Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge.. Today my guest is Dr. Christopher Willard. Chris is a licensed psychologist in private practice, focusing on mindfulness, anxiety, and learning issues. In addition, he trains teachers, therapists, and medical professionals in mindfulness practice through the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy, as well as lecturing at Lesley University and Harvard Medical School. With Sounds True, Chris Willard is the author of the new book and an audio series called Growing Up Mindful: Essential Practices to Help Children, Teens, and Families Find Balance, Calm, and Resilience.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Chris and I talked about the inevitable pain and struggles of being a kid, and how mindfulness practice can help transform pain and suffering into compassion. We talked about introducing kids to mindfulness, different ages and stages of development, how to grow up mindfully with technology and social media, and how challenging it can be for parents to know where to set the limits. Finally, we talked about mindfulness as a public health intervention, and Chris’s vision of the future of mindfulness in schools. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Christopher Willard:
To begin, Chris, how did teaching mindfulness to children and working with teens and families become your focus?
Christopher Willard: It was a bit of an unexpected path, to be perfectly honest. I had been a teacher for a couple years after undergrad, and felt very unsuccessful at that. When I went back to graduate school, I kind of stumbled into working with kids, and I’d had a mindfulness practice for about 10 years at that point. I was trying to think, “Is there a way to start bringing this into these kids’ lives, to build resilience and give them some skills?” Also, some of it had come from my own experience. I hadn’t ever formally learned mindfulness as a kid, but I have memories of looking up at the starry sky, or watching clouds in the sky, or that kind of thing—just listening to the sounds of the waves in the ocean. So I had kind of experienced mindfulness as a kid, but without the word “mindfulness.”
I had some ups and downs as I got to be an older teenager and college student, and that’s when I really first did discover mindfulness by the name “mindfulness,” when I was on a retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh and found that very transformative. At that point, I was thinking, “Man, I wish I’d had some of these more formal practices when I’d been a little bit younger—my path might have been a little bit more clear, or there wouldn’t have been quite so much struggle in a couple of those years along the way.” Part of it was stumbling into working with kids, and then also wanting to give back and offer young people some of what I didn’t quite have, because I had seen pretty immediately how powerful the practices were.
TS: You know, interestingly, in your introduction to Growing Up Mindful, you write that one of the greatest gifts of mindfulness is that it transforms—and this is a quote—“It transforms life’s inevitable pain into wisdom and compassion.” I thought that was such a beautiful way to talk about mindfulness and its potential in our life. Also, that’s not necessarily the way people talk about it all the time—that’s an unusual twist. Can you talk a little bit about how you feel that mindfulness, and especially introducing mindfulness to kids, can help as a tool to work with pain and suffering?
CW: Well, to me, life is stressful. [Laughs.] Other folks might say, “Life is suffering,” and that most of those are pretty inevitable. Pain in life is inevitable; it doesn’t meant that everyone goes through a trauma, or what we think of as a huge trauma, but it does mean that young kids will get their hearts broken, will skin their knees, will experience life challenges. There are different ways that we can respond to stresses in life. We can watch our hearts and our minds close to life and start to shut ourselves down, we can respond with anger, we can respond with giving up and depression, we can respond with avoidance—or we can respond with something else. We can respond with showing up. We can respond with befriending life, so we can—and to me, I think of that as we can respond with mindfulness, we can respond with compassion.
In that way, when we really do show up for life—when we’re fully present for life—those painful experiences become opportunities for growth, opportunities to develop more wisdom, and also opportunities to develop more compassion for other beings as well as compassion for ourselves in that process. That to me—mindfulness can be this kind of—and when I say, “mindfulness,” I mean mindfulness, I mean compassion, I mean contemplative practices, and practices out of the wisdom traditions as a kind of crucible that can transform that into more wisdom, into more compassion in the world and in how we approach the world, how we approach others.
TS: So I’m thinking of situations that parents have to deal with no matter what—that their kids will present that are painful. So for example—and I don’t have kids, but this is just classic from even being an aunt and doing my babysitting with nephews and nieces. Something in their body hurt—they twisted their ankle, a little finger’s bleeding. Here the kid comes crying. What can I do in that moment? This is just life’s inevitable pain, here it is. How can a parent use mindfulness and help a child be mindful in that kind of moment?
CW: In that moment, we can be fully present for that pain and share that pain with them. We can’t take that pain away, but we can kind of feel it with them. Compassion—feeling the feelings together. We can sit down next to them, breathe with them, talk them through it, ask them about their experience, ask them what happened, and then also offer a hug, offer a band-aid, offer whatever it seems that they might need in that moment. But that only comes when we’re able to be present—when we as the adults are able to be mindful in that moment.
