any pain and stress caused without frustration and self-criticism. Mindfulness has been shown to be effective in managing a range of conditions including stress, chronic pain, panic, and depression. More recently it has been applied to education as a means to improve learning outcomes for students by supporting teachers’ social-emotional competence (Jennings & Greenberg, 2009). Social competence is ‘possessing and using the ability to integrate thinking, feeling and behaviour to achieve social tasks and outcomes valued in the host context and culture’. (http://www.dundee.ac.uk/eswce/research/projects/socialcompetence/definition/)
Goleman (1995), when talking about emotional intelligence, identifies five crucial emotional competencies basic to social and emotional learning:
1. Self and other awareness: understanding and identifying feelings; knowing when one's feelings shift; understanding the difference between thinking, feeling and acting; and understanding that one's actions have consequences in terms of others' feelings.
2. Mood management: handling and managing difficult feelings; controlling impulses; and handling anger constructively
3. Self-motivation: being able to set goals and persevere towards them with optimism and hope, even in the face of setbacks
4. Empathy: being able to put yourself "in someone else's shoes" both cognitively and affectively; being able to take someone's perspective; being able to show that you care
5. Management of relationships: making friends, handling friendships; resolving conflicts; cooperating; collaborative learning and other social skills
According to Goleman, mastering these five competencies can enhance an individual’s emotional intelligence (1995). Learning how to practice mindfulness will assist you as a tutor to better understand yourself and become more self-aware of not only your own feelings and thoughts but how to manage difficult situations that can and do emerge in a classroom or tutorial situation.
The aim of this module is, therefore, to provide you with a useful tool to lead and teach in the intercultural space. Mindfulness is—if practiced—also beneficial to daily life. This session on mindfulness has been intentionally scheduled as the second module in order for you to be given the opportunity to practice mindfulness during the intercultural leadership program. This module will draw on mindfulness to support some of the overall Working Together program learning outcomes such as developing reflexivity and facilitating intercultural learning.
Learning Outcomes
· Understand the relevance of mindfulness to intercultural teaching and leadership
· Apply mindfulness as a reflective practice within the intercultural space
· Apply mindfulness as a self-care practice within the intercultural space.
Module topics
This module is an introduction to mindfulness. To maximise the benefits of mindfulness it is recommended that a program of mindfulness sessions be undertaken. As this is only an introductory session and the literature on mindfulness is extensive, the module notes will briefly explore the following topics:
· What is Mindfulness?
· How does Mindfulness Work?
· Dadirri or Deep listening
· How to Apply Mindfulness and Dadirri in the Intercultural Space.
What is Mindfulness?
Jon Kabut-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus and founding director of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School has been instrumental in the wide spread use and application of mindfulness to Western life. He has defined mindfulness as:
the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose,
in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of
experience moment by moment. (Kabat-Zinn, 2003, p. 145)
Mindfulness is also popularly known as ‘mindful meditation’ as many concepts underlying mindfulness are borrowed from Buddhist meditation. Mindfulness recognises the interconnected-ness of mind and body, a notion largely absent from Western discourse. According to Germer mindfulness “is the English translation of the Pali word sati. Pali was the language of Buddhist psychology 2500 years ago and mindfulness is the core teaching of this tradition. Sati connotes awareness, attention and remembering” (2004, p. 25). Mindfulness is about connecting with what is happening in the moment—as a way to learn how to relate directly to your life—and to recognise habitual thinking (Stahl & Goldstein, 2010). In other words, mindfulness is about stopping yourself from merely running on autopilot.
Autopilot could best be described as:
In a car, we can sometimes drive for miles “on automatic pilot,” without
really being aware of what we are doing. In the same way, we may not be
really “present,” moment-by-moment, for much of our lives;: we can often be
“miles away” without knowing it. On automatic pilot, we are more likely to have
our “buttons pressed”: Events around us and thoughts, feelings, and sensations
in the mind (of which we may be only dimly aware) can trigger old habits of thinking
that are often unhelpful and may lead to worsening mood.
