Mindfulness in Class and in Life

Alongside the difficult emotions that are present amid calls for racial and social justice on campuses, mindfulness can help us compassionately bear witness to suffering and choose a wise personal and collective response. In a presentation and student panel I facilitated during USC’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Week earlier this year, Megan (Mae) Gates (her real name), a junior majoring in public policy who had taken my course, reflected on the role mindfulness can play in strengthening mental health in communities of color. A member of Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first Black sorority on campus, Mae has worked to have honest conversations about mental health in the Black community and ensure it is part of the impact she and her peers have on campus. “We have a lot of conversations among ourselves as Black women,” she told the audience. “What does mental health mean to us? What are the disparities that we had growing up? And how can we ensure that this becomes an integral conversation in our community and every part of life that we walk through?”

In the traditional sense, mindfulness is a type of meditation practice, and Introduction to Mindfulness is a secular course in which we explore formal practices of meditation—seated, standing, walking—as well as informal practices of bringing mindfulness into daily life, relationships, and decision making. During the course, students develop a personal meditation practice that progresses throughout the semester. The curriculum comprises five modules through which students explore the principles of mindfulness, the body, working with emotions, working with thoughts, and incorporating mindfulness in daily life. Students submit reflection forms at the end of each module and read a corresponding workbook, which I authored, that covers real-world topics including decision making, communication, relationships, and grief. In book groups, students read a book from the mindfulness field to deepen knowledge of practice and theory. Choices include selections by Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tara Brach, and Rhonda Magee.

Students also work in groups to explore strategies for incorporating mindfulness into an aspect of daily life, such as relationships, technology use, and social justice. This collaborative work creates supportive subgroups within the classroom community. The class has “provided me with a group of people that really care about loving people and building relationships,” Lana, a senior majoring in cinematic arts, said during an interview about her experience in the class. Her group explored the topic of relationships and focused on listening to others. “That’s been great because that’s when we can really talk about it together,” she said.

For exposure to a variety of styles and perspectives, students take an outside meditation class, which many do at a local studio (online during the pandemic) and continue to attend after the semester ends. I also invite guest speakers to class to discuss topics such as anxiety, grief, and intimacy and radical consent. Course assessments include a group presentation about their process and the impact of incorporating mindfulness into daily life, an exam on the principles of mindfulness, and reflection forms for each of the five modules—which include questions to deepen students’ understanding and application of the content.

Through their work in Introduction to Mindfulness, students build agency, strengthened emotional resilience, and became more open to kindness and joy. They learn practices to help them navigate difficult experiences, everything from a disappointing grade on an assignment to a breakup, the loss of a friend or family member—or a global pandemic. To gauge student growth and learning in the course, I conducted surveys across the three fall 2019 classes at weeks one, five, and fifteen to establish a baseline, initial progress, and end-of-course impact. In the week-fifteen survey, 92 percent of students responded that they felt the course “much” or “very much” affected their capacity to cope with challenges. They also gained confidence and developed a stronger self-image.

Steve, a senior majoring in business who took my mindfulness course in fall 2019, recently sent me an email with the subject line “Meditation saved my life.” He wrote about how tough 2020 has been for him, including feeling suicidal, losing friends, and losing his full-time job offer because of the pandemic. In the midst of his difficulties, he remembered the mindfulness lessons, practicing meditation to focus on appreciating what he did have. “I started to regain confidence and happiness in myself,” he wrote. “I started to realize that happiness comes from within, and not through external things. I am improving and starting to gain a little bit of hope.” In combination with professional help—in Steve’s case I recommended he seek such assistance, provided him with resources, and also notified the campus mental health help line—mindfulness can offer tools to navigate challenges students face.

In Introduction to Mindfulness, students learn the RAIN technique to recognize what emotion is present, allow it instead of pushing it away, investigate how it feels in the body, and hold it with nurturing kindness and nonidentification (treating it as the impatience, rather than my impatience). Known as affect labeling, the process of naming emotions has been shown to diminish emotional reactivity by stimulating the prefrontal cortex region of the brain and disrupting emotional amygdala activity. Students correspondingly build resilience to cope with stressful thoughts and find that instead of suppressing difficult emotions, they are able to sit with and process them. In the week-fifteen survey, 89 percent of students said the course “much” or “very much” improved their capacity to bounce back from challenges. This capacity leads to more responsiveness—rather than reactivity—when navigating difficulties.