It can also potentially mean, here’s how to breathe through this pain—whether it’s physical pain or discomfort, or whether it’s emotional pain. That’s like Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work of pioneering the body scan in terms of being a clinical intervention. Can you start to breathe through this pain? Can you start to learn from this physical pain? Also, can you ultimately start to see that this arises and that it also passes, and you can come out the other side of that stronger, and more insightful.
TS: It seems that in talking about introducing mindfulness to kids and teenagers, that there’s these different developmentally appropriate ways that you would introduce various forms of conscious breathing. I wonder if you can talk about that, whether it’s conscious breathing or other mindfulness practices—the age differences and the progression, and what kids become available for as they get older.
CW: Yes. That’s a great question. [Laughs.s] I think mindfulness, a pure mindfulness and open awareness is a tall order for us adults, right? To just be unattachably focused on our thoughts or our sensory experience of whatever is happening moment to moment?
In some ways, I think of the book as being mindfulness training wheels to get a practice started young. I think practices like visualizations, for example—kids are—one thing they have a lot of is a lot of imagination. I describe this study, this anecdotal piece in the book about [it]: Lev Vygotsky was a child development researcher from mid-century Soviet Union, and he did this experiment where he was trying to get kids to stand still or to sit still. This is what all adults are trying to do, whether you’re a teacher, a parent, or a meditation teacher. So he said, “Be still,” and he got out a stopwatch, and two minutes later, the kids are running around all over the place. Big surprise.
So he thinks about this, and he has the kids back, and he says, “OK, I want you to stand still, but this time I want you to imagine that you’re the guard of a factory, or a knight guarding castle.” So we can imagine what starts to happen—the kids are able to stand still for three or four times as long as they were when they were just asked to stand still.
So, tapping into the power of imagination, especially at a young age, is incredibly helpful. That’s why play works. That’s why games work to teach kids anything, and it’s certainly while yoga practices or something like the mountain meditation or Thich Nhat Hanh’s wonderful imagery can be so helpful in teaching mindfulness to adults, but it also really works with kids.
I think visualizations can be very powerful early on. I think the body—kids are so much in their body, they’re so much in their five senses—or hopefully they are! They’re not just interacting with screens, they’re able to fully be in their five senses. I think of the five senses also as being a helpful way to bring us back into the present moment. Our thoughts may be wandering to the future, they may be stuck in the past, they may be halfway across town, but our five senses are really always grounded right in the present moment. If I feel my feet, that brings me right to the present moment. If I listen to sounds, that brings me right to the present moment. Also for kids as they start to get older, using the five senses is a way to really come right back into the present moment.
I also think an interesting question to ask kids, but even to ask ourselves as adults in terms of, “Am I being mindful in this moment?” is to just occasionally ask ourselves, “What am I doing and how do I know I’m doing it?” and just checking in with my five senses. Like, how do I know I’m speaking? Well, I can feel the vibrations in my throat, I can hear my voice—these other [ways of] checking in with our five senses.
These are very concrete ways to start to teach the elements of mindfulness that then kids can start to build, as they get older, a longer practice on top of a more nuanced practice on top of a compassion practice on top of different kinds of practices that start with these basic building blocks of mindfulness. Just like we don’t start with calculus when we’re teaching kids math—we start with one plus one. We can start with some of these practices that are more concrete with the senses, or that are movement-based, or maybe that are built into games that they’re already playing, or built into song or art projects or things that they love to do. Then it can start to become more of a formal practice over time, but it doesn’t start as, “Oh, this weird breathing thing I’m doing,” or something like that.
TS: I’m curious if you would say, between the ages of two and five or something like that—where do we start, and at what age does it then shift into a different type of focus? [Is] there something particular that you’d emphasize with teenagers? Can you break it down for me in that way and actually tell me what age groups—[when] you would experience the shift from this age group to that age group?
CW: At a young age, I would start with physical stuff—movement, mindful walking or arm motions as kids are breathing, or other kinds of movement as they’re breathing [and] walking, other kinds of practices like that. As they get a little bit older, into elementary school, then kind of going a little bit more into some of the visualization-based practices. I’m trying to think of an example. Thinking of something like a lake meditation, or a mountain meditation like that.
As they get older still, I think then we can start to help them get more in touch with their senses. And then as they become teenagers, I think then just some more of those, OK, just a breath practice or just a counting the breath practice—something like that. But that, I think, is going to be way too challenging for something like a three- or four-year-old. They’ll need to see it, they’ll need to feel it in their bodies in order to be able to start to become used to it, and start to build the structure on which they can build a more formal practice, I’d say.
TS: That’s very helpful. Now you mentioned, if of course we can get our children away from interacting with screens, and if we ourselves can put down our technological devices long enough to swing our arms with our kids, that kind of thing.
CW: [Laughs.] Right.
TS: So, tell me about your view of interacting with technology in terms of growing up mindful: what are Dr. Christopher Willard’s recommendations for screen limitations?
