It's all in the mindfulness

Mindfulness can help young people – and their parents – live more caring, peaceful and happy lives, writes SYLVIA THOMPSON

NEXT TUESDAY in Dublin Castle, a group of health professionals, teachers, parents and young people will come together to talk about and listen to how the practice of mindfulness (yoga, meditation, body scans and other observing skills) can help young people live more caring, peaceful and happy lives.

The Art of Being Still: Mindfulness and Young Peopleis the second annual conference organised by the Sanctuary, a meditation centre in Dublin founded by Sister Stanislaus Kennedy in 1998.

Niamh Bruce and Bro Richard Hendrick, who work with young people on the Sanctuary's The Art of Stillness in the Classroom, The Warrior Journeyand The Wisdom Journey,will speak at the conference. So too will Susan Bögels, professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Amsterdam.

Bögels’ work teaching mindfulness to young people with autism spectrum disorders and attention deficit hyper-activity disorder (ADHD) will be of interest to many parents and teachers struggling to help these children in this country.

“We started this work over 10 years ago because we didn’t have effective psychological treatments for ADHD. There are highly effective medicines for ADHD, but many parents don’t want their children to take these medicines and many children aren’t compliant with medication either,” explains Bögels.

Along with her team of mindfulness teachers, Bögels teaches the practices of mindfulness to groups of teenagers and eight to 12 year olds and their parents.

“We started with adolescents for whom other treatments didn’t work and we ran mindful parenting groups for parents too,” she says.

“In the beginning, the parents found it strange – saying things like, ‘We don’t have a problem, it’s our child who has the problem’.

“But it can be very stressful dealing with these children and parenting skills can collapse under stress, which results in parents shouting at or even hitting their children.”

The mindfulness teachers explained to the parents that by taking part themselves, they could help their children generalise the skills learned on the course, which could also help their own parenting and life skills.

“Young people with ADHD are a group of clients who usually drop out of courses, but we had almost zero level of people dropping out. They loved the course,” says Bögels.

“We also taught them how to guide each other in yoga and breathing meditations, and sometimes we brought the parents and young people together for meditation. Overall, we found that the parents became less reactive to their children,” she says.

“We found that it has helped them [the children] to become more aware of what attention is and where it goes. Their concentration levels improved and hyperactivity decreased,” explains Bögels. “It also helped parents – and particularly parents with symptoms of ADHD themselves – to become more accepting of their child, less negative and less judgmental.”

Since the publication of their studies, the UvA treatment centre in Amsterdam has received requests to teach this mindfulness programme to teachers in the Netherlands and other parts of the world.

Richard Burnett, teacher and housemaster at Tonbridge School in England, is another speaker at next week’s conference. He is a co-founder of the Mindfulness in the Schools project, a non-profit organisation aiming to encourage, support and research the teaching of secular mindfulness in schools throughout the UK. Tonbridge was one of the first schools in the UK to include mindfulness in its curriculum for 13 to 14 year olds.

Tony Bates, the founder of youth mental health organisation, Headstrong, would like to see mindfulness taught in schools in Ireland. “I’d like to see it introduced as the fourth R, an R for reflection,” he says.

“Mindfulness teaches you that whatever point you are at, you are whole and fine and touching into that once or twice a day helps young people be more comfortable in their own skins.”

Sr Stanislaus Kennedy views mindfulness as a tool that could help young people deal with the problems facing them. “We want to bring mindfulness to ordinary children and use it as a preventative measure,” she says.

The Art of Being Still: Mindfulness and Young Peopleon May 24th is booked out. The Sanctuary will run courses on The Art of Stillnessin the Classroom on June 13th-17th and July 4th-8th. Sr Stan will hold a day on cultivating compassion and mindfulness on Sunday, May 29th, in the Sanctuary, Stanhope Street, Dublin 7. Tel: 01-6705419, enquiries@sanctuary.ie