“I’m someone that really feels emotions when they’re happening,” wrote Mia, a junior majoring in cinema and media studies. “By paying more attention to identifying my emotions, I am able to begin the process of working with them and not letting them just control me.” After the death of their classmate that fall, Mia and her friends got together and at one point started laughing about something. They immediately felt guilty. Mia told her friends about our class discussion on the idea that the heart is big enough to hold it all—the joy with the sorrow. In her reflections, she shared that hearing this helped her friends cope with the complexities of grief.

Comparisons of the week-five and week-fifteen survey responses indicated that high anxiety levels among the students in the mindfulness course dropped from 51 percent to 28 percent. Though the percentage of students who experienced depression didn’t change (31 percent), all students who did experience it remarked that the course increased their capacity to cope. The number of students who felt they “much” or “very much” had tools to cope more than doubled, from 15 percent to 41 percent. This was also true for anxiety, with the number of students who felt they could “much” or “very much” cope increasing from 38 percent to 74 percent.

It wasn’t that their outer circumstances had changed—rather their relationship to their challenges had. Eric, a sophomore psychology major, wrote that mindfulness helped him alleviate depression and anxiety and that his meditation practice had flourished. Over the semester, and with a therapist, Eric worked through a childhood trauma to gain power in defining his identity on his own terms. “My past doesn’t define who I am,” he wrote in a personal journal entry he shared with me. “But my past has certainly shaped who I am today. My pain has cracked my heart open wide. . . . There is so much more to me. I am much more than pain.”

As students learned tools for improving mental health and emotional resilience, they also noticed they were more open to kindness and joy and more aware of things for which they were grateful. The number of students who responded that they “often” or “very often” engaged in self-criticism decreased from 54 percent in week five to 36 percent by week fifteen. Correspondingly, at week five, 33 percent of students said they rarely spoke to themselves with kindness. By week fifteen, this number had decreased to 8 percent—and 81 percent attributed an increase in kind self-talk to the course. “I began to speak to myself with kinder thoughts, and a kinder voice for myself emerged,” Lana wrote. “I held each thought lightly and delicately, without judgment.”

Introduction to Mindfulness is not a silver-bullet class designed to save anyone, and individuals facing depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues should consult a licensed professional. Rather, the course is an invitation to a field that teaches students tools to navigate their experiences with awareness, curiosity, kindness, and openness. As my students have learned more about mindfulness, they have wanted to share the practice with those they care about. Many recommended the course to friends, shared the workbook with their parents, or took meditation classes with family and friends.

“I’m really taking my hardest classes to date, and I have so much on my plate,” Devin, a business major, remarked in an interview. The mindfulness class “is like a weird gap in my really busy schedule today where . . . I’m doing something for myself instead of doing something for my GPA or someone else.”

Situating a mindfulness course within the college day provides a safe space for students to build mental health and well-being practices among a community of their peers over a sustained period of time. This can be done in-person or in an online community. Though it may be difficult to be a college student in today’s society, no one has to navigate it alone. Institutions can include spaces where students explicitly learn resilient coping skills to manage whatever challenges arise—not as a one-time event but as a structured, proactive, comprehensive response to a clear and continued mental health need. In the wake of the tragedies at USC in fall 2019 and others throughout the country, in the face of the pandemic, in the urgent calls for racial justice, and with unknown challenges on the horizon, it is my hope that more universities, in addition to ensuring their campus offers robust mental health services, situate well-being courses alongside academics. This can even be structured as a well-being general education requirement so all students have the opportunity to build the mental and emotional resilience to fully thrive.

“People run on such high stress, and being mindful isn’t usually part of their daily discourse,” Mia said in an interview. “Having the opportunity to learn it in a class setting, where you’re kind of forced [to learn it] but also it’s not demanding or homework-intensive—having every student take this would be so helpful.”

Many thanks to student researchers Shayla McPherson, Cambria Peterson, and Sudhakar Sood for their diligence in interviewing students in the mindfulness course.

Photos courtesy of University of Southern California/Gus Ruelas and Linda Yaron Weston