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MLP Weekly Groups See Growth – February, 2016

We are excited to see the growth of weekly groups as a way to support you in sharing your growth in mindfulness in person with others. We now have groups in three locations and a new group for our new Mindfulness in Recovery Program.

Those in the Durango, Colorado area can now take part in a group hosted by MLP Certified Teachers Cindy Schmidt and Tecumseh Burnett. A guided meditation is followed by discussion and support for creating your own consistent practice. Bring your questions and insights for manifesting a mindful practice and way of life.

We also excited that our Melbourne cofounder Mark Molony has reconvened the Wisdom on Wednesdays group after a short break. This program supports individuals who have completed the MLP Foundations Course and are looking to continue to develop their practice. The group meets on a fortnightly (2 week) basis.  The group meditates together and shares insights into our individual daily meditation and mindfulness practices. Currently the group is reading B. Alan Wallace’s book “Minding Closely” and using the Mindful Life Community as a foundation for their daily intentional practices.

We are very excited to launch our new Mindfulness in Recovery program!  This has been a vision of our co-founder John Bruna for many years and it has now come to fruition. Drawing upon his 31 years in recovery, experience as a substance abuse counselor, educator, Buddhist monastic, and mindfulness teacher, we have integrated the tools and resources of our mindfulness community with specific meditations and resources for people in recovery. To learn more about the program and the weekly group, see our news article announcing the program or the webpage dedicated to this new offering.

Mindfulness Exercises Improve Kids’ Math Scores

Fourth and fifth graders who did mindfulness exercises had 15% better math scores than their peers

Posted in Time.com by Mandy Oaklander – January 26, 2015

The study authors put 99 4th and 5th grade public school students in British Columbia into one of two groups. One group received four months of the mindfulness program, and the other got four months of a standard “social responsibility” program already used in Canadian public schools.

In the mindfulness classrooms, the program incorporated sense-sharpening exercises like mindful smelling and mindful eating, along with cognitive mindfulness exercises like seeing an issue from another’s point of view. Children did a three-minute meditation three times a day focusing on their breathing. They also acted on their lessons by practicing gratitude and doing kind things for others.

For the four months, researchers analyzed all kinds of in-depth measures, like behavioral assessments, cortisol levels, children’s self-reports of their own wellbeing, reviews from their peers about sociability and the objective academic scores of math grades.

The results were dramatic. “I really did not anticipate that we would have so many positive findings across all the multiple levels we looked at,” says study co-author Kimberly A. Schonert-Reichl, a developmental psychologist at the University of British Columbia. “I was very surprised,” she says—especially considering that the intervention took place at the end of the year, notoriously the worst time for students’ self-control.

 Compared to the kids in the social responsibility program, children with the mindful intervention had 15% better math scores, showed 24% more social behaviors, were 24% less aggressive and perceived themselves as 20% more prosocial. They outperformed their peers in cognitive control, stress levels, emotional control, optimism, empathy, mindfulness and aggression.

The program also may have had an unintended effect—one the researchers didn’t measure, but now want to. “Anecdotally, teachers tell us that the program helped them calm down more—by doing the program and integrating these mindful attention practices and being more aware and thinking more about others, that they actually become less stressed,” Schonert-Reichl says. “That has huge implications, and a further area of research is needed.”

More research is needed, but mindfulness interventions like these are promising. “Doing these kinds of programs in school does not take away from academics,” Schonert-Reichl says. “It adds to a growing research literature that’s showing, actually, these kinds of programs and practices increase academic gains. By adding this on, you not only create more academically capable, successful students, but actually create more caring, less stressed, kind students.”