Each summer St. John’s College hosts a Summer Classics program, a month’s worth of week-long classes, each inspired by a classic text or subject. Over 30 years old, the series is the largest and longest-running of the college’s community programs, and this year the non-degree summer classes—held at the Santa Fe, New Mexico campus or online—run from July 4 to July 29. (The school also hosts a shorter Winter Classics program.) Registration for summer opened February 15 and anyone—not just students of St. John’s College—can apply.  

Think of it like a “learning vacation,” Carolyn Kingston, Director of Community Events and Outreach at the college, told Tricycle, encouraging students to sign up for one or multiple week-long courses. Among the 37 classes this year, 11 are online. The class size—18 students in-person and 12 online—and the teaching style are designed to encourage conversation. It’s “an intense way of unpacking together one of the best texts in the world,” Kingston says. Indeed St. John’s College professors, who are the instructors for the Summer Classics courses, are called tutors, their emphasis on engaged, active learning as opposed to lecture-style instruction. “They’re experts in the art of dialogue,” Kingston says. “Our method of teaching is that nobody is the expert in the room. We’re learning together from the text.” 

In any given year those texts change, and while most of them are extensions of the Western Classics master’s program, some find roots in the Eastern Classics master’s program, which was established in 1994. The beauty of the non-degree seminars is that anyone can join, whether it’s a retiree who wants to dive into a favorite book or a potential master’s student who wants to get to know the school or department. Almost two-thirds of the attendees are returning. Kingston describes a welcoming community of students on campus each summer who get to know and support each other over the course of their studies.  

This year, courses built on Eastern classics include a class on the Bhagavad Gita (in-person, 2–4 p.m. MDT, July 11–15), an introduction to Buddhism (online, noon–2 p.m. EDT / 10 a.m.–Noon MDT, July 4–8), and a Japanese film class focused on three movies by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa (online, 2–4 p.m. MDT, July 11–15). The introduction to Buddhism is called Basic Buddhism 2, but neither Basic Buddhism 1 nor any prior knowledge is a prerequisite. The course poses questions like, “Is there a soul?” and “is there life after death?” Sources include the Sigalovada Sutta, the Kodhana Sutta, the Kalama Sutta, the Mahasudassana Sutta, the Ratthapala Sutta, the Potthapada Sutta, and the Samannaphala Sutta.  

See here for the full list of Summer Classics courses for 2022 and learn more about registration here.

The post St. John’s College Opens Registration for Its Summer Classics Program appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In early 2020, scholar and professor Natalie Gummer planned a roundtable called “Manifestos for Buddhist Studies” for the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion. A couple months later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the roundtable was postponed until the following year. In that time, Gummer began to reflect on her proposed structure and the voices she was leaving out. “I noticed that the criteria I had used to determine who would be on the panel were the same criteria that often gets used in Buddhist studies,” she shared. “I wanted to find ways to broaden the range of perspectives represented.”

Gummer collaborated with fellow scholars Natalie Avalos, Frances Garrett, Ann Gleig, and Sarah Jacoby to brainstorm more inclusive—and exciting—forms of engagement. Out of their conversations, the Collective Buddhist Studies Manifesto was born. The website aims to showcase a multiplicity of visions for the future of the field, and they are currently seeking contributions in a variety of creative formats. Tricycle spoke with Gummer to discuss the origins of the project, the genre of manifesto, and the role of pleasure in academic studies.

What motivated you to create the Collective Buddhist Studies Manifesto website? In planning the original roundtable, my colleagues and I hoped to open up paths outside of the narrow tracks that many feel they’re shunted into when they study Buddhism. We aimed to collectively imagine alternative futures for the field, and in order to do so, we realized we needed to expand the range of voices we were hearing from. In particular, we wanted to elevate the voices of marginalized scholars, contingent faculty, and graduate students, whose perspectives are often devalued. We decided to set up a website and put out a call for submissions so that anyone could submit their manifesto and share their vision for the future of the field.

Can you share a bit about the name? Why “collective,” and why “manifesto”? I selected that name based on a collection of essays I read, Manifestos for History, where several historians articulate their visions for the future of history as a field. I felt like we needed a parallel project in Buddhist studies. There’s a great article in The Atlantic on manifestos that lays out the ten traits of effective public declarations: manifestos exist to challenge and provoke; they are theatrical; they come in many forms; they “mark the beginning of a path to realization.” This article informed our thinking about the genre and the ways it challenges dominant power hierarchies. We see manifestos as provocations for the future. What should we be thinking about? What are the issues that should matter? Manifestos are by nature dramatic, so we encouraged people to put forth their vision and to make it a little extreme.

When we say “collective Buddhist studies,” we’re gesturing to the fact that Buddhist studies should include everybody who considers themselves to be studying Buddhism. There’s no policing about who gets in and who gets out; if you think you’re doing Buddhist studies, you’re doing Buddhist studies. We formulated this as a collective project so that anyone could contribute their perspective. We’re especially interested in ensuring that underrepresented and marginalized scholars have a voice. There are so many people studying Buddhism who exist outside the standard academic track, and it’s so easy for their voices not to be heard. 

You aim to amplify not only marginalized voices but also marginalized media: in the call for submissions, you state that you’re looking for academic prose but also poetry, dance, and spoken word, expanding what we think of as what counts as Buddhist studies. Can you speak about this range of forms? In designing the call for submissions, we were thinking about the creative projects and formats we use in our classrooms. These formats can be so liberating for our students—and for ourselves. But often, such creative formats are off limits for scholarly expression. We hope that opening up the call to different forms of media will encourage different voices to be part of the conversation.

On a broader scale, we’re also hoping that the website will encourage other projects to take form. Any single initiative of this kind is not sufficient. So many people are doing such important work to expand the form that Buddhist studies can take. Frances Garrett has been developing experiential, embodied approaches to religious studies with the Teaching for Student Flourishing project. Natasha Heller is researching how gender intersects with publishing practices within Buddhist studies (in addition to mapping women scholars within Buddhist studies). Ann Gleig and others have formed the Buddhist Studies Complaint Collective.

I believe that there need to be multiple projects of this kind in order to make this work more and more visible so that it can’t be ignored by the already ossified systems within academia. I hope that the Collective Buddhist Studies Manifesto will be one contribution to this larger conversation that makes visible the narrowness and exclusion that are so much part of academic Buddhist studies. 

What are some of the forces of narrowness and exclusion within Buddhist studies right now? There’s a certain philological approach to the study of ancient texts that often gets privileged as “real” Buddhist studies, which, like the field as a whole, is rooted in Orientalist approaches to the tradition. Those who have tended to rise to the top within that particular area (mainly white men) consequently exercise control over what counts as legitimate. Critiques of Orientalism are decades old by now, but they still haven’t been internalized in ways that have truly transformed our methods of study.

There are also ways in which normative identities are reinforced again and again, both in terms of scholarly identities and embodiments, and in terms of assumptions about the identities and embodiments of Buddhists, contemporary and historical. There are a lot of normative assumptions that go uncontested, and when they’re contested, there can be a lot of pushback. Buddhist studies happen in lots of different embodiments and in lots of different kinds of institutions, and we need for those to be recognized as part of the discipline, not as marginal. This is the central question of our project: How do we center the margins? I don’t have the answers to that question, but I’m going to keep asking. That’s one major emphasis of this project: to keep asking this question and to transform the discipline accordingly.

How are you looking to transform the discipline? In gathering these manifestos, we’re really looking for constructive visions for the future. There’s a lot to get angry about in the field, but we want people to channel that frustration toward positive visions of what Buddhist studies should be. We can recognize all of the things that are wrong, but we can also imagine how we can make it better. In my view, the most hard-hitting manifestos hit a balance between those two poles: identifying what needs to change and charting out where we go from here, proposing possible futures that it would be exciting to move toward. 

On that theme of excitement, one of the questions you pose in the call for submissions is, “What would you like to do in Buddhist Studies that you feel you cannot or should not do now?” Can you speak to the role of excitement and pleasure in study? That question came from Natalie Avalos, and it’s such a fabulous question: What would you like to do? That is really the heart of the genre of manifesto—a vision for what we ought to be able to do. If you don’t find pleasure in your work, what are you doing? For me, pleasure in the work that I do is what leads me to insight. It’s not that the philological tools don’t help—they do. But without the pleasure of human connection, what’s the point? Thinking together with students and colleagues and friends allows me to explore how whatever I’m studying opens up to broader human questions.

One of the things that my mentor, Charlie Hallisey, taught me was always to be asking the “So what?” question: Why does this matter? I think pleasure is one of the ways that that question gets answered. It’s not the only way—academic research can matter for the sake of justice, for the sake of critiquing the past and the present, or for many other reasons. There are so many resources within Buddhist studies for addressing current questions and problems. Pleasure can serve as a guide, though certainly anger also helps.

