Take a Couple Deep Breaths

I never thought I’d say this, but part of our Sunday evening routine as a family is to watch American Idol together. Throughout the show, we’re all taking turns making comments and jokes and wiping our eyes. It’s strange how things we find ourselves doing together as a family I’d never do on my own.

In this week’s episode, there were a few participants whose nerves were getting the better of them. “Take a deep breath” was Katy Perry’s coaching. So they took a deep breath.

Taking a couple deep breaths is one way to ground ourselves - stabilizing ourselves on solid ground, feeling our way down to planted feet, remembering that despite the feeling of dizziness and swirling up in our heads, we’re actually always firmly on Earth. In my last post, Get Grounded Before Taking Off, I described the process of checking in, which is also a practice of grounding ourselves.

Most of us probably have some intuitive sense of the value of getting grounded. We have this intuitive sense because we know what it’s like to be dizzy or to misstep or to trip physically. And most of us have an intuitive sense of what it is to be standing solidly on firm ground. Both of these intuitions demonstrate a physiological understanding.

Getting grounded, then, is really just becoming aware of our physiological state and settling down out of the seeming swirl of a stressed or preoccupied mental state. Integrating the physiological and the intellectual in schools, then, can drastically impact students’ long-term health and well-being, the physical, mental, and spiritual kind.

By getting good at getting grounded, we have more time before reacting, more space to heal, and more quiet in which to hear the whispers of our inner wisdom (or God, if you’re a believer).

In that American Idol episode the other night, we saw three different reactions to Katy’s “take a deep breath” suggestion. One singer took the breaths, calmed down, and sang even better - their true voice came through. A second singer took the breaths, didn’t calm down, and sang about the same as they had before. A third singer also couldn’t calm down, but they got more nervous and freaked out in a feedback circle of stress, frustration, and disappointment; they could barely finish their performance.

Developing a practice of getting grounded is a practice in relaxing into our inner wisdom and doing our best.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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Get Grounded Before Taking Off

All schools can expand their focus beyond the intellectual development of students. Doing so, our growing and budding young adults would more fully reach the potential of adulthood as capable and confident agents in their lives, all of us able to nurture our own well-being and enrich the lives of others in the process.

One practical access to doing this in the classroom, in the faculty room, in meetings, and on our own is the practice of checking in. Checking in is a brief, meditative grounding of our awareness right here, right now.

Mostly, we move from one activity to the next in whichever state of mind shows up. Checking in is an opportunity to bring into awareness the sensations, thoughts, and emotions that already make up our present experience. Bringing them into awareness often allows them to settle, and this reconnects us to well-being and our true nature.

Checking in is a way to foster integrity, to get profoundly related to the present moment. Checking in is also an access to balancing our intellect with our physiology.

For the 10 years or so that I participated in a men’s group, we began every meeting with a round of brief check-ins from each participant. When it’s my turn to check in, I close my eyes and observe what I’m experiencing physically, mentally, and emotionally. (I also consider a spiritual checking in, but I’ll save that nebulous term for another day.) I will then share that check-in with the group, who will simply acknowledge that I’ve checked in and then move along to the next participant.

One of the key breakthroughs that men in our group would consistently have within the first few months of joining us is a breakthrough in distinguishing between thoughts (like judgments and interpretations) and feelings (emotions and their sensations in our bodies). The practice of checking in is a straightforward practice that anyone can do, but it’s one of those habits that can lead to a palpable shift in our experience of life.

There are three main areas of focus when we check in: our physical sensations, our thoughts, and our emotions. The diagram below is a graphical representation of this model of our experience of life:

Right now, I am experiencing sensations. Noticing these sensations is the practice of getting present to my physiology. We’re always experiencing sensations, though most of them we don’t notice unless someone asks us to direct our attention to them (how many years of my life have I lived without even noticing that I breathe at all?).

Right now, I am also experiencing thoughts. Observing our thinking is a key practice in meditation because without intending to, we typically identify with our thinking. In other words, how I think of myself is who I am to myself. Observing my thinking leads to a peeling away of my sense of self from the thoughts that I have. We are, in fact, a being who has thoughts, not a being of thought.

Emotion is a blending of Thought and Sensation. Anger, anxiousness, sadness, excitement, joy, and others: our emotions have sensations and thinking that go along with them. They’re a good place to start when we check in, and it’s quite fruitful to identify and distinguish the sensations and thinking associated with our emotions when we feel them. Emotions can start with either a thought or a sensation, but they soon become a self-propagating feedback loop.

A fun question to explore: if the model above encapsulates our experience of the present moment, where is the you that’s doing the experiencing?

Try this 3-minute exercise on your own:

1. Settle yourself in a chair or on your feet. Don’t hold anything in your hands.

2. Look around the space you’re in. Get a sense of where the walls are, where any furniture is, and notice the light and shadows on the walls, ceiling, and floor.

3. Look forward, then close your eyes. Feel the ground or the chair pushing up against your body. Notice how it actually feels, where and how it’s holding you.

4. Feel your clothes on your body.

5. Follow your breath in. Then out. Then in. Then out.

6. Staying aware of any of those sensations that you’re enjoying, now notice your thinking. Where is it? What is it? Where does one thought begin and another end?

7. If you’re with someone else, share what you’ve noticed.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

(Note: I rarely, if ever, have an original thought. I've been introduced to the model above in different forms from different sources, but most recently and succinctly from the work of Rupert Spira.)

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Schools Can Enrich More Than Our Intellects

On the first day of class each year, I would let students know how unnatural I found our physical experience in the classroom. This was at an all-boys school with a strict dress code of a button-down shirt with a tie. Adolescents in the prime of their growth and development, ready to be creative, curious, and active members of a community, almost literally tethered to a chair all day with a tight collar and a tie.

But, I would say, this is what it looks like to get conditioned to our culture. And then we’d go about learning.

Even without the tight collar and tie, it’s easy to see that modern education is heavily intellect-focused. As a teacher, I feel proud when my students master a new concept. Teachers design lessons to scaffold learning, and students build understanding piece by piece.

But our intellect is only one aspect of who we are, and the way our schools are structured, it’s pretty clear that schools support our dominant culture’s valuing of our intellectual development above the other realms of our experience.

I’m not suggesting that our kids’ intellectual development isn’t important. I am, however, suggesting that we should infuse physiological, emotional, and spiritual development into our schooling too.

The STEM or STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) acronym was created within the last 20 years as a reminder of the actual overlap and integration of those subjects in project-based work. It’s a reminder that those subjects aren’t separated in the “real world” as we tend to separate and silo them in school curricula. I have appreciated the reminder that though my subjects can be taught distinctly, they’re actually quite intertwined.

Similarly, the intellectual, physical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of the human experience are currently siloed subjects in school, isolated to their special places on campus if they’re offered at all.

Related to this, I’ve recently been learning about trauma, and there are two ideas about it that have sort of blown my mind. First, we have all experienced trauma; it isn’t limited to extreme experiences such as severe accidents or assault. Second, though trauma has psychological components, trauma is at least as much a physiological phenomenon, so it lives in the body.

By more fully integrating our intellect, physiology, and spirit in school, we can learn to experience more consistently high levels of well-being. Additionally, by learning self-awareness and resiliency, we can better resolve and even prevent trauma.

Thanks for reading ❤️.

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Thanks for joining me on this exploration/reflection! If you'd like to receive blog updates via email twice weekly, be sure to subscribe here.