CW: Well, we know that—I was just talking about this with a friend at a conference who is an expert in executive functioning and ADHD. And one of the things we know about screens and screen interaction at a young age is that it really does hinder executive function development, attention, empathy, all kinds of things. So I’m very much in favor of keeping our kids away from screens as much as possible for as long as possible.
Now, what’s really hard about that is that as a therapist, I see so many kids have so much of their social lives are online—they’re playing games together online while they’re younger, they’re chatting and sending messages as they get older. So to deny them technology is in fact, in the end, denying them some of their social outlet that they really need. So I think talking to kids about the technology—technology is neither good or bad, it’s just what we do with it. I was actually talking to someone today who was said, “You know, we can use technology to be the anchor of our awareness as well. We use a candle, but by looking at the candle, we focus on it. If we put our hands in the candle, then that’s not a very good object of meditation! [Laughs.] That’s kind of how we use technology.
So, I think for one thing, we want to first think about how we set limits around technology, and that really does start with us as adults. All of this really starts with us as adults, whether it’s modeling mindfulness or modeling more mindful use of technology. It can start to trickle down to kids. Putting our phone away when we are not on it, putting it away at the dinner table, leaving it in our bag when we’re around the house or putting it in a place in the house where it’s not in sight—when it’s out of sight it is kind of out of mind, which is helpful.
I just read a great book called Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle a couple weeks ago, and there’s all kinds of research in there. One of the facts she said was that if there’s a phone on the table or a phone in sight, it actually cuts down on the amount of conversation that we’re having with each other. So just by having the phone out of sight or having the technology out of sight, we’re actually connecting with each other more live and in person and all that.
I think there are also ways to bring a little more mindfulness to technology. I certainly love my technology as much as everyone, and I get out my phone and will occasionally find myself mindlessly refreshing Facebook or Twitter or something like that. But I started thinking about, “How can I use this a little bit more mindfully?” It’s interesting to just open up your phone for a moment, and go to whatever your favorite social media app is, or something like that, and just take a deep breath, look at that first status update that you see from a friend or an old colleague or something like that, and notice what your emotional reaction is. Notice what happens to your breath. Notice what happens to your body. Then just be aware of that, and just look at the next one, and the next one. And just do that with like, two or three, maybe a couple more—do that for a minute or two.
It’s amazing, because so much of social media, we’re having this constant barrage of emotional content coming at us all the time, and we’re not wired to process that—whether it’s reading news sites that are barraging us with information, [or] whether it’s social media. So, just slowing down a little bit with how we use our technology, and then going back into how we use it. But it can be interesting to watch.
People probably know the mindfulness practice of naming your emotions as they arise; just scroll through your Facebook feed and name the emotion that arises with each friend’s status update. It’s usually like, “Jealousy . . . jealousy . . . jealousy . . . [laughs] or something like that, but it can be very interesting to just notice, “Oh, that’s what I’m experiencing when I go online and I go through Facebook, is 50 experiences of jealousy, 20 experiences of being really happy for someone, 10 experiences of sadness.” But we’re not really processing that when we’re doing it so fast. So, usually just slowing down with our technology can be an interesting practice.
TS: Now, I want to circle back to the first way you answered this question, in terms of how much exposure to technology should we let our kids have. You said, keep them away from technology as much as possible and as long as possible. OK. But now, your kid is saying, “Oh my god, I want to play the blah blah game!” This is the number one thing that’s turning them on. “I don’t want to swing my arms and count to ten, are you kidding me? Please give me my iPad.” So how does the parent respond to this?
CW: I think it’s doing both, and I think what’s hard about technology—and what’s hard about a lot of the work that I do as a therapist—is trying to stay away from judgment of others, trying to stay away from judgment of ourselves. Whatever the choices [are] that we’re making as parents or as educators or as whatever our job is with kids, [the important thing] is to know why we’re doing it. If I’m setting limits, am I aware that I’m setting limits? If I’m not setting limits, am I aware that I’m not setting limits?
In the end, what it comes down to is the intentions behind it. So, as long as we know, “OK, it is time for him to learn how to play the game and how to manage it,” or “She does deserve a little bit of screen time so she can relate to her friends,” or whatever it might be, we’re just being aware of why we’re doing it.
Again, it’s thinking about mindfulness in that broader sense of intentionality behind all of our actions and all of our choices, as much as possible. It’s not like every moment we’re going to be making the perfectly mindful decision about how we let our kids interact with technology, but trying to bring a little more awareness into that process.
TS: Now, how would you coach a parent who wants to have limits with their kids around technology, and has a kid who’s belligerent about it and quite upset?