Any hopes for the future of this project? From its inception, this project has been collaborative in nature, and we plan for it to remain that way. It’s open to whoever wants to contribute, and there’s a lot of interest and excitement—about 130 people attended the roundtable at the American Academy of Religion last week, and I had never been to an AAR panel with so many attendees. It does feel like a shift is happening. It’s exciting. I hope that this project will help give that shift capacity, and I hope that people will continue to share their manifestos, knowing that there’s an audience for them.

The post Imagining the Future of Buddhist Studies appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Having been a troubled student myself, I think I’m just very empathetic to students who are having difficult times,” says Bernie Rhie, Chair and Associate Professor of English at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Rhie teaches classes on the conception of the self, Buddhism’s influence on American literature and culture, and Asian American literature, among other subjects, while exploring ways to incorporate meditation into his teaching. Outside of Williams, he leads the weekly Williamstown Meditation Group. Before college, Rhie spent over three years living at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center in Santa Rosa, California. “I went there partly because I was very lost,” he says. “I went through a lot of mental health stuff when I was a teenager. I never managed to graduate from high school.” His time at the Zen center clarified for him that he did want to return to school, where he pursued literary theory. 

Rhie’s Zen training also provided a foundation that sustained him when one of his children had a life-threatening medical emergency and a 20-day hospital stay. After this traumatic time for his family, he reconnected with a holistic approach to teaching and brought together his academic pursuit of literature and his personal background in Zen—a union that has proved urgently appealing to his students. Opening up his current course, “Zen and the Art of American Literature,” to 90 students per semester still didn’t allow him to accommodate everybody interested this year. Tricycle caught up with Rhie to learn more about his approach to teaching and why it is so important for students right now.

Why did you start studying literature?  It was in my literature classes that I could engage in conversations and talk about things that seemed most resonant with what I had been learning on the cushion at the Zen center: really textured explorations of consciousness and human suffering, and also human happiness and joy. That was in the mid-90s, and this was at the height of literary theory and a whole really powerful wave of philosophical thinking that was about the sense of self that we have. Is it real? Is it an illusion? Is it constructed by language? I thought, wow, that really sounds like Buddhism! So I really got into theory as well. 

Eventually you became a professor of English literature. What led you back to Zen and why did you bring these two domains together? I did not try to integrate them at the beginning. When I did the English literature thing, I wanted to go all in and do it on its own terms. In the background my Buddhist practice and experience was informing what I found interesting, but I felt like they were too far apart on the surface. 

But Western theory was still just theory. You could talk all day about the deconstruction of the self, or the critique of a subject, but it would be just at the level of ideas. [Scottish philosopher] David Hume had this very Buddhist-sounding idea of the self as just a bundle of phenomena, but having those ideas is very different from having the experience, or a practice that can lead one to the experience. So in 2015, I decided that I wanted to explore teaching the stuff that actually was driving all this inquiry in the first place, and not trying to simply hint at it. 

What led to that is my older son, who is 19, had a life-threatening medical emergency and spent 20 days in the hospital. He nearly died. I slept with him every night in the hospital and I think it was my Zen practice that sustained me. It was meditation in the waiting room or by his bedside that gave me the ability to make space to hold all the really intense emotions I was going through, without being overwhelmed or destroyed by them. 

That was a really traumatic event, which took months, and really years, for him and the whole family to heal from. During that time, I actually left my job [at Williams College] and taught for two years at a high school because we all needed a change of scenery for the purpose of healing and recovery. Teaching high school kids reconnected me with an element of teaching that I think I had lost sight of a litte: teaching the whole person. Not just teaching minds. I coached. I advised. . . That really changed the way I wanted to approach teaching. When I came back to Williams after those two years away, I said, “I’m just going to try teaching this stuff that I really care about, and teach the whole student, not just teach them cool ideas to train their minds.”

What are you teaching this semester? Because I’m chair of the English department at Williams, I’m not teaching as much as I ordinarily would. I’m only teaching one course this semester. It’s called “Zen and the Art of American Literature.” I couldn’t resist the title, but it’s not just about Zen or American literature, and more Buddhism in American culture. We read things like Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind; [Philip] Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen; Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step; Natalie Goldberg and Norman Fischer on writing as practice; Gary Snyder and Jane Hirshfield… Eventually we end up looking at the places where Buddhism has had an influence more recently, like Black dharma. I’m teaching the anthology, Black and Buddhist, which just came out last year. We’re listening to a podcast Resmaa Menakem recorded with Dan Harris on racial trauma. David Loy’s Ecodharma and the climate crisis is also a really important unit. So it’s ways that practice can speak to American culture, but also to the concerns that students really feel are urgent and live right now. Meditation is a small part of the class—like the first 10 minutes—but it can be a very positive or negative experience for a person who has a lot of stuff going on.

During COVID, I taught a very small seminar of 28 students and we met in groups of seven because I thought connection was the most important thing. But the demand for the class has gone up and up and I had to turn so many students away. I’m teaching 90 students this semester, and I’ll teach another 90 in the spring, and still probably have to turn a number of students away. There’s a lot of hunger for this kind of teaching right now.

Can you talk about your Instagram account @Zen_Prof? When and why did you start it? I taught the 28-person version of the class in the fall [of 2020] and I realized I wanted a way to continue to offer some of what I had been offering in the class not only to the students who would now no longer be there, but also to other students at the college who might want some of that. It was explicitly something within the context of the pandemic. People were struggling, and I thought some of these practices might be of use. I think it struck a chord. I have an addictive personality and have actually deleted three different Instagram accounts over the past 10 years or so. But you have to meet people where they are.

Can you describe what you share on @Zen_Prof? Oh, it’s totally random. I think I just have this faith that what feels important and necessary for me now is probably going to feel that way for someone else. And I just try to just be genuine. At the beginning there were some very basic lessons. There’s actually a lot of really superficial meditation instruction out there. It’s amazing how many students come in thinking that meditation is all about making yourself stop thinking. So I made clear in some early posts that meditation is about finding your relationship to your thoughts, and not necessarily about making them go away. But in terms of recent practices, it’s sharing what feels like it would be a cool thing to do myself.

Why is it important to you to teach college students mindfulness right now? One thing a lot of people have been talking about is what some people call a mental health epidemic among young people, especially college students. I definitely see it on the ground.

Having been a troubled student myself, I think I’m just very empathetic to students who are having difficult times. So I think that’s one motivation for “why now?”

I also think that college admissions, the pressures of getting into college, what it’s like to be in college, the job market, and our desire to control everything—these pressures are a contributing factor. Then there’s the racial reckoning the country is going through and the catastrophe of the climate crisis—existential concerns that students are quite right to have about their futures. All of this is factoring into psychological struggles in classrooms on campuses. 

But I also think that talking about this as a mental health epidemic is too limited. What we neatly categorize as a mental health issue is a much broader crisis—a spiritual crisis or an existential, species crisis. I think it’s something that requires more than just psychological services at a particular campus. Those services are really important, but I think psych services, chaplains offices, and professors all need to play a role in giving students new frameworks and ways of imagining a future—and a present—that seems livable to them. We’re trying to educate people who can lead the world in the future, or just live fulfilling lives in the future. 

We need to educate young people so they can face with resilience and imagination the work necessary to engage in anti-racism, climate activism, and all that stuff. Academic discussions about race have been on college campuses for a while now, and I think one reason I really appreciate having the chance to teach some of this stuff is because we’re having necessarily intense discussions in classrooms about racism, anti-racism, white privilege, and more. They bring up a lot of feelings and that’s natural. But I think that’s where the merely academic approach to these topics doesn’t serve students or our communities well.

What are some of the unique challenges of teaching college students mindfulness and how do you approach them? Teaching about Buddhism always requires a soft touch. In whatever context, at whatever age, people often come to practice because they’re suffering. I think that teaching at a college campus, especially a selective campus like Williams, there’s a lot of pressure, so it’s important to be very gentle about the practice. It’s important to be aware that people are potentially going through very difficult things all the time, and that there may be trauma in the room. A very important resource for me is David Treleaven’s work on trauma-sensitive meditation instruction. I always offer modified forms of mindfulness that are meant to be sensitive to the fact that people may be recovering from trauma, including anchors other than the breath, like using sounds as an anchor. And I’m just really clear with them that it’s up to them how much they want to try. 

See here for a practice on Rhie’s @Zen_Prof Instagram account for using sound as an anchor.

What does your daily practice look like? My original training was very much Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind Soto Zen practice. But one of my fellow students at Sonoma Mountain Zen Center was Ezra Bayda. He became such a close friend and mentor figure. So I’ve been a student of Ezra’s since the earliest days of my practice. Basically, the kind of practice I do is the kind he talks about in his books and the kind that [Zen teacher Charlotte] Joko Beck talks about in Everyday Zen. I’m not super strict or traditional. The essence of the practice is kind of like a Zen version of vipassana: just sitting, open awareness, but also with noting or labeling thoughts. I do a minimum of two 45-minute sittings a day and will maybe fit in a third or fourth in a day if I can. I’m not a good teacher, or a good husband or parent, if I don’t.