By becoming more aware of our thoughts, feelings, and body sensations, from
moment to moment, we give ourselves the possibility of greater freedom and choice; we do not have to go into the same old “mental ruts” that may have caused problems in the past. (Segal et al., 2002).
Through switching off the autopilot, mindfulness enables us to be consciously in the moment and allows us to be less reactive to what is happening in that moment.
How Does Mindfulness Work?
Increasing research from the Unites States is showing that mindfulness practice changes the functioning of the brain and has positive health benefits (Kabat-Zinn, 2003). Lau and Grobavak, referring to what they call the Buddhist psychological model (BPM), state that mindfulness training improves both the ability to recognise the occurrence of unhelpful mental thoughts (proliferation) and the ability to stop constantly thinking (ruminating) about something by learning to focus your attention elsewhere. Mastering these skills helps individuals to treat and see their re-occurring thoughts “as mental events rather than aspects of reality of self.”
The application of mindfulness also reduces suffering (mental proliferation) through insight which is a
“direct, non-conceptual understanding achieved through the repeated examination (via mindfulness practice) of the following three characteristics that are present in all sensations:
1. impermanence (sensations are transient – they arise and pass away)
2. un-satisfactoriness (attachment/aversion to the feeling of sensations leads to suffering)
3. not-self (sensations do not contain or constitute any lasting, separate entity that could be called a self).” (Lau and Grobavak, undated; Grobavak, Lau & Willett, 2011)
Constantly practicing mindfulness and reflecting on these characteristics can eventually lead to what the Buddhists’ call enlightenment. However, another important outcome of such “insight is a long-term reduction in habitual attachment/aversion reactions and a consequent decrease in mental proliferation [constant occurrence of unhelpful mental thoughts] and rumination [constantly thinking about something]” (Lau and Grobavak, undated).
Mindfulness and Aboriginal People
In Australia the application of mindfulness as an Eastern concept is relatively new in the Aboriginal community. Professor Michael Yellowbird, a Native American scholar and social worker from the Department of Social Work at Humboldt State University, Arcata in California, points out that
” almost all human cultures have engaged in practices that include the use of deep, focused thought, listening, and attention” (Yellowbird, 2011).
Yellowbird further states that while:
Developing mindfulness is not easy … it is worth doing since it is culturally
appropriate, easy to implement, low cost, and it works. Mindfulness involves
systematic training and practice and is a process that takes place over time.
[And that] dramatic, positive changes can occur when one gently and consistently
practices mindfulness. It is a journey that is well worth it for native students and
those that teach them; for when they are invited to enter into states of deep aware-
ness and concentration their worlds, experiences, and lives become much richer,
less fearful and angry, more vivid, creative, peaceful, and healed. Raising the
educational success and wellbeing of Indigenous students is just one mindful
breath away. (2011)
A personal story from Associate Professor Dawn Bessarab further illustrates Professor Yellowbird’s comments:
Bard people are saltwater people because they live on the coast. Many years
ago I had the opportunity to spend time with my elders at place called ‘Gulun’
which is their country near Lombadina on the Dampier Peninsula. Their campsite
at Gulun is right on the beach on a high sand hill that faces directly out to sea.
I returned to Gulun from a shopping trip at the nearby Djarindjin community to
find my two elders sitting side by side and gazing out to sea. In that moment they
were not speaking, sitting quietly totally immersed in the landscape. My first impulse
was to go up to them announce my presence and ask them what they were doing.
But I resisted the impulse and the question, choosing instead to observe from a
distance and to try answer the question for myself. After several minutes of
reflection, I realised they were meditating which was a revelation for me as this new
piece of knowledge hit my consciousness. When they eventually moved, letting me
know that I could approach I went up and greeted them. My Gulu (grandfather)
then pointed out to sea and asked me what I saw. I looked and all I could see was
a blue flat expanse of ocean that stretched to the horizon. Occasionally a distant
wave would reflect the sun’s rays but nothing seemed to break the flat calm. After
a while I replied that I couldn’t see anything. He then proceeded to point out where
a Gulil (turtle) was swimming and a dugong diving. He read the patterns of the sea
to me like a story taken from a familiar and favourite book. I realized at that point,
that by sitting quietly meditating on the ocean my Gulu and Golli (grandmother) had
learnt to read and know the ocean in a way that I could not. That moment was
a huge learning curve for me in realising and knowing that my Elders, past and present,
had been practicing mindfulness meditation for thousands of years.
