Paulo Karat, Senior Lecturer at NLS https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/law/paulo-karat
As a mindfulness teacher, I have often tried to find a way of bringing this side of my experience into my law teaching. At some point in their work (most obviously in our pastoral duties), many colleagues will have invited students to “breathe” as one of the oldest ways we all know of helping people with self-regulation. But inviting law students to notice their breathing, their bodily experience, their thoughts and emotions in, say, a jurisprudence or company law seminar was neither easy nor successful. These forays provided a platform for healthy tutor-group dialogue on acknowledging ‘stress’ in the classroom but my overriding feeling was of trying to shoehorn a topic that, whilst worthy, did not fit its context, creating an awkward disconnect between two distinct realms.
But then, after many years focusing on undergraduate teaching, I once again found myself teaching the LPC interviewing module and, with the mock assessment seminar, something clicked into place. I was now seeing students who I could see ‘needed’ mindfulness to help them relate better to the dysregulation in their body and mind: students arriving visibly nervous and anxious by the prospect of an impending performance that might expose them as neither ready nor fit - with barely 4 weeks to go - for a summative assessment with potentially significant consequences for their LLM award.
With each student pair, I named what I was seeing (and feeling): students looking flushed in the face, avoiding eye contact, unsure, hesitant, flustered, doubtful, fearful, apologetic. Importantly, I followed these observations by describing them as normal. The acknowledgement and normalising of the full range of human experience is a key theme in mindfulness teaching. I invited them not to judge their experience as 'bad' or ‘abnormal’ but, instead, to simply notice what is here, to allow it to be here, to breathe into it, to see how it feels to let it just be as it is, moment by moment.
As part of this, I asked students whether there was any thinking associated with what they were experiencing (e.g. “I will fail the assessment”, “I will look stupid and incompetent”, “This is a car crash”) and, most often, there was. In Week 6 of the 8-Week Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) course, we teach that for all their heat and power, more often than not ‘thoughts are not facts’. Instead, we help participants explore the automatic nature of thoughts, and how they are so often tied into the operation of the oldest regions of the mammalian brain (in particular the limbic system). These regions fire up our ‘fight or flight’ reaction whenever we perceive we are under some kind of threat (for early humans, these threats were existential; for most modern humans, much less so, but the physiological mechanisms are the same). Simultaneous with the firing up of the amygdala, the newer, more evolved regions of our frontal cortex responsible for rational thought go offline. So when we are under stress, we may continue to assume that our thoughts are based on reason when, in fact, they are based on our instinctive reactivity. Pausing to anchor ourselves in the present by noticing our breathing and the full range of our experience without judgement can provide the space needed to observe our thoughts rather than invest in them. This process can be enough to help us exit invalid, unhelpful or catastrophic thinking.
In most cases, this kind of material appeared to provoke a shift in perspective. Themes that had previously landed awkwardly now felt more relevant, urgent, perhaps vital. Reassured, heard and held, students proceeded with their interviews and, perhaps, were able to reflect on their experience more openly.
Many students also floundered during the advice-giving section. They commonly place a very strong emphasis on the advisory aspects of a lawyer-client interview. Clarity, accuracy and completeness become to them a vital metric for judging the interview. I noticed students not pausing between the end of their questioning and the start of their advice. I could see in their eyes that they were distant, thinking ahead to advising instead of listening to me, their client. Present-moment awareness is perhaps the most well-known aspect of mindfulness and in these sessions I was observing students on auto-pilot, their minds wandering from the present, distancing them from their actual, present-moment experience with their client. I ventured that this will have stopped them listening properly, causing them to have missed potentially significant information. It also broke the relational connection with their client in what is a relationship-building (not just a fact-gathering / advice-giving) exercise. Research into the neuroscience of mindfulness enabled me to point not just to the cognitive failings of not being present but also to the benefits that flow from mindful awareness training on concentration, working memory, problem solving and decision making. In this new context these insights seemed to land with students, rather than glancing off them.
What next? There is more for me to explore here and I'd welcome the opportunity to speak to any colleagues interested in how a functional level of awareness of mindfulness theory and practice might inform their teaching practice and scholarly output.
Notes about the author:
The author completed his mindfulness teacher training pathway during his MSc in Mindfulness Based Approaches to mental health & wellbeing at the University of Bangor. He is registered with the British Association of Mindfulness-Based Approaches (BAMBA) as a teacher of mindfulness including the clinical 8 Week Courses MBCT (Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy; see Teasdale and others 2000) and MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction; see Khoury and others 2015)
Further Reading:
Teasdale JD, Segal ZV, Williams JM, Ridgeway VA, Soulsby JM, Lau MA. Prevention of relapse/recurrence in major depression by mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. J Consult Clin Psychol. 2000 Aug;68(4):615-23. doi: 10.1037//0022-006x.68.4.615
Khoury B, Sharma M, Rush SE, Fournier C. Mindfulness-based stress reduction for healthy individuals: A meta-analysis. J Psychosom Res. 2015 Jun;78(6):519-28. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychores.2015.03.009
Comments