♦

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The post Teaching the Whole Student appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What are you attending to at this very moment? What—or who—were you attending to before this? Perhaps more importantly, what was the quality of your attention? Were you fully aware and present, or partially distracted and disengaged?

These are the types of contemplative questions I ask students in my Asian religions course. Contemplative pedagogy incorporates stillness, silence, mindfulness, attention, reflection, and self-inquiry into teaching and learning, helping students build their attention, deepen their levels of introspection, and strengthen their sense of connection. Although some instructors incorporate contemplative practices directly from religious traditions, because I teach at a public university, I’ve designed what I call “analogous activities,” which are similar to religious practices, but secular and relatively simple to perform. 

My students practice social rituals when they’re learning about Confucianism; stillness and sitting in nature when learning about the Daoist practices of “fasting the mind;” social media fasts when learning about Hindu ascetic practices; singing when learning about Sikh devotional hymns; mindfulness when learning about Buddhist meditation; and nonviolent communication when learning about Jainism. They intentionally engage in the analogous activity for several days, journal about how it affects them and their relationships with others, and write a reflection that brings their experience into dialogue with their understanding of the respective tradition. My research has shown that engaging in such activities develops my students’ moral attention because it disrupts their fixation on themselves and heightens their awareness of others. Most students observe that their relationships with other people improve, and they identify digital technologies as impediments to their interpersonal interactions. 

Continuous Partial Attention

Technology allows for constant access to a variety of media through a range of digital devices, and this impacts the way some students manage their attention. They tend toward “continuous partial attention,” a phrase coined by tech writer Linda Stone that describes the process of paying simultaneous attention to numerous sources of information, but on a superficial level. Continuous partial attention is motivated by the desire to continuously connect and be connected in an effort not to miss anything. As Stone says, “It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, anyplace behavior, and it involves an artificial sense of constant crisis.” Continuous partial attention can also impede my students’ ability to perform tasks requiring undivided attention.

This continuous partial attention—and resulting tendency to be less attentive to the people surrounding them—poses considerable obstacles to my students’ capacity for moral attention, or perceiving people, environments, and situations in all of their complexity and particularity. French political thinker, social activist, and essayist Simone Weil called moral attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” In Waiting for God, a collection of essays published after her death, Weil writes, “Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object…Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” Moral attention involves suspending our thoughts so that we can actively receive something or someone else. As philosopher Martha Nussbaum has emphasized, moral attention requires that one be “finely aware and richly responsible.” She writes, “We live amid bewildering complexities. Obtuseness and refusal of vision are our besetting vices. Responsible lucidity can be wrestled from that darkness only by painful vigilant effort, the intense scrutiny of particulars. Our highest and hardest task is to make ourselves people ‘on whom nothing is lost.’” In other words, moral attention requires considerable effort and concentration on the particularity of people and situations—something that continuous partial attention undermines. By disrupting their habitual engagement with digital devices, analogous activities allow my students to develop their capacity for moral attention.

Social Rituals

The social ritual activity instructs students to intentionally perform five social rituals for one week, including opening doors for others or letting them into traffic, saying please and thank you, and looking people in the eyes when they talk to them. Although most social rituals come naturally to students, they have admitted having difficulty and experiencing discomfort when maintaining eye contact with other people because it requires concentration and focus. Reflecting on their experience, however, they report feeling a greater sense of transparency and presence—a feeling that became particularly palpable for students who committed to not using their phones while conversing with others. Several students have admitted that although it was initially difficult to not look at their phones, it got easier. When they provided their full attention to the other person by making eye contact, they were showing respect through their nonverbal behavior. One student identified it as a “generational concern.” “Whether users are scrolling through social media or texting friends, cell phones have a tendency to be an intruder during face-to-face conversation.” Burying her cell phone in her bag, she noted how she found herself engaging in deeper conversation, but also admitted feeling annoyed when the other person checked her phone. She was not alone—dozens of students admitted feeling disappointed when others failed to similarly observe such social rituals.

Students often discuss the adverse impact that digital devices have on their interactions with other people. After performing the “social rituals” one student wrote, “It is easy to assume that by communicating through my phone, I am participating in a community. However, the more direct relationship to the world is to the people physically around me, and I owe them the respect that such friendship deserves.” Some students realized that they previously prioritized those in their online networks rather than people around them. Some went further and identified their phones as obstacles for interpersonal relationships. As one student wrote, “I wasn’t as zoned in on my phone and actually interacted with others more than I normally would.” Another student remarked, “By giving my full attention, I realized that this strengthens relationships and can create greater harmony.” In this way, they brought their experience into dialogue with Confucian notions of humaneness and harmony, and recognized the ethical impact of attention. They identified digital distraction as endemic to those of their generation. “I noticed that most people hold doors open for people or say please and thank you, but not many people really pay attention to their friends when they have a conversation,” another student wrote. “They are usually multitasking by talking to friends and checking social media on their phones.” 

Stillness

The stillness activity challenges my students’ tendency to be busy, productive, and constantly connected. As students learn about Daoist traditions, they engage in non-purposeful action—sitting quietly in nature or otherwise being still—for at least thirty minutes a day for a week. They reflect on their experience, including the impact it had on themselves and the responses they noted from others. Students choose various ways to engage in stillness such as sitting at the beach watching the ocean, sitting on the balconies of their apartment, swinging in a hammock, or sitting and drinking tea. Almost all of the students say they thought it would be an easy practice, but instead they find it incredibly challenging. 

For many students, the experience of solitude is novel: “It was like thirty minutes of just being with myself uninterrupted by anything. I’m alone a lot, but there’s always some sort of device distracting me,” one student wrote after trying this practice. Many noticed that their habitual instinct was to reach for their phone when they were alone. As one student wrote, “I sat there for a solid minute before I automatically reached for my phone. . . I found one of the hardest struggles was to be disconnected from the world of the internet. After this, I have become conscious of the amount of time that I am constantly connected to my phone and to the latest buzzes constantly changing my thinking and what I am doing.” They acknowledge their tendency to disrupt what they are doing in order to check text messages and notifications on their phone, and how their minds resisted not doing anything. As one student remarked, “As millennials, we need to be constantly stimulated by the next entertaining thing—silence and ‘doing nothing’ are boring. . . Doing nothing has proven to do a lot more than worrying and stressing about the minuscule and trivial parts of life.” 

Although they struggle on the first day, most students eventually appreciate the value of stillness and how it gives them a broader perspective on their lives. One student wrote, “My mind was in complete control, and it had my full, undivided attention, which is a very unique experience.” Instead of being partially aware, the student appreciated how stillness allowed for complete and undivided attention.

Social Media Fasting

Students become especially aware of the distractions of digital devices when they engage in a social media fast, during which they avoid logging into social media or browsing the internet. Often students resort to deleting social media apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook from their phones, and even after deleting them they still find themselves reaching for their phones to look for updates. They describe feeling disconnected from their peers because they can’t “check in” to restaurants through Facebook or upload pictures of their meals to Instagram, and they struggle with constant cravings to be informed of what others are doing. Recalling the overwhelming and over-stimulating effects of continuous partial attention, students describe feeling anxious when withdrawing from social media. They remark how novel it is to make “actual jokes and laugh at things that people are saying in front of me” as opposed to scrolling through funny videos on Facebook. They describe the exercise as a process of de- and re-habituation. 

Many students also find it novel that they can decide whether or not to engage with social media. When they reflect on their experience, they often bring it into dialogue with Hindu ascetic ideals of discipline, self-control, and taming the ego. They describe the social media fast as an opportunity to gain back the control that social media had over them.

Many students admit to an “obsessive relationship with social media” and struggling with various types of discomfort and anxiety during the social media fast, especially the “fear of missing out,” known as FOMO, which captures the “artificial sense of constant crisis” that Stone associates with excessive continuous partial attention. Downtime is usually spent checking the latest Instagram pictures, Facebook posts, or Twitter updates, and the social media fast heightens students’ awareness of a dependency on their digital devices. As one student remarked, “I found it especially hard when waiting for class to start because I wasn’t sure what to do and I just felt very awkward and uncomfortable. It amazed me how much [I], as well as recent generations, rely on technology. [We] are constantly glued to our phones and computers instead of actually interacting with people.” 

Another student, who described initially experiencing great FOMO after a social media fast, wrote, “By not being nearly as tied down by my smartphone or laptop all day, I was able to experience reality in entirely different ways, whether it was asking friends in face-to-face communication what social events were going on later that day or using words instead of texts to communicate with people.” The student disciplined his desires, refocused his attention to people around him, and discovered a new way of engaging with the world.

Paying Attention 

It’s clear that the analogous activities encourage the development of moral attention, allowing students to suspend thought and forget themselves, to actively receive others, to care for the particulars of others, and to increase their sensory concentration, all of which constitute crucial elements of moral attention. One student wrote after a social ritual activity, “During the course of this exercise, I was more aware of my surroundings. I was able to be mindful of my actions and how they are perceived by others.” Many students have found that the stillness activity heightened their sense of hearing, which shifted their focus away from themselves and their own thoughts. One student described how she became keenly aware of birds chirping, the wind blowing, and people laughing, and wrote, “This was a little hard for me, only because when you yourself are so quiet, the noises that surround you become extremely loud and noticeable.” Another student wrote, “One can begin to see the world for what it is, rather than overanalyzing and worrying about everything.” 

