RAISING CONSCIOUS KIDS
which should improve this faculty would be the
education par excellence.”
Rather than simply training our children’s minds
to absorb and regurgitate facts so that they can do
well on standardized tests, mindfulness has the potential to promote other valuable cognitive skills,
such as creative thinking, perspective-taking, and
innovative problem solving. These skills are critical to our collective capability for addressing the
challenging problems we face today.
Practicing mindful awareness also supports the
social and emotional dimensions of development
by promoting an ethos of caring and compassion.
Furthermore, it provides us with the tools to become more aware of our emotional experiences
and to better regulate our emotions, skills that are
critical to building successful social relationships
with others.
Mindful Listening
An important dimension of care involves the way
we listen. In order to respond with care, we need to
be attentive, listen with an open mind, and be receptive to our students and their families so we can
understand and empathize with their experience
and recognize their needs. This involves bringing
mindful awareness to the act of listening. The listening process helps us attune to another.
As we listen, we gather our full attention and notice
both the internal and external dimensions of our
experience. We notice the sound of the other person’s voice—the tone, the volume, and so forth. We
notice the other’s facial expressions, and we listen
to her or his words without automatically judging
them and reacting to them. At the same time we
notice our internal experience—our thoughts and
feelings—without judgment.
We can practice mindful listening throughout the
day. We can do simple things, such as taking a brief
moment to give a student our full attention. We
can get down to her or his level and make eye contact when the student is speaking. This communicates that we care about our students and that
what they have to say is important. When we give
our students our full, openhearted, nonjudgmen-
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tal attention, we are more likely to hear the needs
they are expressing, rather than unconsciously imposing our own ideas (or the institution’s ideas) of
what the student should need.
I used to assume that caring for others required
solving their problems and fixing things for them.
However, this tendency disconnected me from
the present moment. Rather than truly listening
and giving the other person my full attention, my
thoughts would wander to the cause of their problem and how to fix it. I also noticed that this tendency to figure out and fix others’ problems arose
from my deep discomfort with simply being with a
person who was suffering. Being deeply and mindfully listened to is an incredibly powerful experience and is often all that another requires.
When I invited Derek to speak with me during recess, I focused my intention on listening to him
mindfully. When Derek told me that his parents
were getting a divorce, I noticed the sadness in his