Mindfulness and Yoga in Schools A Guide for Teachers and Practitioners

128 • PART II: MINDFULNESS IN EDUCATING FOR SELF-REGULATION AND ENGAGEMENT

Jennifer focused her meditation on the noticing of the arising and passing away of her
awareness of mental events and sensations, and on the way her brain tagged mental events
and sense impressions as pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral (Cook-Cottone, 2015). She watches
the nearly automatic tendency to attach to the feeling-tone, the mental event, or the sense
impression. She noticed how simply sitting for meditation could trigger her personal narrative,
or belief system, “I am overwhelmed, and I can’t handle this.” Before she began to work on
mindfulness, she had no awareness of mental events or sense impressions arising and passing
away. She did not know that they were attached to a feeling tone. Most troublesome, Jennifer
believed her story that she was always overwhelmed and that she could not handle anything.
She thought that maybe she was just like her mom. Her meditation practices and work with
her psychologist gave her insight to this path of events, and she began to question her old nar-
rative. She began to find space, choice, and power (see Figure 6.7). See principles of embodies
learning and growth (see Chapter 3); principle 1, I am worth the effort; principle 3, I am fully
aware; principle 4, I work toward presence in my physical body; principle 5, I feel my emotions
in order to grow and learn; principle 7, I choose my focus and actions; principle 8, I do the work.
The following practices provide several structured ways to dig into the space between
stimulus and response (Cook-Cottone, 2015). These include the sitting meditation script
unique to this text, designed to bring awareness and competence to cultivating the space
between stimulus and response. As you and your students practice, use Figure 6.8 to record
your experience and growing awareness.

The Space Between: Formal Sitting Meditation

The Space Between formal meditation is intended to bring awareness and insight. This script
will help you and your students bring awareness to stimuli that include sense impressions
and mental events, the accompanying feeling-tones, the choice to notice and then attach or
allow, and, finally, the active choice of a response (Grabovac et al., 2011; Wallace, 2011).

Feeling-Tone

Unpleasant

Stimulus

My parents are

fighting.

I can’t handle

this.

Your Power

to Choose

Your

Response

Allow

Response

I am breathing.

I can choose my

response.

I am sitting with

what is.

I am STRONG.

FIGURE 6.7 Jennifer’s new choices.

Source: Cook-Cottone (2015).