Another wrote, “I was able to pay attention to little things within the environment like ants crawling on the bench and squirrels running up trees.” Another student wrote, “Watching the raindrops striking the pavement and the wind shaking the trees, I thought of myself as a squirrel or some other animal jumping between the rapidly swaying branches and quickly falling raindrops. I saw other people pass from time to time, and I thought about what lives they may have been living, and what it would be like to be them.” 

Paying attention to the details—the wind, rain, and squirrels—led the student to consider the perspectives and experiences of others. This was echoed in yet another student who wrote, “This practice has made me realize that there are different ways of seeing and reacting to things. It really emphasized, to me, that there are different ways of thinking; intellectual and rational thinking is not always right or the best.” When students allowed their minds to wander more freely, they discovered greater care and concern for others.

In all these ways, the so-called analogous activities prompt students to suspend thought, become receptive, and focus their attention on others. They challenge conventional thinking and, perhaps more importantly, conventional habits tied to digital devices that can impinge on moral attention. 

From a Buddhist perspective, such activities are important because they reveal the true nature of reality. They lay bare the three characteristics of existence: no-self, suffering, and impermanence. When we suspend thoughts that ordinarily lead us to fixate on ourselves, and instead become receptive and attuned to others and our surroundings, we become more sensitive to universal experiences of suffering and change. As Weil writes, “The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing. . . It is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way. This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth. Only he who is capable of attention can do this.” 

♦

This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post How to Hone Moral Attention—and Why It’s So Important   appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Three years ago in May, scholar Isaac Weiner stood inside Wat Buddha Samakidham, a Theravada Buddhist temple in Columbus, Ohio, as its members celebrated Vesak, the holiday commemorating the birth and life of the Buddha. Resident monks and women who had taken monastic bhikkhuni vows for the weekend participated in formal meditation and chanting sessions, while outside, locals gathered for the Southeast Asian festival, where vendors were selling food and merchandise.

Walking around the area as night fell, Weiner began recording the chanting sessions and noises outside. As the festival closed down, men and women who had worked the kiosks all evening chatted and drank beer. The sounds of the monks chanting still echoed faintly in the distance amidst the noises of traffic and the crowd.

“I think it’s a really interesting moment, the kind of overlap of the mundane and the extraordinary, the religious festival and the cultural festival, the commercial and the spiritual,” recalled Weiner, an associate professor of comparative studies at Ohio State University.

That recording was later uploaded to the American Religious Sounds Project, a digital platform and database of religious audio that launched on Wednesday, May 15. The platform, developed by scholars, students, and multimedia staff, provides an intimate look into the vast sonic landscape of religion and focuses in particular on how secular and religious sounds may unexpectedly intersect.

“I think sound is something that goes between public and private spaces . . . across religious communities and raises larger questions for Americans about who we are and where we think religion belongs,” Weiner said.

Co-developed with Amy DeRogatis, a professor of religion and American culture at Michigan State University, and a team of students and staff researchers, the project integrates audio, text, and images centered around the theme of religious sound and space, and how community interactions and partnerships may shape those sounds.

Related: A Diversity of Voices

At the time of its launch, the site featured about 100 audio clips recorded over the past four years, including 11 recordings from local Buddhists. Most clips are between 30 seconds to 3 minutes in length. The site is divided into two sections: a mapping database where users can search for short recorded clips with specific tags (religious tradition, language, type of space, institution, type of sound [silence, laugher, chanting, singing], time [year or day]) as well as a “gallery” with more curated audio-clip collections organized by theme.

Focusing on sound, Weiner and DeRogatis argue, offered a medium to explore questions about religious diversity through the embodied experience of listening, and challenged students to practice listening and conversation skills in an increasingly hypervisual world.

“I was really excited about finding new ways to think about some basic questions in the study of religion with my students, both introductory and advanced, about lived religion. Religion as it’s practiced,” DeRogatis said. “And particularly I was interested in getting an opportunity to think about what we were studying in the classroom by going out into our local community.”

Although many of the recordings evoke particular contexts, places and moments, such as a community pilgrimage to an Islamic center in East Lansing, Michigan, or a Lenten fish fry dinner at a Serbian Orthodox church, many other recorded moments reflect on the intersection of both religious and secular sounds: the voice of a chaplain leading a prayer at a race track in small Ohio town as cars roar in the background; the mingling of voices at interfaith events and political rallies.

“Often we think about religion as something transcendent and special. And that is an aspect of religion. But so much of religion too is the mundane, everyday sociality of it,” Weiner said.

Some recordings also document specific transformations and dramatic events within communities. A recording at an interfaith peace circle in support of the Columbus Karma Thegsum Chöling (KTC) center in Ohio was recorded after its building burned down in an act of arson. Team members recorded moments with the KTC at its old space and followed them as they moved to a new building.

“One of the things that appealed to us about sound was the relationship between sound and space,” Weiner said. “So here we have a community that ends up for various reasons practicing in different spaces and contexts, and we were doing recordings in different spaces and thinking about how religion happens in these different kinds of contexts.”

Silence emerged as an important theme in recorded moments with Buddhists (such as in one clip where practitioners participate in a silent meditation punctuated by the sound of bells), but also in the academic comparison of silent religious practices. Silence might appear during both religious and secular moments (“a moment of silence,” for instance), and more broadly speaking, the concept of silence can spark discussions on inclusion and about why certain religious groups may be more or less visible in American society.

Related: Buddhism’s Postmodern Age

“[There’s] a lot of work happening in digital humanities about silence in the archive and how you read it . . . just because something isn’t there, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, or just because you can’t hear it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” DeRogatis said.

The team hopes to add about ten new recordings every two weeks so that eventually between 300 and 400 recordings are uploaded. The project, which initially received funding from the Humanities Without Walls consortium, received additional funding from the nonprofit Henry Luce Foundation to document more sounds in Missouri, Wisconsin, and Georgia. In the future, the project may also expand with traveling exhibits where communities can make their own recordings.

DeRogatis and Weiner note that central questions that began the project—What does religion in the United States sound like? Where should you go to hear it? How might we understand religious diversity differently if we listen for it?—keep providing new ways to explore religious diversity as the project grows.

“No matter how long we’ve been at this and how many recordings we’ve been doing, we keep coming back to these questions of how we label religious sound,” DeRogatis said. “We’re not really coming to any answer with it. We’re just finding new ways to think about what religious sounds are. That central question continues to really animate what we do and it continues to be a really important and interesting question.”

The Professors’ Picks

Isaac Weiner and Amy DeRogatis have selected their favorite clips from the American Religious Sounds Project. Below is the audio with the professors’ explanations.

Isaac Weiner: We spent a Sunday afternoon at Shadybowl Speedway, a racetrack in Ohio, and walked around with Kermit Wilson, the racetrack chaplain. The clip brings together moments from throughout our day together.

Throughout our conversation, you can hear the constant roar of race cars in the background, and you can almost feel the vibration. Chaplain Wilson talks about why the racetrack is his church and why ministers there rather than in a traditional church, and you can hear the cars the whole time. So you hear him talk about the space while the soundscape evokes it. And you get a sense of movement. The cars are moving as we’re physically walking around and recording. So we, the recordists, are moving  in much the same way that religious communities and their members move. All of that—the space, the conversation, and the movement—comes together nicely in this recording, so it captures a lot of the project.

Amy DeRogatis: In my class at Michigan State University we talked about moments where food, religion, and sound intersect. I had been bringing students to the Sikh Gurdwara in Lansing, Michigan, and one day we decided to record the langar, which is the communal meal served after the worship service.

We asked a community member to talk about why Sikhs always provide meals in between or after the services. The recording is about a minute from a longer interview that was conducted in the worship space after the service. I really love the recording because you can hear the ambient sounds of other people conversing and coming in and out of the worship space as they go downstairs to join the Langar. As the community member explains why he thinks the Langar is central to the practice of being a Sikh, listeners get a vivid sense of being in that space in between the formal service and before the communal meal.

Edited for clarity

The post American Spirituality in Stereo appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A new school opening in Woodstock, NY, this September will offer a primary school education based on the Buddhist understanding of wisdom and compassion. The Middle Way School will be nondenominational and aims for high academic achievement while teaching Buddhist ethical frameworks and contemplative practices. It will begin offering kindergarten and first and second grade classes in the fall and will grow by one grade a year through the twelfth grade.

Made possible by a grant from the nonprofit Khyentse Foundation and guided by the teachings of Bhutanese teacher and filmmaker Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, the Middle Way School intends to build a model for Buddhist education that can be replicated around the world.

Below, Tricycle talks to Middle Way School Executive Director Noa Jones about the school’s approach to education.

