School replaces detention with meditation

Category : Asanas (Postures), General advice, Philosophy 14th November 2016

Inside Yoga 183

A school in Baltimore has replaced detention with meditation and yoga as a way of solving the school’s problems such as pupil violence and behaviour issues.

Patterson High School principal Vance Benton says in a Guardian article, that this programme is intended to help students cope with the prevalence of death, violence, and turmoil in their lives. The school serves students living in tough neighbourhoods, in a city that is set to reach 300 murders and 1,000 nonfatal shootings by the end of the year.

Some of the students are also immigrants whose families escaped violence in Central America. Benton compared what his students go through on a daily basis to the experiences of soldiers serving in a war.

After the meditation programme was introduced the school principle says the number of disciplinary issues was halved.

“Whenever there is a child who is acting up or not focused, getting into a fight, the teacher can refer this child to the Mindful Moment room. They sit down with our staff, we have about 15 minutes with them, they do some active listening to figure out what it is the kids are complaining about, whatever is going on.

“They’ll lead them through some breathing exercise, meditation, give them some tea, send them back to the class,” said Andres Gonzalez, one of the founders of Holistic Life.

The Guardian report says that it was a risky proposition, bringing yoga and meditation into an inner-city school and taking up instruction time in core subjects, such as reading, in which many of his students struggled. But Benton felt he did not have a choice: they couldn’t focus on reading if they couldn’t deal with their trauma.

“When this opportunity was brought to me, I knew we had to do something that was not ordinary because we have a situation and we have issues that are not ordinary,” Benton said.

The meditation programme is run by the Holistic Life Foundation, which was founded in 2001 by brothers Atman and Ali Smith with Gonzalez after they met on the University of Maryland party scene. The organisation now runs about 20 programmes in schools; and like the students most of its staff is mostly African American or Latino.

“If you look at the founders and our staff, we don’t look like your ordinary everyday yoga instructors,” said Gonzalez. “There are four or five of us on our staff with some dreads; most of us are wearing a superhero T-shirt or a comic book T-shirt or a Star Wars T-shirt.

“We were pretty wild guys, but it got to where the end of the night, a few drinks in you and you’re talking about life and philosophising about the meaning of life and what’s the point of us being here and why are we here.”

Ali and Atman, who were raised as what Gonzalez calls “hood hippies”, grew up with a meditation practice but they had moved away from it until one of them spotted a book on the subject at their godfather’s house. They got thinking and then in 2002, they started their first school program and have since been able to hire some of the original students to work as instructors in the program.
Some of these students end up spending a lot of time in the Mindful Moment room with the instructors, who are available throughout the day to help students who are dealing with emotional issues, distractions or trauma.

To read more see the Guardian story at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/06/baltimore-school-students-meditation-patterson-high

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