CW: In that moment, I think—what we want to do is avoid the moment where things completely fall apart. I think talking with your kids before you give them technology—or give them their own iPad or give them their own iPhone or something—about what the limits are going to be, and about what the responsibilities are. The rights and responsibilities of having technology for themselves, [so] that they understand that, and making a contract—whether that’s formal or informal—and then hopefully you can get to the point where you stave off that total meltdown in the face of the technology.
We also know that technology is designed to be very addictive; it’s designed so we stay on it as long as possible, and it’s hard to get off of—we adults know that. For developing minds, when their prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed, it’s incredibly hard for them to understand that for one thing, but also to be able to get themselves off the technology when it is built and designed to be that addictive.
That is where I think [it’s important] in general in our lives when we adults or we as families can figure out times that are screen times, or times that we’re taking a Sabbath or taking a bit of a break from technology. I know different parents have different expectations that they set up around—no phones overnight, which I think is a really important one. Or no phones or screens an hour before bed, or an hour after waking up. Some people have no phones around town, but on the highway you can get out your phone and do what you want with it. I think having clear limits, and naming those limits and being consistent, is what’s important. And kids are going to tantrum about anything, right? Whether it’s about candy in the checkout aisle, or whether it’s about wanting the screen time in that very moment.
TS: One of the interesting things, Chris, about your book, Growing Up Mindful, is that you include more than 70 different practice suggestions that parents and educators can use with kids. It’s really chock-full of practices. You say many important things in terms of which practice to do with your kids at what point in time, but you say that you can tailor the practices that you introduce to your kids according to their interests. I thought it would be good to talk about that, and you could give some examples for our listeners. So for example, let’s say you have a kid who’s extremely athletic and really interested in sports. Maybe you could suggest just one practice, and we’ll do one for each of these different interest areas, that you would suggest for a kid who’s wild about athletics.
CW: I think athletics is wonderful. Actually I just had the opportunity to meet George Mumford last weekend, who’s the mindfulness coach to a lot of the NBA. I think athletics are a real growing area of mindfulness, especially bringing this to kids that might be a little bit skeptical, when they see how many winning teams and that kind of thing are interested in these practices. I think talking to kids about that, that these are what winning teams use—and I think body-based practices, for example, for those athletes, or practices that help them clear their head a little bit or read the field in some ways a little bit differently, with constantly fresh eyes—or something like that.
The fresh eyes practice is one that I have in the book, which is just, whether it’s a playing field or whether you’re in your room or it’s when you’re bored in the classroom. Just taking a moment, checking in with yourself—looking around the familiar surroundings that you find yourself in. Maybe you’re in the studio, where you’ve probably been hundreds of times, thousands of times, Tami—see if there’s something new you can notice in this room that you’ve never noticed before.
TS: Yes.
CW: And it’s kind of amazing. It brings a different level of awareness to our surroundings in terms of something that we’d never noticed before. Some of those more visual practices can be interesting for an athlete, or maybe scanning around the room and noticing the different colors that you see in the room—how many shades of red? Or can you notice the different shades of the rainbow? Again, this is using our senses to connect with the present moment and be aware of our surroundings. That’s something that an athlete might use to calm themselves down, get their head into the game, and be more fully present. It’s also something that a kid who might be interested in the arts, in the visual arts—just being aware of the surroundings might find the helpful practice to boost their creativity or bring more awareness to the visual appearance of things around them.
TS: If you were going to introduce one of these practices to a kid—I mean, it seems like you might need an on-ramp of some kind, like, “Would you like to play a game with me,” versus, “I’ve been reading this great book and I want to try a mindfulness practice with you.”
CW: [Laughs] “I’ve been reading this great book, Growing Up Mindful, and . . .” [Laughs.] Right.
TS: What do you suggest for parents in terms of how they even begin with their kids, such that their kids will be receptive?
CW: To me, I think figuring out what—as parents, hopefully you know what your kids’ interests are [already]. Often what I’ll talk to kids about is that this can help you be better at and enjoy more what it is that you already love. This can help you with your soccer game and help you enjoy it more. This can help you with your friends and help you in your social life, and help you enjoy being with your friends even more. I talk some about what’s it like when you have—you know that friend that you have in your group who’s really present, who really listens, who really gets you? What would it feel like to be a little more like that person? Because that person is just more present and a little bit more compassionate, and you can cultivate that in yourself as well.
Or maybe it is around—as a mental health professional, it often is around something like depression or like stress or like anxiety, and that is an automatic buy-in, when a kid wants to work or their depression or their anxiety or their stress, or something like that.
But when we get kids at a young age that are still interested in asking their parents for help or asking other people for help—before the teenage years, which can be a little more challenging of course—I think that can be helpful too. One of the ways that comes up a lot is teaching kids in practices around public speaking. Pretty much all of us adults and kids are afraid of public speaking. So kids will say, “I have to do a presentation in class,” and I’ll say, “Oh, well here’s something I do—I take a deep breath in, I follow that breath all the way down into the soles of my feet, and really feel my feet grounded on the floor, really notice those sensations of the bottoms of my feet on the floor. Do a couple breaths like that, and I feel a little bit more confident and I’m ready to go and do my public speaking.” Those are some ways. Yes.