What do you think is the benefit of a Buddhist school?
There is currently no formalized education for children within the Buddhist tradition. So, at the very least, we’ll fill that gap. But it’s not just that we’re teaching Buddhism; it’s really about the methodology around the education. We will be working from the perspective of recognizing inherent buddhanature in a child rather than just trying to fill them up with knowledge. There are a lot of things in the dharma that I think could enhance education. That’s what we are exploring.

Could you elaborate on what you mean by recognizing the buddhanature in a child?
I think a lot of education comes from a perspective that the adult knows something and the child doesn’t know something, and it’s the adults job to fill the head of the child with information. Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche’s guidance has been different. When explaining his view to me, he swept his arm across a table, pushing everything off, and said, “That’s what we are trying to get at.” We’re trying to clear away obstructions, so that the child’s natural brilliance will shine through.

But that’s just one element. Buddhism is also a tradition of inquiry, curiosity, and debate. It’s not that you’re supposed to simply accept the Buddha’s teachings. You’re supposed to test them, make them personal, and question the teacher. This concept of debate is really going to run through this educational method, in which we develop curiosity rather than squash it down.

In Catholic schools or yeshiva, there would be separate classes for religious studies and for math and English and so on. Will there be a separate sutra study class at the Middle Way School?
That’s a good question, and we’re still working out when things are going to happen. We’re going to grow by one grade each year. Right now, we have no intention of separating out and having special Buddhist classes with our first class of kindergarteners. For them, the Buddhist philosophy will be completely integrated into their regular education. But moving forward, when they’re 16 years old, they will have dedicated study, kind of like a shedra, or a Buddhist philosophy class. Also, there will be separate sitting practices or contemplative practices.

For science, Buddhist teachings will also be integrated. There will be a way of questioning from the Abhidharma [a highly analytical Buddhist text on philosophy dating back to the 3rd century] that you can bring into science. But that level of detail of the curriculum is still being worked out. We’re creating curriculum development teams for the fourth grade onward, where it really starts to get more academic.

Until they’re eight years old, the education will be play-based; in public school, they stop being play-based after pre-school. Some of the parents are telling us that their five-year-olds are already having exams. We will definitely not be giving exams to five year olds. You can learn so much through play, which is our basic philosophy for the early grades.

Is the play-based approach Buddhist inspired? Or is that just an additional thing?
It’s all inspired. There’s nothing written in Buddhist texts that says children should play until they’re 8, but Rinpoche said, “Play is so important. It’s not just the means, but it’s also the goal”—that they remain playful with how they live their lives. And there are all kinds of studies that back this up, that play supports cognitive and social development.

Why did you locate the school in Woodstock?
Woodstock has such a concentration of different Buddhist communities. Zen Mountain Monastery is here, and the Karmapa’s seat [at the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra temple] and other people from the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism are here. And we have relationships with them. The original plan was to open a school in Bali, but I’m actually finding it much easier to work here. You’d think that in this litigious country that it would be more difficult to open a school, but they’re quite open. Once you start working on a nonformal, nonpublic school, the restrictions really open up. You’re quite free here.

Are there going to be nuns and monks among the teachers, or are you going to have all lay teachers?
In the beginning, we want professional early education teachers. It’s really, really important to us to have people that understand the developing child. And we’ve been lucky to find very strong practitioners who are also teachers.

We will also have Rinpoche and others do remote teaching through Skype or another means. And then we’ll probably have visiting spiritual masters come on a regular basis. We’re not intending to have our classroom instructors teach the dharma. When it gets to that point, we will have khenpos and geshes [monastics trained in the Tibetan Buddhist academic tradition] and roshis teaching the dharma.

What are the main concerns that you’re hearing from parents? It seems like they would be taking a risk sending their children to an experimental school.
It has been overwhelmingly positive. We had 70 people show up at our open house in March, and people are very excited about it. Some people said it’s the answer to their prayers. We have two families who are moving here so that their children can attend the school. Of course, when starting a new school, you have to have a certain tolerance for ambiguity, because I can’t tell you when exactly we’re going to start teaching Madhyamika [a school of Buddhism that emphasizes emptiness], for example. So, parents have to be OK with not knowing every single detail.

There’s a quote from Rinpoche on your website that says “to be a Buddhist is not of utmost importance for Buddhists. There isn’t one stanza in the entire Buddhist world that says, ‘May all become Buddhist.’” Can you unpack that?
The Buddha never said, “Oh, I hope everybody becomes a Buddhist.” And I don’t think most teachers walk around hoping that people will become Buddhists. What Rinpoche is saying is that they’ll realize their own buddhanature.

We want our students to be able to speak articulately about all the traditions of Buddhism, to understand its history, to understand the differences between the different yanas [Buddhist schools], to be able to pronounce things correctly, to know where to go to get information on the dharma—but that doesn’t make you a Buddhist. And we also want them to have some experience and some facility in doing the Buddhist practices, including knowing how to sit—but none of that makes you a Buddhist. So, if they choose to be Buddhists, great; if they choose not to, that’s totally fine.

The core belief of this school is the view of emptiness and the practice of bodhicitta [the wish to awaken for the sake of all beings]. I don’t think you have to be a Buddhist to have a sense of emptiness and then also to have a habit of trying to benefit others.

How important is cultural exchange going to be? Are there going to be more teachers from the Himalayan region or from Asia in general?
The cultural dimension is so incredibly important to this school. We had dancers from Delhi come to our last open house. At our next event, we are going to have Bharatanatyam Indian dance. Again, I can’t say for sure who our teachers are. We’re just going to go with who is the most qualified; we’re not necessarily concerned with where those teachers are from. But we are planning to have Mandarin be one of our languages and possibly Sanskrit. So, naturally we’ll have teachers from other places.

Our plan is to have Friday be a half-day for our teachers, so that they can use Friday afternoon to work on the research component of what we are doing. Meanwhile, we will bring in specialty teachers on Friday afternoon, when we might have an Indian dance class, for example, or some kind of music, which might be Japanese, Indian, or even Native American. We’re going to have a real array. The plan is to rotate through different cultures and different traditions.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Middle Way School will be holding its next open houses on April 28 and May 19.

The post Buddhist Elementary School Forging a New Path appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Alex Tzelnic, a Zen practitioner, is the author of Tricycle’s (Meta)Physical Education series about the lessons he has learned while teaching gym at a Montessori school. You can read more of Tzelnic’s stories here.

Recently in the PE class I teach, we played a game called Frenzy. I took just about every small object at my disposal—dodgeballs, cones, bean bags, and so on—and piled them in the center of the gym. I laid out a circle of hula hoops around the objects and paired two students at each hoop. I explained the objective: “The game will end when all of the objects are in one hoop.” Then I blew the whistle.

What ensued was, well, a frenzy. There was a mad dash for the objects, theft from other hoops, impromptu tug-of-war sessions, and inadvertent collisions. Every so often I repeated the lone directive, the students pausing long enough to roll their eyes at the seeming impossibility of the task. There were far too many objects and far too many hoops for such an outcome to occur, unless of course, they did something crazy, like work together.

Ahh . . .

It is tempting to assume that as we become adults we become more capable of cooperation and less prone to aggressive behavior. Of course, one glimpse at our current political climate, at the school shootings we tolerate like no other country on earth, and at the tone of our gun-control debate, and that belief is quickly dashed. It took my students all of 12 minutes to figure out that they needed to work together. How long will it take us, and how many more children have to die until we do?

I was 14 years old when the Columbine shooting occurred. At the time it seemed like a singular act of unconscionable violence, and like the rest of society, the event stayed with me like a lodged bullet. For much of high school and college, I imagined how a shooting might play out, where I would run, how I would hide or assail the shooter. When it became clear that Columbine wasn’t a singular act but a nightmarishly recurring one, these fantasies only intensified.

I graduated college the year of the Virginia Tech shooting. I became a PE teacher at Cambridge Montessori School the year President Barack Obama was elected. There was a period of relative calm, as far as school shootings go, and then in 2012 a gunman opened fire at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Our school tightened its security policies, engaged in professional development centered around safety, and began to practice lockdown drills. Now, while teaching, I often imagine what would happen if an active shooter came to campus; where I would flee with the kids, the hockey stick I might grab for defense.

In the aftermath of the latest shooting, President Donald Trump suggested that I, too, become armed. Surely, a gun would be a better protection than a hockey stick. So why doesn’t this solution appeal to me?

The answer is that I refuse to support the culture of violence that has allowed America to lead the world in private firearm ownership and mass shootings. The argument is often made that having a gun can prevent the likelihood of violence but even my students could see the irony in this: the correlation between gun ownership and gun violence is so obvious. When a PE game involving dodgeballs becomes too combative, we don’t add more dodgeballs—we take them away. I understand it’s naive to compare a national crisis to a gym game, but it’s not as naive as suggesting that the solution to gun violence in schools is to increase the number of guns in schools. The idea that becoming a “hard target” would make our school safer raises the question: why be a target at all?  