A Koori project in the Eastern States called the ‘Deep Listening Project’ is a “unique four-way partnership between RMIT, the Koori Cohort, the Koori Heritage trust and Silcar” and has developed a mindfulness that has helped to generate mutual understanding, respect and creativity between all the partners. Silcar states that the “Deep Listening project has brought new insights and approaches to the concepts of awareness and mindfulness which underpin Silcar's workplace health and safety commitments”.’ (Silcar, 2010)
Deep listening
Deep listening:
Involves listening, from a deep, receptive, and caring place in oneself, to deeper
and often subtler levels of meaning and intention in the other person. It is listen-
ing that is generous, empathic, supportive, accurate, and trusting. Trust here
does not imply agreement, but the trust that whatever others say, regardless of
how well or poorly it is said, comes from something true in their experience.
Deep Listening is an ongoing practice of suspending self-oriented, reactive think-
ing and opening one’s awareness to the unknown and unexpected. It calls on
a special quality of attention that poet John Keats called negative capability. Keats
defined this as “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts
without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” (Mindful 2012)
In an interview on You Tube, Aboriginal writer Miriam-Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann describes deep listening as ‘Dadirri’ which:
is inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness. Dadirri recognises the deep spring
that is inside us. We call on it and it calls to us. This is the gift that Australia is thirsting
for. It is something like what you call ‘contemplation’ (Creative Spirits, undated).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2YMnmrmBg8&feature=player_embedded
Similarly Judith Atkinson, an Indigenous scholar, says that ‘Dadirri’ is important in initiating healing and positive change in postcolonial Australia (Lowitja Institute, 2012). Both Ungunmerr-Baumann and Atkinson refer to Dadirri ‘as an Indigenous philosophy’. Atkinson says that Dadirri can inform the way in which we ask questions and engage in ethical and respectful behaviour … to help ensure cultural safety’ (Atkinson, 2002:15). The principles and functions of Dadirri, as used by Atkinson, are:
· a knowledge and consideration of community, and the diversity and unique nature that
each individual brings to community
· ways of relating and acting within community
· a non-intrusive observation, or quietly aware watching
· a deep listening and hearing with more than the ears
· reflective non-judgmental consideration of what is being seen and heard; and, having learnt from the listening, a purposeful plan to act, with actions informed by learning, wisdom, and the informed responsibility that comes with knowledge (2002:16).
Although Atkinson when referring to Dadirri uses the term and concept in relation to doing research with Indigenous people, the fundamental concept is very relevant and can be applied to working with Indigenous people.
Ungunmerr-Baumann in her interview says that “in our Aboriginal way, we learnt to listen from our earliest days. We could not live good and useful lives unless we listened. This was the normal way for us to learn - not by asking questions. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting.”
Learning to use mindfulness and apply deep listening can enhance your wellbeing not only on a personal level but can be extremely valuable in a class room or lecture situation and is a very culturally appropriate tool to use with Aboriginal students.
In this module you will be introduced to a guided cultural meditation that will take you on a journey to country (See Appendix One). This meditation will focus on breathing, listening and visualisation.
How to Apply Mindfulness to the Intercultural Space
The intercultural space is a relatively new and emerging concept that is difficult to define. it is placed in the context of higher education teaching and learning in a unit about Aboriginal culture. The intercultural space involves tutors and students from different cultures learning from intercultural leaders, some of whom are Aboriginal Australians, about Aboriginal culture. Tutors and students are encouraged to discuss key learning’s, identify differences and similarities within and between cultures and deepen understanding about barriers and facilitators to engaging with Aboriginal culture.