TS: OK. Let’s say that I have a kid who’s really invested in their friendships, like you mentioned—this is really a focus for them. Their interest is, of course I want to be a better friend. What would you suggest as a practice that could be introduced?
CW: This is also one of the ways—teenagers are so [especially] socially oriented. I’ll often do a presentation to a group of teenagers at a high school or something like that. I’ll introduce a practice, say like the 7-11 breath, where we breathe in for [a count of] seven [breathes in] and breathe out for eleven [breathes out], and doing that a couple times. When I introduce it, I’ll talk about [how] there’s a good chance that you, by the time you get to college, will experience a panic attack, and there’s an even better chance actually that one of your friends will experience a panic attack, or just have a really hard time or just be emotionally overwhelmed. This is a practice that you can use to help them. So, if you practice it yourself right now, with me, then you can use it to help your friends when they’re having a hard time. That’s another way of [saying], “Here’s how to be a good friend, is to know a couple of these practices that can help your friend feel better. Maybe it’s something like a breathing practice or maybe it’s something like—I really like listening to sounds as one of my ways of a mindfulness practice—noticing sounds at a distance, then sounds a little bit closer, then sounds even closer still. These are ways you can help your friend if they’re having a hard time, if they’re feeling emotionally overwhelmed, that kind of thing. That’s often how I talk to kids about how this can be helpful for them socially, or helpful for them if they want to be supportive of their friends who are maybe struggling.
TS: You even have some practices in the book, Growing Up Mindful, that address kids who are very interested in social media and spend a lot of time on social media platforms. What might some of those practices be?
CW: I think those practices of, as I described earlier—you go ahead and open up your Twitter, open up your Instagram, and just name the first emotion that comes to mind as you look at each picture, as you read each status update. Do that for five status updates, do that for ten status updates, that kind of thing.
It can also be helpful—one of the things that happens with social media, why it makes us feel worse about ourselves, is we see how much better everyone’s life is, because everyone’s showing their best self to the world. There’s some interesting research where if you look at your own social media feed rather than look at other people’s you start to feel better about yourself, because you’re presenting the best of what’s going on in your life In a sense, it’s like making a gratitude list or doing one of those positivity practices of counting your blessings and looking at what’s going well in your life. So if you look at your own feed, it’s like, “Oh, I did have a good time at that party! Oh, I do have friends! Oh, I did this cool thing last year.” Rather than “Oh, everyone else is doing something cool, everyone else is great.” That can be another way of looking at social media.
It’s also just a way of connecting—whether it’s following mindfulness-related topics on Instagram or Pinterest, or Tumblr or Twitter, or some of the other social media apps that kids are using. There’s a lot of short practices on there—little memes, inspirational quotes about mindfulness, and that kind of thing on there as well for kids to get involved in. So again, technology isn’t good or bad. You choose to use—do you choose to feed the wolf that encourages you to be more mindful, or do you choose to feed the wolf that encourages you to be more mindless? [It’s] depending on what you look at.
TS: One of the things you say right at the beginning of Growing Up Mindfuls, and of course it makes a lot of sense, is that [it’s] not even focusing on the practices that we introduce to our children, [but] how we are—how we are as parents is the factor that makes the biggest difference in whether or not our kids will be growing up mindful or not. My question to you is, if you were to say, “These are the most important ways a parent can demonstrate their mindfulness—inhabit, incarnate, and express their mindfulness; and these are the ways that if you don’t, this is what’s really going to cause the most difficulty for your kids in terms of growing up mindful. How would you respond to that—both the positive and the negative?
CW: I think that the most important things for parents are to model mindfulness. I think it’s having a practice—which kind of goes out the window as we become parents, as I found out about 18 months ago when I had my son—so embodying informal practice as well. So not multitasking quite so often, not looking at our phones every five minutes—those kinds of things. As we think and act, so our children become, is what ends up happening.
So embodying mindfulness in the way we eat, in the way we walk, but most importantly, I think, in the way we interact with our kids. Are we giving them our full attention? Are we making eye contact? Are we getting down to their level—are we getting on the floor with them when they are young? Are we remembering what it was like to be a teenager as they become teenagers? Are we able to be open and compassionate to everything that is going on in their experience? That’s ultimately what’s going to be most helpful, most important, is living in those ways.