But aside from my disagreements with Trump’s suggestion, I won’t carry a gun because I am a teacher, and my job is to model for my students the prosocial behavior I hope they can learn. The Montessori philosophy is founded on grace, courtesy, and peace. I can already anticipate gun advocates ridiculing this stance and the vulnerability it might engender, both in our students and in our community. To that I would respond that it is a vulnerability I am fiercely proud of. The solution to mass shootings is not to engage in a domestic arms race against potential shooters but to raise a generation that is empathetic, aware, and intolerant of this kind of violence. Vulnerability is an ability—the ability to be open and accepting, the courage to sometimes be hurt by that openness, and the wisdom to express oneself and resolve conflict without resorting to violence. As a teacher attempting to impart that to my students, the last thing I would do is carry a weapon.

When one of my classes gets too wild or loud, we have what I like to call a “Buddha Break.” I blow the whistle, everyone stops what they’re doing and sits in a comfortable position, and then for 20 seconds we have complete silence. Once the 20 seconds are up, I blow the whistle and we carry on, usually in a more mindful manner. During our most recent lockdown drill, I was instructed to have my class crouch in the corner with the lights off and the shades drawn. I told the group it would be like an extended Buddha Break in the dark. When the time came, we got in position by the wall, crouched, and remained silent. We were so quiet that when the facilities director poked his head in the gym to tell us the drill was over, he didn’t realize anyone was in there. Afterward I let the group know how impressed I was with their performance.

I hope the next generation doesn’t have to grow up in fortified schools. I hope that for them, the classroom is not a place where we have to arm ourselves against violence, but instead learn how to coexist without it. America is currently engaged in a deadly game of Frenzy. The game will end when we all agree that guns have no place in schools.

The post Why I Won’t Carry a Gun in School appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In his early 40s, Mark Collin abandoned a successful career building houses in order to resume the study of psychology, which had fascinated him as a young man.

After training to become a therapist, he took a position as a counselor in a rural, impoverished school district in Northern California. Having been away from the classroom for decades, he was shocked and dismayed to see that many children lacked basic social and emotional skills, and that agitation and ache often stood in the way of learning. It was no fault of the hardworking teachers, he realized, but rather a shortcoming of the educational system as a whole.

Jump ahead 23 years. The educational program that Collin developed in collaboration with those young students, called TOOLBOX, has been adopted by more than 180 schools and currently serves over 75,000 children and families, nationally and worldwide. Borrowing from Collin’s background as a carpenter, it employs the metaphor of “inner tools”—for example, the Breathing Tool, the Taking Time Tool, and the Garbage Can Tool. Each tool, according to Collin, offers children a means of tapping into their inherent capacities and natural strengths.

I met Collin at his home in Sonoma County on a sunny spring morning to discuss his work and the broader social and emotional learning movement of which it is a part. Before we sat down to talk in his quiet, book-lined study, he showed me a letter of support for TOOLBOX written by the Dalai Lama. Scanning it quickly, I noticed the phrases “fuller, more rounded education,” “heart as well as the head,” and “happier and more peaceful era.” Collin smiled, tucked the letter into a binder for safekeeping, and the conversation began.

What is social and emotional learning?
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is a worldwide movement that addresses what many people are calling “the missing piece” in education. It’s long been taken for granted that school is about developing the intellect, but now people are realizing there’s this huge emotional and social reality that exists at all times under the surface of our daily affairs. We’re not automatons. Our feelings interact with our thoughts and our behavior, in turn influencing our ability to learn. How are or aren’t emotions integrated into life? How do they influence social dynamics? And what does all of this have to do with raising and educating children? The field of SEL is interested in those kinds of questions.

Do your students practice specific SEL skills?
Absolutely. SEL breaks down into five areas. The first is self-awareness, or self-knowledge—learning to reflect on what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, what you value, and becoming more aware of the stories that are shaping your experience. The second is self-management, which refers to regulating your thoughts, emotions, and behavior in complex interpersonal and intrapersonal situations. The third is social awareness, usually understood as empathy. The fourth is relationship skills, as seen in the ability to form healthy friendships, resolve conflicts, and work in groups. Last, there’s responsible, ethical decision making.

A skill that everyone can benefit from practicing, from cradle to grave, is pausing and taking a moment before acting. This may not sound like an impressive skill when compared to something as notoriously cerebral as calculus, but just watch yourself through the course of a day—in traffic or in conversation with a family member or coworker. I’m talking about the ability to head off at the pass a quick emotional response, the ability to question the complexity of what’s going on both inside and out, and then make a positive decision.

We want kids to be proactive, not reactive, and SEL provides kids the means of getting in touch with their agency, authority, and authorship. What’s going on inside? What am I feeling? What do I need? Asking and answering these questions is a skill. First you becoming aware of the self, then you work outward from there to consider others.

Can you illustrate SEL in action with an anecdote from your work?
I started out as a guidance counselor in a kindergarten classroom where the students had a lot of trouble calming down and focusing. You need to be able to focus in order to learn, so one day I sat down on the carpet with the kids and showed them how to take a deep, conscious breath. By simply teaching them how to breathe, they found a new way to inhabit themselves and the communal space. And on top of that, they really liked it. It became clear to me that 5-year-olds had this capacity—and not just a capacity, but what seemed like a longing, a need, a desire—to regulate themselves by breathing. Then the teacher started breathing with the students. Just like that, right before our eyes, the nature of the class changed.

I can picture a rambunctious kid, taking a breath, calming down.
And not just one kid, but many kids together, consciously breathing as a group, all sharing the same experience. They felt the change in their bodies, somatically, but also in the room, which got a lot calmer and clearer.

What was the classroom like prior to teaching the kids to breathe?
It was chaotic with lots of disruptive behavior—kids flopping around in chairs and squirming under desks, sometimes fighting with one another, sometimes having meltdowns and crying. Things would escalate fast, with one kid’s energy transferring to the next, and soon there was no way to reign it all in, no way to hold their attention and center their minds. We say emotions are an open-loop system, which means your mood isn’t just internally regulated. Our connections with other people also determine our moods, for both better and worse.

There was a lot of anxiety in the room, too. Each student was at a different level in terms of his or her ability to sit in a chair, listen, and participate. Who knows what happened on the bus an hour ago? Who knows what happened at home that morning? Some kids hadn’t eaten a real breakfast. Some had probably been awake most of the night. There was this jaggedness to the scene—some kids prepared to learn, others reeling. The breathing tool smoothed things out.

How is the SEL movement meshing with mainstream education in America today?
Right now, at a national level, SEL programs are considered “nice to have,” not “must have.” Things are changing quite rapidly, though. In some states it’s mandatory that schools incorporate SEL, even if only for a few minutes of the day. It’s becoming part of what we consider a complete education.

On the whole, we’re seeing a huge demand, and that’s because the difficulties children face are widespread. People are using the word “epidemic” with regard to bullying, eating disorders, drug abuse, violence, cliques, isolation, suicide. Not only is academic performance impacted, but entire lives are impacted, and those lives impact other lives. Researchers talk of downstream and upstream costs. How much money gets spent on jails, rehabilitation programs, and the like? If we invest in individuals when they are young and give them the tools they need, society will benefit down the line. The SEL concept is simple and sane.

Look at what happened when 20 children were shot at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012. Around tragedies like that people begin to ask how we’re going to deal with all of this darkness. In SEL circles we use the phrase “whole child.” Not only do kids need to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, they also need to learn how to find their voice, communicate their emotions, work together in groups, resolve conflicts, and strengthen social bonds. The suffering felt by kids, families, and communities is waking people up. It’s grim, but that’s driving the movement.

Can you describe the dominant pedagogy that SEL is up against?
Children need to participate in their learning, as opposed to just eat something the teacher feeds them. We’re all familiar with the regurgitation model, where the teacher lectures, you take notes, and then you spit the content back up in a test, paper, or presentation. There’s a real challenge to that pedagogy these days, and SEL flows right into that challenge by encouraging children to have agency and be responsible for their own education.

Internal locus of control versus external locus of control—that’s another angle on this question. The teacher is the authority, standing up front, commanding the class, acting as the enforcer. From the children’s perspective, that’s an external locus of control. Rules come from the outside, not the inside, and as such they weaken the real responsibility, which is to oneself. With rules, we are policed rather than self-managed.

I’ve heard of strength-based and deficit-based educational models.
Yes, when a kid does something “bad,” we separate the disruptive behavior from the larger picture. He’s an angry boy. He’s pathological. You threw a chair across the room? Go to the principal’s office immediately! The deficit-based system focuses on what’s “broken.” It’s punitive. And it drives the from-schools-to-prisons idea. The boy is deemed “bad,” which sets him on a trajectory toward jail, drug addiction, depression, and so on. Once bad, always bad.

But the boy’s not really “bad,” is he? Of course not. This is a matter of focus and emphasis—through what lens do we want to see this child? Kids have the seeds of self-reflection and self-mastery within them, and the strength-based system turns our attention to these untapped resources.

