Christian Mindfulness

On Tuesday afternoon I talked with a group of staff at Woodford House, in Havelock North, about the possibilities of Christian Meditation. There has been a concerted effort by the Department of Education to introduce Mindfulness to New Zealand schools, and some of our Anglican schools have experimented with it. The government's motivation is the well attested success of mindfulness programs in positively impacting the academic, behavioural and social life of schools. Of the various methods used to introduce Mindfulness I have not heard of any which have been entirely successful, and most seem to have foundered early on several intractable problems:

• Training. Mindfulness is simple but not easy. It can be learned in a half hour, but sustaining it in one's own life and teaching it with the integrity which only  comes from committed personal practice is another matter entirely. The training programs are bought by schools so the providers must be seen to be giving their money's worth. Materials are bright and well produced and the training material is well research and cleverly presented. Which is to say, they are often far more complicated than they need to be, and staff balk at the work involved in bringing themselves, and after them, all the rest of their staff up to speed. 

• Timetabling. I recently attended St. Peter's Catholic Primary School in Christchurch, and was mightily impressed by their meditation program. As well as other brief uses of silence in the course of a day, every class has a period of silent meditation after lunch, ranging from 5 to 12 minutes in length, depending on the children's age.  While this works in this particular primary setting, the difficulties of doing something similar in a secondary school would be enormous, when every teacher, insofar as they had a teaching period after lunch, and regardless of their ability to do so, and regardless of the loss of valuable teaching time, would be required to become a teacher of meditation. I know, anecdotally of a few places where it has been tried with (unsurprisingly) little ongoing success.

• Theoretical. Mindfulness is a Buddhist concept, and the ancestry of the various programs offered in schools can, despite the claims of their promoters to the contrary, be easily traced back to their Buddhist roots. I have no particular problem with that, but some parents do. The programs offered invariably stress the secular nature of the Mindfulness they teach, stressing that it is a purely secular, "psychological" and "behavioural" practice, but this raises another problem. Mindfulness divorced from a theoretical or theological base is fatally shallow: just another exercise program. The justification for introducing it into a school is usually a bunch of statistics derived from the study of Mindfulness programs elsewhere, which usually turn out to have solid Buddhist foundations. I'm not aware of any studies of the secular mindfulness actually being taught. 

The Christian Meditation practiced in St. Peter's and in many other Roman Catholic Schools is that taught by the World Community of Christian Meditation headed by Fr. Laurence Freeman. It is grounded solidly in the centuries old tradition of Christian Meditation, is simple to learn and easily taught. It offers all that the secular mindfulness programs do, and does not have the problems outlined above, although timetabling will always be an issue in a secondary school. In a secondary school with regular chapels and/or assemblies though, this problem may be addressable.

I always enjoy visiting Woodford House. With its lovely, curvy old buildings arranging themselves over the hillside around the chapel it is one of the most attractive schools in the country. I'm grateful to the chaplain, Deborah Wilson, for making arrangements and giving me the opportunity to meet and talk with some of the impressive teaching staff. 

Photos: Pictures of arguably the prettiest secondary school campus in the country were taken with my Samsung Galaxy S9+ phone.