Then of course, the opposite ends up with the opposite effect. If we’re busy, if we’re stressed out, if we’re not modeling good self-care, good self-compassion, then they’re not going to be internalizing those things either. If we’re modeling that we’re on the phone all the time, if we’re modeling that we’re half paying attention at dinner because we’re too busy thinking about something else, or if we’re modeling that we come straight home from work and then don’t give ourselves a chance to exhale—and then snap at everybody else in the house—then our kids are going to start to do that. But if we model coming home, taking a few deep breaths checking in with how we are, and doing that maybe with them, or maybe even not with them, then they’ll pick up on that—that that’s a more mindful approach to life, a more mindful approach to the hectic-ness that life offers.
To me—I don’t know if that’s quite specifically enough answering your question, but I do think as parents—or as educators or as therapists, or as whatever it is our role is with kids—when we can embody the qualities of mindfulness and compassion, that’s the best way to ensure that their practice is going to grow. Ultimately, the book has 70-something practices in it, but the biggest lesson to me is if the parent, if the teacher, if the professional who’s working with kids can embody mindfulness, that’s going to be the best way to cultivate mindfulness in the kids.
Best way to create stressed-out kids? Surround them with stressed-out adults. Best way to create mindful and compassionate kids? Surround them with mindful and compassionate adults.
TS: You mention that you became a new parent 18 months or so ago. I’m curious: what’s been the hardest aspect of embodying mindfulness for you in your new parenting role?
CW: I’d say certainly my formal practice has gone out the window. [Laughs.] So, I think informal practice has become where it is, or my formal practice has gotten smaller—and by formal practice, I mean my time on the cushion. What was your question?
TS: What’s been the most challenging for you, in terms of—well, here you wrote a book, Growing Up Mindful, but now you’ve actually had a kid and you’re doing it, and I’m sure it’s hard. I’m curious how that’s going for you, and what’s been the hardest part?
CW: I think what’s hard is that kids do require so much absolute presence. I’m busy with my job, I’m busy with writing, I travel a fair amount, and my wife is also busy with all three of those things too! So, really remembering to be as single-minded as possible, to be as present as possible, to leave work at the office when it’s time to leave work at the office and it’s time to be home. That’s an easy thing to do when—in some ways, that’s a hard thing to do when you’re a therapist, but I had gotten used to that. But how do I not bring writing [laughs] into every moment of my day, because everything is kind of grist for the mill, or planning and logistics. That’s a real challenge to take that time out— to be really fully present with my son and with my wife.
My wife and I cook and eat dinner together I’d say at least six out of seven nights. I get a lot of time with my son; I’m with him a lot of mornings, I’m with him on weekends, and it’s me and him most Fridays, which is just wonderful. I feel so very privileged that I do get that time with him.
Then it’s being intentional about, “We’re going to the park. Do I need my phone with me? It’s great because I could take a picture, but I’ve got plenty of pictures of him. I can probably leave that at home.” Those kind of things are hard though. It’s a strong pull. And I’m sure, in five or ten years, I’m going to hopefully—[laughs] if you guys let me write more books with you, I’ll write an apology letter about all the things I got wrong when I first wrote this book as a new parent, that changed down the road. But that’s also part of—we’ll see what happens.
TS: I’m curious, because mindfulness now sounds like we’re introducing this new idea into parenting, and here are 70 different practices, and yet when I hear you talk about what’s actually required—a type of single-minded, openhearted focus—I think, this is ancient! This is nothing new. I’m curious what you make of that.
CW: This is what I think is kind of tragic about the fact that mindfulness has become so big. I think mindfulness has become so big because it’s a reaction to how multitasking we are, how busy we are. I heard someone say this—but to me, mindfulness is inherent in all of us, it belongs to all of us, it’s a natural state of being. And yet, now we need to carve time out to be mindful—to be on our cushion or do a practice or something like that, when in fact it’s one of the most natural things to us; but at the same time, we live in this modern world where we drive ourselves and park as close as we can to go to the gym and get our exercise, or our kids take time out of school to go do recess—which, by the way, they barely have anymore. Anyway!
And the same thing—we’re doing that with our mental health and our mental exercise of mindfulness that we used to get naturally just by hiking or by not being quite too busy, or by looking at the clouds in the sky or the stars in the nighttime, or something like that. It’s sort of tragic that we have to build mindfulness in in formal ways, but we can also try to be more deliberate in our lives at the same time, just bring more intentionality to what we do.
TS: Chris, one of the things I want to make sure we talk about is that I know that one of your areas of expertise is teenagers and depression. You write in the book Growing Up Mindful that teenagers in our society are unusually stressed out.
CW: Yes.
TS: You quote a study of—[that] they’re the most stressed-out portion, actually, of our population in the West. So, talk to me a little bit about stress in teenagers, and also what you’ve learned about working with teenagers, mindfulness, and depression.
