This week I have felt exhausted, and this has only been
invigorated by feelings of guilt that I am taking this exhaustion out on my
students. I can feel that I am not patient with them this week. I am not
handling the classroom with the grace I am so proud of, but with tension, and
frustration.
Something about the program has to change, and it is the
daycare center quality that it has become which makes learning impossible due
to age ranges and learning abilities. This is to be attended to in the months
to come.
But, today, I was listening to Richard Davidson’s interview
on Being the Podcast. Davidson is someone I have had my ears tuned to for
years. I referenced him in my neurobiology final research paper on the
relationship between cognition and meditation, I have read all of his studies,
and next in line in my reading list is a book by Kabat-Zinn who has been his
partner in crime in past studies. He is a professor at the Univerisity of
Wisconsin at Madison, and , naturally, it would be a dream to study under him.
I could write for days about his interview, but, in brief
they focused on the plasticity of the brain, and how meditation can retrain the
brain, and therefore how you think and feel. He focuses on this in children in a
sort of “after school program” he designed.
There are two parts to his program, Mindfulness and
Compassion. I couldn’t help but think that focusing on these two themes would
be extremely helpful in the disorderly classrooms of South America. We will see
how I can work mindfulness and compassion into the week of self exploration,
which is the final week of the program and takes place in two weeks.
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