A part of every child is unbroken, regardless of life circumstances. The TOOLBOX Project can help children access this unbroken part. Rather than a kid who needs to be “fixed,” here’s a kid who needs to be supported. Many educators talk about how the deficit-based system is unsustainable because it deals only at the surface level, while the strength-based system, because it’s internally driven, makes for true growth and transformation.

What is resiliency?
In Buddhist philosophy the first noble truth is that life is suffering. We can probably all agree that there’s a certain degree of suffering, difficulty, whatever word you want to use, in being alive on this planet. The ability to bounce back from difficulty and be made stronger in the process—that would be my definition of resiliency.

Actually, it appears that we’re biologically programmed to bounce back. There’s evidence coming in from various cultures across the globe that children born into high-risk conditions, such as war zones, can grow up to lead successful lives. In the face of massive stress and hardship, kids can still develop into healthy, happy adults. Resiliency theory identifies three factors that need to be present in an environment for this to happen: caring relationships, high expectation messages (such as “I believe in you”), and opportunities to participate and contribute in a meaningful way. Even in what we’d usually consider a hopeless situation, those three factors can tap into a person’s innate resiliency.

I’ve heard you speak of “traumatized communities.” What do you mean?
At a school we’re working in, the principal got a call in the middle of the day, informing her that somebody with an AK-47 was on the roof of a nearby building. Immediately, the entire school went into lockdown. Most people probably associate lockdown with maximum-security prisons. The walls around this particular school are 14 feet tall, topped with barbed wire.  

Some people were shot and killed across the street from the school the night before, and the kids were holding that information, even as the school went into lockdown. Shootings are a part of their culture. They all likely know somebody who has been shot.

In any given classroom, half the students’ parents are in jail, or on probation, or out of work. Drug addiction is heavy. Care is minimal. Racism, violence, poverty, pollution—there are a number of elements that build towards trauma. You could say it’s a question of oxygen. Are these kids getting enough air to breath? Children are like canaries in the coal mine, but in this case the coal mine is the city and country and society they call home. When it gets bad, the kids are the first to drop. 

You’re thinking of a specific school?
Yes, that’s a particular school in the San Francisco Bay Area, but this is happening all over—in Boston, in Montreal, everywhere. And even outside of what I’m calling “traumatized communities” we’re seeing all kinds of issues. In high-end private schools in communities characterized by wealth and privilege, there remains an insidious lack of basic social and emotional skills. Self-injury and bullying and the like occur across the geographic and socio-economic spectrums.

I wonder about connections between various scales of trauma—a kid, a family, a community, a nation, the natural world.
I see all the pieces as interconnected, whether it’s ecological degradation, the discrepancy between rich and poor, or a school shooting in a particular cafeteria in a particular town. I can’t prove it, but I see these connections when I look out at the world.

If you’re able to have an internal locus of control, where you find a quiet place regardless of your circumstances, where you become the calm center surrounded by violence and pain, can that spread out and impact the wider world? Is that a way to deal with these issues of poverty and bigotry and institutional greed and environmental abuse? The influence works its way down, from the large scale to the small scale, but it also can work its way back up, starting with the individual. Once you have that sense of what cultural anthropologist Angeles Arrien would call “being at home,” you’ll never be homeless again—you can always go inside and work with what you find. By no means are you now immune to the pressures around you, but you’re not totally at their mercy either, and maybe once you’re no longer at their mercy, they weaken.

Let me bring it back to the story about the school that went into lockdown. It was lunchtime, so the first grade class was outside in the courtyard, huddled beneath a bench, waiting, wondering if shots were going to be fired. A child—not the teacher—suggested that as a group they take some intentional, deep breaths and go to their quiet, safe, inner place. After this incident, I heard from the principal. In her opinion, it was a less damaging experience for these students because they had these tools. They could support themselves and one another in that moment. They could even support their teacher, in a sense, because she didn’t have to be the only guardian of their well-being.

Does SEL find its way back to parents and the broader community?
Yes, the kids bring it home. Hey mom, your volcano is about to blow. Why not use your Breathing Tool? Here, let me show you how to do it. The kids teach their parents or caregivers. Why? Because they have taken that breath and it felt good. Think of any child excited by a new interest or skill. It could be a trick on the bicycle, or it could be a stress-management tool. Both create a positive feeling, and that positivity wants to be expressed.

Angeles Arrien, whom you mentioned, has said that your work translates the great wisdom traditions into a secular common language for children, their families, and communities.
When I was a kid, I saw there was a lot of hurt in the world, and that some people hurt more than others—so much addiction, abuse, and self-defeating behavior. People would tell me I was just too sensitive, but I knew this was real. What does it mean to be a fulfilled human being, a human being who thrives? This was on my mind at an early age.

So I read, then read more. Later, studying transpersonal psychology, I was exposed to texts from various traditions—Tibetan, Vipassana, Hindu, Sufi, Celtic, Joseph Campbell’s work on the Arthurian legends, Carl Jung’s work, the Tao Te Ching. I’m not a scholar, but I’ve studied enough of the great writings to see the patterns of how cultures deal with the question of suffering. It’s the stuff we’ve been talking about. Self-awareness. Concrete practices. The breath is about as universal as it gets. So all of that study was with me when I landed in the classroom and sat down with the kids on the carpet.

But you didn’t set out with the intention of introducing the wisdom traditions into the classroom, right?
No, my intention wasn’t to introduce the tenets of the world’s wisdom traditions to kindergartners, nor was it to reform schools. I was transitioning from a career in carpentry to a career in therapy, so I started working as a counselor. There was no such thing as SEL back then.

The first school I worked in was dysfunctional—kids acting out, the school board and teachers always fighting. I invested my energy in the handful of kids who were getting kicked out of class, and it didn’t take long to realize that they were great people.

I was in Jungian analysis at the time—you have to be in therapy to become a therapist—and I had a series of dreams. There were these repeating images of a wellspring, an upward surge of energy from a hidden source. I understood that something powerful was happening. Though it made no financial sense to stay at the second school I worked in, I ended up staying for 10 years. Over that entire decade, I never had a plan. I had one tool, then two tools, then three, then finally ended with what is now simply called the 12 TOOLS of TOOLBOX. The students and I developed them together. My intention was only to help these kids hurt less, to tap into the health and well-being that I could sense was inside of them all, waiting to be released.

You’ve conducted follow-up interviews with some of those original students.
We’ve done longitudinal, qualitative studies to look at how early exposure to The TOOLBOX Project impacts a person’s life after school. One fellow said that if it weren’t for his tools, he’d surely be in the penitentiary—nine years had passed, and he was still using his tools daily.

Recently, I was preparing to give a talk, and an old student of mine called up asking if she could come along and share her story. She spoke about the multi-generational aspect. Her brother had ADHD, her mother had an anger problem, and as a family they used the tools together. Now she was using them with her husband and her own kids.

Where does the sacred fit into your work?
Honestly, it doesn’t. You could say there’s something sacred about kindergartners in a room together, breathing and learning that they have resources within themselves, and I probably wouldn’t put up a fight. Monks all breathe together in monasteries, and maybe they call that practice sacred, too. For our purposes, though, why take it there? Everybody can agree that we need tools to help us be happy and healthy. That language isn’t divisive, so that’s what we use. Everything else—“sacredness,” “spirituality,” and “meditation”—gets left at the door. TOOLBOX is a cross-cultural, secular language and set of strategies or practices that are simply reflective of the wisdom traditions.

Religious language frequently causes rifts. There’s a branch of the SEL movement that draws on the Buddhist concept of mindfulness, and while much of that work is really great, it’s a drawback, I think, that there are associations to organized religion. People’s minds go to robes and incense. The TOOLBOX Project is neutral. It’s not robes and incense. It’s not God. It’s not even psychology. Rather, it’s carpentry. It’s using simple tools to build the house of the self and the neighborhood of the classroom.

Finding the right language, the right metaphors, is important. Come to think of it, I don’t even use the words “respect” or “cooperation” in the curriculum. It’s all about respect and cooperation, but I don’t say it outright. 

Why not?
Those words send the wrong message. When a teacher says, “You need to respect that person and cooperate,” it goes to the mental realm, not the realm of experience—the memory of what it once felt like to be treated respectfully. Plus, the kids see a world around them where people aren’t practicing what they preach. At 4 years old they’re already noticing the hypocrisy of the world. I think of the tools as ways to heal that hypocrisy. There’s no hypocrisy in offering a person a practice and letting them decide if it works for them or not.

I want to go back to the sacred for a second. It is, of course, a vital subject, and it does underlie this entire discussion. Algebra is important, but algebra for what purpose? Not only do we need to learn mathematics and sciences, we need to ask ourselves why? To make money? To build bigger bombs and destroy ourselves? Or to understand biological systems and beauty, the miracle of the earth, and to preserve that miracle for many generations to come, seven generations or longer? Astronauts have gone to the moon, looked back at the little blue planet floating in the big black void, and been struck by the sacred. It’s the miracle of life itself, and the interdependence of all things, and our gratitude and appreciation for a place in the mix. That’s the sacred. Religion is a different subject.

