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> students have learned mindfulness techniques like breath awareness, thought observation, and emotional monitoring as part of their regular curriculum Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. It’s like trying to teach peaceful and quite a 6 months old dog - you can’t. You need to let them burn all that energy.
> students have learned mindfulness techniques like breath awareness, thought observation, and emotional monitoring as part of their regular curriculum Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. It’s like trying to teach peaceful and quite a 6 months old dog - you can’t. You need to let them burn all that energy.
The "mindfulness" techniques and breathing techniques ultimately come from the Hindu/Buddhist school of thought and is much bigger than the cargo cult way the western society seem to have picked up from them. > Children are full of energy - they need to be let loose and run around. The masters of the original mindfulness techniques would agree.
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> Religious studies fails to make kids more religious You can definitely make kids believe in religion. There's a reason entire societies in the past held the same religious views.
Religious education in schools often fails because the kids can tell the adults teaching it don’t really believe in it themselves. If the person who wants you to believe it doesn’t actually do so, why should you? And then when they do really believe in it, more often than not rather than “I’ve thought deeply about all the doubts and I can give thoughtful responses to them”, their attitude is more “asking tough questi…
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Religious education in schools often fails because the kids can tell the adults teaching it don’t really believe in it themselves. If the person who wants you to believe it doesn’t actually do so, why should you? And then when they do really believe in it, more often than not rather than “I’ve thought deeply about all the doubts and I can give thoughtful responses to them”, their attitude is more “asking tough questi…
> their attitude is more “asking tough questions is a sin” I hear this sentiment a lot, but having been in all sorts of church, para-church, and religious education settings, I've never once seen it for myself. I have stumped many tutors in my life, but not once was I chastised for "sinning." Not that my experience is worth more; it's just still very foreign to me. What I have seen is a severe lack of religious knowl…
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> Here in the UK we’re in the weird and untenable position of providing state funding for religious schools Australia has been doing that since the 1960s. State governments fund public schools, federal government funds private schools (the majority of which are religious) The Catholic Church forced them into it by threatening to close its private schools and send all the students to public ones, thereby overwhelming…
Feels extremely silly that the government would allow this threat to still stand. Feels like when this happened, it should have sparked an initiative that every child could attend public school if they wanted. I get bending in the moment, but that's a kind of threat that should have no teeth for a nation's government IMO.
In the 19th century, Australia's colonial governments (which later became its state governments) provided public funding of private religious schools, both for the Protestant majority and the Catholic minority. In the second half of the 19th century, there was a big push for secular government education. Although that in itself might be seen as a religiously neutral idea, in practice it was something most Protestants were happy to support, the Catholic Church opposed. The result was that Australia ended up with a government school system which while officially religiously neutral, was de facto perceived by many as Protestant; most Catholics continued to send their children to Catholic schools, albeit now without any government support.
Not only did Catholic schools no longer have government funding, but the Catholic minority was on the whole less well-off than the Protestant majority. A big part of how Catholic schooling survived was the reliance on religious orders to provide teaching staff. However, by the 1960s, Australian Catholic schools were trying to deal with the post-war baby boom simultaneously with a crash in vocations to religious orders. Many Catholics were angry about the fact that their taxes paid for the education of Protestant children but not their own, while their own kids suffered from ballooning class sizes, overworked teachers and schools that were physically falling apart.
Much like in the US where Catholics traditionally supported the Democrats, Australian Catholics historically supported the centre-left Labor Party; the conservative side of politics was very Protestant. However, many Catholics were angry at the Labor Party for refusing Catholic demands for public funding for religious schools, despite relying on their vote to gain and remain in power; conservative Prime Minister Robert Menzies saw this as an opportunity to try to get Catholics to switch their political allegiance from the left to the right, so he went to the 1963 election with a policy of federal funding to construct science laboratories for all secondary schools without distinction (whether public or private, secular or religious), and he won, and the decision of many Catholics to switch sides played a big part in his victory. The Labor Party then realised that if they continued to oppose public funding of religious schools, they might lose the Catholic vote permanently, so they begrudgingly came around to supporting it too.
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I find the Waking Up app the closest to this. Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised, with an aim of improving “productivity”. If anyone is looking for guided meditation, I suggest checking out waking up.
> Others like headspace feel heavily commercialised The one you pointed to is $130 a year.
The app is free (or heavily discounted) for those that can’t pay. Nor do they seem to optimize conversion flows, run ads, or pursue growth as aggressively as Headspace has.
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I’d also note mindfulness only works with practice and reflection as well as an experienced guide. It’s not a pill to be swallowed. Likewise CBT and other interventions need a work, practiced, and an experienced and licensed practitioner. Finally I would look at late life outcomes as well. A lot of the lessons of vipassana and other mindfulness lessons are difficult for the very young. Handing someone a life time too…
A lot of this is junk so it’s hard to take the rest seriously. CBT works just fine self-taught. You don’t need an experienced and licensed practitioner. That is totally bogus. So I must conclude that there is zero information value in the rest.
But personally, I'd attribute that to therapists in general, especially the ones who tend to shift the blame towards the parents (even if they don't spell it out explicitly), not really to CBT where you actually verify very quickly if the method works or not.
Note that this is self-reported mindfulness. I don't find it farfetched that someone who's been taught mindfulness would self-report lower even though objectively they may have a higher degree of mindfulness.
I believe studies on this are discussed in Sam Harris’s book “Waking Up”.
My belief is that societal and technological sophistication is overall extremely stressful for organisms that were prepared for a very different life by evolution. Our neurosis is a byproduct of our success and of the highly complex and competitive nature of our social interactions. Touching grass, spending time with animals, learning to accept and appreciate our animal roots, is what can balance the stress.
We have the data to show that mindfulness works, however I think we underestimate the pull or grasp that social media has. It’s hard to implement mindfulness when everything is vying for your attention.
Do we? (From "Has the science of mindfulness lost its mind?" (2016))
"A recent comprehensive meta-analysis of randomised clinical trials showed that mindfulness interventions only led to moderate improvements in depression, anxiety and pain, and very small improvements in stress reduction and quality of life. There was no evidence that mindfulness had an effect on other variables, such as positive mood, attention, sleep or substance use. Further, when mindfulness was compared with other interventions, such as physical exercise or relaxation, it was not more effective."