CW: Yes. This is one of those heartbreaking statistics I encountered a couple of years ago. The American Psychological Association did a survey and found that teens are the most stressed-out group in America—and of course, they could have told us that. I maybe had an idea of that, but it was really profound and I think pretty disturbing. I’ve heard other kinds of mental health experts talk about the fact that our teenagers in America are—and part of the problem is that our stress response system is the same for everything, whether it’s an emotional threat or an academic threat, or a social threat, or something like that—as it is if it’s an actual danger. So, the negative effects of the stress our kids in mostly-sheltered America are under are just as dangerous—people are saying—as kids that are growing up in war zones.
What we know about stress and our usual stress response of fight or flight and freeze or forget it, are that these start to rewire our systems, rewire our brains, if we’re exposed to this kind of significant stress at a young age. So what happens is then that kids grow up and they end up depressed, they end up anxious, they end up aggressive, or we see this concern about bullying.
The other thing we know about stress is usually when we’re stressed out and in that fight-or-flight ode, that shuts off our ability to be compassionate. We kind of know this—if we’re driving and we’re in a rush, then they’re a total jerk, but if we’re not in a rush, well then, “OK, go ahead and cut in front of me on the highway.” What that means is that kids are rewiring their brains to be depressed or to be anxious because of this chronic stress we’re under.
The other thing that’s happening is that we’re not teaching kids how to manage their stress. So not only are they not getting it in social/emotional learning class—because that’s getting cut—but they’re not getting it out on the playground, getting it out on the walk to school, because they’re not walking to school as often. Or when they do have a break, they’re on their phones, which ends up making them more stressed out.
So, they’re more stressed out because they have more on their plate, then they’re also not getting the skills to deal with this stuff, and at the same time, any time they do have is being taken away from them, where they might naturally learn how to manage their stress.
To me, that is where mindfulness can kind of—I really see mindfulness with kids as a public health intervention. If we can reach a broad number of young people at a young age and teach them how to manage their stress and regulate their emotions, and teach them how to focus —and we can do that through mindfulness, we know that from the research—I mean, that’s going to be huge for the next generation. And teaching compassion and self-compassion at the same time, which is built into mindfulness as one of the wonderful side effects of mindfulness.
What that ends up doing down the road to stress-related issues, whether it’s depression, whether it’s anxiety, whether it’s some of the violence that we’re seeing and lack of compassion that we worry about, I think that’s such an incredible gift for the future. Then we also know that even if kids are already depressed or already anxious, these practices can be really helpful for them at the same time—to treat their anxiety, to treat their depression, to calm down their anger, to help them make better choices around turning to cutting or self-harm or drugs, or other acting-out issues that they might be having.
TS: When you talk about introducing mindfulness practices as a public health intervention, that of course makes me think about mindfulness in the classroom and how—you know, here you’re introducing 70 different practices that are not faith-based in any way. They’re simple moving, breathing, attention, et cetera kind of practices. What’s your view on how this might unfold in a positive way over the next decade or so—mindfulness in the classroom?
CW: I feel really optimistic. For those people that are following this more closely, there’s always been a concern about this becoming controversial; in the last few months, some things have erupted in terms of some more concerns about getting mindfulness more into schools. Of course, there are hundreds, thousands of teachers across the country—around the world—bringing mindfulness to kids in schools. If you want to reach kids, schools [are] the best place to do it. There are going to be some challenges, but I do think that the movement in terms of bringing mindfulness and contemplative practices into schools is definitely going to win out in the end, because the research—
TS: Can you share with me what the core challenges [are] and what’s happened in the last few months—just bring me up to speed?
CW: There’s been some—with anything mindfulness [-related], I think there’s often a concern from people that don’t know that much about the practices that people are teaching religion in schools. So there’s some lawsuits, there’s some threats of lawsuits happening in some different parts of the country. But I think we know that mindfulness can be completely secular and not related to any spiritual practice, although it can also be a beautiful part of anyone’s spiritual practice, really.
I think that’s ultimately going to win out—you know, the way reading can be religious or it can not be religious, but we certainly teach reading in school, right? No one would argue with that. And when people start to see the benefits of, “Oh these kids are concentrating better. They’re regulating their emotions better. They’re being kinder to each other,” I think that’s going to be what’s most clear. But there may be—a bit of controversy may continue for a couple of years, but I think it ultimately will settle down and this will continue to only grow in the schools.
TS: And do you have a vision now—let’s say we fast-forward several decades from now—what mindfulness in the classroom will look like? Can you see it?
CW: That’s a really beautiful thing to imagine. I mean, I love the idea of my son, who’s 18 months old now, getting into nursery school, and some of the nursery schools in the area are already doing movement practices. As he gets older, that gets reinforced in some different ways—some days they do a short breathing practice before something stressful happens, or it’s integrated a little bit into athletics to help kids stay calm in performance, and it’s brought into music and the creative arts, and it’s also brought into science class as kids get older and start to understand their brains and understand their emotions. There’s time that’s allowed for more formal practice—not just like two minutes here, five minutes there, but longer periods of time where kids are able to and encouraged to practice. Just the way they’re encouraged and even required to exercise their bodies, they’d be required to exercise their minds in these ways.