I heard it said once that the sacred is an experience, not an idea. I think TOOLBOX helps children, families, and communities experience the sacred.

[This story was first published in 2016.]

The post Is Anything Sacred About A Classroom of Kindergartners Breathing Together? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

(Meta)Physical Education is a series about the lessons that Alex Tzelnic, a Zen practitioner, has learned while teaching gym at a Montessori school. You can read more of Tzelnic’s stories here. 

After finishing my yearly spiel about rules this morning—the one in which I talk about participation and commitment, about how the work that we do in gym is similar to the work that we do in the classroom, and that even though we may not always like it, completing this work will challenge us, and make us better athletes, teammates, and disciples of Michelle Obama—Amanda, a feisty third grader, remarked, “Great speech, Alex.”

I didn’t want to laugh. Laughing would indicate to her classmates that undermining your teacher with a well-timed sarcastic comment is acceptable behavior. But in the battle between laughing and being teacherly, laughter always seems to win. When a student pokes a needle into the inflated balloon of your own gravitas, it’s hard to remain serious.

As a teacher I’m always dancing on the edge between serious and silly, order and chaos, especially in PE, where chaos within limits is the name of the game. It is my job to maintain a safe and structured environment while also allowing my students to explore their athletic potential and figure out what they are capable of. This kind of exploration frequently involves flying projectiles, so my goals aren’t always compatible.

Much of the same dynamic exists within the walls of a monastery. There are teachers and there are students, who, at the instruction of their teacher, spend their time staring at walls, washing dishes, cleaning floors, and figuring out what they are capable of (thankfully, with fewer flying projectiles). The teacher walks into the room and everyone straightens, notices in that moment how their posture is, their minds returning to the room from various flights of fancy. We imbue the teacher with special power, whether he or she actually possesses it or not, because we want to believe that there is someone out there with authority, with special power, who can tell us how to be; who can help us make sense of the chaos inherent in being human.

Aside from my whistle (and perhaps my beard, which my students seem particularly awed by), I have no special power. When I first began to teach at Cambridge Montessori School eight years ago, I was terrified that the students would mutiny. Couldn’t they tell that should they decide to play dodgeball rather than tag, or spend the whole class racing around the gym on scooters, there was no real power I possessed to stop them? What could I do, scream “Help!” down the hallway and hope the librarian would come running to the rescue?

One of the first things that I learned, however, was that the students seemed more comfortable when I assumed the role they expected of me. During chaotic moments, when I blew the whistle and asked for attention, the students listened. When someone got hurt, as inevitably happens when flying projectiles return to orbit, the students quickly brought me over to the injured party. When I walked out into the hallway to greet them before gym, they straightened.

It has taken me years to recognize the responsibility that comes with this trust. Early on, when I realized, with some surprise, that the students liked me, I was too eager to be their friend, to sacrifice my authority for the boost this relationship gave to my ego. Now, I know that though our interactions can be full of joy, and though they often treat me like a human jungle gym, there is a more important process going on, one that will hopefully result in stronger bodies and sharper minds and allow me, when need be, to facilitate this growth.

But I’ve also come to recognize that there is a thin line between exercising authority and misusing power. One of the most common mistakes beginning teachers make (and it is a lesson I learned the hard way) is to fight fire with fire. Chaos is distressing and the tendency is to bring about order as fast as possible, by whatever means necessary. The trick, of course, is to be at ease with unease. Once upon a time I would try and wrest control with ear-piercing whistle blasts. Now I find myself twirling my whistle and glancing at the wall clock as the class begins to take notice and sit up straight. In these moments, part of me can’t believe it’s working and the other part of me can’t believe I’m not still the kid on the bench causing the ruckus. But, as Shunryu Suzuki said, “The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in a wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him.” I have a spirited flock and so I try and provide a spacious meadow.

When I went through my yearly spiel about rules with another class, I asked them to come up with some rules of their own in small groups. As we went around the circle sharing their ideas—“Treat others as you want to be treated”; “Don’t die”; “Be hippies about everything”—one group came up with a particularly interesting rule: “Worship Alex.” I hesitated to write it down. It would only serve to inflate the balloon of my own gravitas. And yet it also indicated the role I’ve been cast in by my students, and it’s a role I am all too happy to play. I had to laugh.

[This story was first published in 2015.]

The post (Meta)Physical Education appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

(Meta)Physical Education is a series about the lessons that Alex Tzelnic, a Zen practitioner, has learned while teaching gym at a Montessori school. You can read more of Tzelnic’s stories here.

I joined the Jade Room for morning meditation on the last day of school before summer vacation.

The Jade Room is a classroom of fourth, fifth, and sixth graders at Cambridge Montessori School. Three years ago, a former Jade room teacher responded to a particularly “spirited” (educator code for “rambunctious”) class by instituting daily morning meditation sessions. The class starts the school year by sitting for 30 seconds, and work their way up to a full three minutes by the end of the school year.  

The attendance taker turned off the lights, and we arranged ourselves on the floor in a circle. Mary, the Jade Room teacher, asked everyone to sit in a comfortable upright position. Our first intention for the day was to close our eyes and keep them closed. Mary rang a chime and instructed us to check in with each zone in the body for relaxation and stillness. As Mary took us through a body scan, my phone buzzed in my pocket, and I prayed to Buddha that my neighbors couldn’t hear it. I broke my first intention, peeking to make sure the sound went unnoticed. (The coast was clear.)

The second intention of the day was to breathe deeply with the goal of centering ourselves. Mary struck the chime again, and instructed us to go through breath cycles at our own pace. I noticed a few voices outside in the hallway, but inside, the classroom was quiet. After two minutes, Mary rang the chime a third time, indicating that 30 seconds remained. Then she closed the round by ringing the chime three times in succession, asking us to inhale and then exhale deeply.

“When you’re ready, bring your awareness back to our classroom,” she said. The lights were turned on, and then Mary mentioned that I had some questions for the group and handed the class over to me.

Related: Does Mindfulness Belong in Public Schools? 

I began by explaining a little bit about my personal history with practice. Then I fired away. “So,” I said, “You guys have been doing this for the whole year. Do you think it has helped you in any way?”

The class was quiet at first. Then a brave fourth grader raised his hand. “If we have too much energy it helps calm me down and get us ready for the day.”

A sixth grade boy piped up: “It also helps us concentrate on what we need to do and helps our mindset become more about our work instead of about talking to our friends.”

“I see,” I said. “Do you know where meditation came from?”

“It came from monks and Buddhism and other religions that believe in peace and peacefulness,” answered a boy who grew up in a Tibetan Buddhist household.

This answer seemed comprehensive enough for all. It was followed by crickets.

“OK,” I said. “Listen, you guys can be completely honest in answering these questions. There is no right or wrong answer. If you think it is a complete waste of time you can say so.” And the floodgates opened.

“Sometimes I think it’s a complete waste of time, and I want to get on with the day, but many times it helps me calm myself,” said a fifth grader.

Another fifth grader: “Sometimes I come in over-energized and it helps.”

A sixth grader: “It helps if I have actual energy, but if I come in tired it makes me want to go to sleep.”

A sixth grader: “I don’t think it works in here because people breathe too loudly.”

A fifth grader: “If I had a bad morning, if I didn’t sleep enough, it helps bring me down.”

A fourth grader: “I do feel like it’s a little bit of a waste of time. We could do it individually if we needed to.”

A fifth grader: “I just like closing my eyes and taking deep breaths. Sometimes it does help me get ready for the day.”

A sixth grader: “We learned when studying the respiratory system that exhaling takes longer than inhaling.”

Another sixth grader: “If you hurt your finger or any part of your body, not making faces and taking deep breaths helps calm your mind set.”

“Do you guys think you will keep meditating after you leave the Jade Room?” I asked.

“I do martial arts and before we start we do meditation or deep breathing.”

“Probably not nearly as regularly. Maybe sometimes.”

“Maybe before big events, like gymnastics.”

“If I’m completely nervous or stressed out about something.”

“Before I have to take a test.”

“Hmm,” I said. “So it sounds like something you might be able to use when you need to. All right, last question: what is . . . enlightenment?”

“It’s when you’ve understood what life is and you have a sense of how everything is gonna be and you attain enlightenment by having that wisdom,” said the Tibetan Buddhist.

Once again, this answer was comprehensive enough for all.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks guys.”

I left the room and began to reflect on our morning meditation session. When I started teaching at Cambridge Montessori School nine years ago, most of the kids in the Jade Room were crawling. At that time, meditating in a classroom might have seemed like a fringe idea employed by a few rogue teachers. Now, as mindfulness becomes increasingly mainstream, the idea isn’t so wild. Taking time each day to be practice being in the moment is now more familiar for my students than it is foreign.

And I found sitting with the Jade Room was a refreshing break from my own practice, the 30-minute rounds that I often take too seriously. It was a reminder that practice can come in a variety of containers, and can be accessible to all ages. Unless, of course, people are breathing too loudly.

Related: The Value of Mindfulness in the Classroom

The post Little Buddhas in the Classroom appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.