A young girl leaned into 18-year-old Amandip Thiara as their group played a game of memory with homemade cards Monday morning. Later, two little boys asked Thiara for help with their balloons.
Thiara and her class of Grade 12 family psychology students from John Oliver secondary visited John Henderson elementary Monday morning equipped with action-packed lesson plans related to a book called Who Am I? The objective of both the book and the visit: explore mindfulness.
“I wish we had this in elementary. It would be so much fun,” Thiara said. “I like how kids get to interact with older kids. They get to learn more. I remember when we were small we used to be so scared of older kids.”
Thiara’s class has been learning since October about paying attention to their thoughts, feelings and the related sensations in their bodies.
“I have a lot of temper problems. I get mad pretty fast,” Thiara said. “It just brings you down and just calms you down. It just reduces stress.”
The author of Who Am I?, Jasmine Bharucha, helped JO students lead a lesson for more grades 3 and 4 students in an adjacent room.
She describes her impulse to write a book on mindfulness for kids and parents as a calling.
Bharucha, a 45-year-old mother of two, says she’s dabbled with mindfulness since she was 16. She’s read all the related self-help books and saw there was a dearth of material about mindfulness for children.
Bharucha wants children to know they’re connected to the planet, the universe and to each other. She wants to help them connect to themselves, and defines mindfulness as “coming to peace with what is.”
“I know what it looks like not to be mindful,” she said with a laugh. “And I know the misery it causes us and I say this because I’ve gone from the music business into the real estate business. Gee, you couldn’t possibly go from one pretentious industry into another more pretentious and manipulative industry.”
According to her writer’s bio, Bharucha is singer-songwriter who was the first Indian performer to appear on MTV Asia in 1990. She has been featured in Rolling Stone, TIME and nominated as Best Female Pop Artist at the Channel V Music Awards in Asia.
Now Bharucha wants to teach youth the coping skills she wishes she’d learned earlier. She chose to focus on schools on the East Side because they tend to lack resources, and as a realtor in Richmond, she thought it would be wise initiate the work in another city.
“She actually made my kids cry,” said JO family psychology teacher Michelle Cheng.
Cheng said breathing exercises Bharucha led with her Grade 12 students “released something.”
JO’s principal Tim McGeer said JO is about to partner with the Hawn Foundation, founded by actor Goldie Hawn, because the organization’s MindUP program has proven successful in elementary schools, and they want to offer mindfulness in a formal way at a secondary school. The focus on mindfulness serves as a follow-up to the Dalai Lama’s “heart-mind” instruction at JO in October.
“The science is telling us it can be very beneficial in terms of students’ ability to self-regulate, to be healthy emotionally and awake and aware and present for learning,” McGeer said.
He noted mindfulness connects to new provincial kindergarten to Grade 9 curriculum that is to be in place July 2016. McGeer said having students work with a published author and develop lesson plans for younger kids furthers JO’s emphasis on literacy.
Bharucha wants to help create a happier and healthier society, so her guide is meant for kids and parents.
“We are all living outside all the time. There is no inside time,” she said. “These children are in the age of technology where everything is times five… There’s no quiet time. They don’t know how to sit still.”
Bharucha encourages everyone to write about their thoughts and feelings in a journal each day.
“Journalling is a very simple way of really hearing yourself,” she said.
Thiara plans to study nursing at BCIT or Douglas College next year and to maintain her mindfulness practice.
“That’s going to be the number one thing to do,” she said. “Because there’s going to be so much stress on you and you’re just going to want to take time out, and then you can just meditate and just relax and take those five minutes, and that just brings your whole body relaxed and calmed down and back to your task.”
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