Yes. I certainly hope my son gets to see the fruits of that in his lifetime. Again, because I know for myself when I was young and a little lost and confused for a few years there, it would have been so helpful to have had these practices or the seeds planted a little bit more firmly.
And it’s not like everyone will necessarily grow up and be sitting on a cushion, but that everyone who needs these practices as they get older if something does happen—if they are struggling, they can go back and think, “Oh, we did that cool listening to sounds thing in second grade, and I remember really liking that,” or “Wow, I really liked the mindful walking thing we did in fifth grade. Maybe I’ll just do that right now to calm myself down or to get through this difficult time that I’m experiencing.”
Or not even because of anything, but just because I like it, right? Not because of something bad happening. For some kids, maybe they wouldn’t, but [if] everyone can have at least some exposure to it, I think it would be amazing. And I think it may well get there.
TS: It is a beautiful vision. Thank you. Thanks for unfolding that for us. One final question, Chris. I’m going to give our listeners a preview—you’re working on a new book with Sounds True, I’m pleased to say, on raising resilience. Talk a little bit about how you see resilience, and what you think some of the keys are to raising resilient kids.
CW: Yes. I think there’s a lot of pandering in our culture about how not resilient so many of our kids are; the book is kind of a response to that. It’s also a response to—I went to my old meditation center a couple months before my son was born. I said, “What am I going to do about my practice?” My teacher said, “Ah, forget it. Just focus on the pāramīs, focus on your values, focus on your life off the cushion and be present.” I did a little digging, and I learned about some really beautiful traditional virtues. I don’t want to say I’m writing a book about family values [laughs], but in a sense I’m writing a book about family values 2.0, or spiritual values 2.0 and the science behind what leads to resilience.
It really is—there’s this amazing science about what practicing and teaching generosity does in terms of making us happy. How can we cultivate patience and diligence and hard work in our kids, and what that does for a lifetime of success and a lifetime of happiness and resilience, and how can we help them learn to kind of roll with it in terms of, can you teach a kid equanimity, can you practice that yourself? So, looking at these different kinds of values and virtues like that.
It’s been—I’ve already found it a fascinating exploration, both of traditional wisdom and of recent neuroscience and social science of how these kinds of things lead to resilience. Teaching kids compassion and self-compassion rather than teaching them just self-esteem; teaching them how to care for others, how to be generous, how to live simple lives of not just wanting and consumption, but how to be more appreciative. So it’s been really fun, and I’m about halfway—you’ll be pleased to know, Tami, I’m about halfway done! It’s on target.
TS: Interestingly, I pulled out a sentence from the end of Growing Up Mindful, and here’s the sentence: We know that the best predictor of resilience in a child’s life is to have one adult who is there for them, who believes in them unconditionally.” This is at the end of the book, in your conclusion. I noticed when I read that sentence—one adult who is there for them, who believes in them unconditionally—I just felt so moved by that. I thought, “I want to be that kind of adult for some of the children that I know in my life.” So it’s a beautiful inspiration, I think, to people.
CW: Thank you. I had this moment where I got absolute chills when I had this revelation; I was practicing metta—lovingkindness practice—and channeling a benefactor, which is something that one does in that contemplative tradition. It occurred to me that it’s not just about me having a benefactor, it’s about that maybe I’m someone’s benefactor, and maybe there’s a way that I can be a good benefactor to someone. That was a really profound and moving moment for me, when I thought about that. Also, I think in terms of what it is that kids need, they need that benefactor, and that could be you. It could be any one of us, and we forget that. Again, it goes back to our own practice of mindfulness, our own practice of compassion, our own practice of self-compassion, that allows us to be that benefactor, even though that might be kind of a frightening responsibility. It’s pretty amazing to consider.
TS: I’ve been talking with Chris Willard. He’s the author of a new book called Growing Up Mindful: Essential Practices to Help Children, Teens, and Families Find Balance, Calm, and Resilience. There’s also a companion audio guide of practices—Practices for Growing Up Mindful.
Chris, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being on Insights at the Edge and for your good work, and for all the people that I know are benefiting from you as a benefactor. Thank you.
CW: Well, thank you, Tami. This has been really fun. Working with Sounds True has been incredible, speaking with you has been incredible. I first heard your voice on Jack Kornfield’s The Roots of Buddhist Psychology about 20 years ago, 25 years ago. I had some old audio tapes of that Sounds True program. I’m just thrilled to be working with you, and honored, and I hope this podcast and this book can be of benefit to many beings big and small. So thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
