Make an Update: Identify and describe an educational counseling need or practice of interest or relevance to you.

For school counselors, teaching students to focus on the present moment and acknowledge their thoughts and feelings in a non-judgmental way seems like a dream. Research has proven that mindfulness techniques can decrease behavioral problems, decrease symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, and increase working memory capacity.

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens.

Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, for instance, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.

Mindfulness can be used with students as a model of empowerment, helping students learn and accept personal responsibility for their lives while externalizing events beyond their control. By helping students learn to embrace and practice self-awareness, school counselors empower individuals to take ownership of thoughts, feelings, and actions through the use of tailored interventions.

Mindfulness is dedicated to present-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings, and senses for the purpose of better management of stressors. By developing an increased awareness to internal reactions, a form of desensitization develops to those internal emotional, cognitive, and physical reactions (Whitfield, 2006). Removing or separating self from these internal reactions enables the student to identify, not as the reaction, but rather as an individual who is experiencing an emotion, thought, or physical state.

Separating self from internal reactions empowers an individual to stop the thought process, step back from the emotion, and actively minimize physical responses of a previously troubling situation—all essential skills for children and adolescents (Hamiel, 2005; Semple et al., 2005). A school counselor can help students learn to separate their personal identities from a situation, emotion, or event. Through this process, school counselors also teach students to mindfully respond rather than immediately react. Therefore, school counselors can facilitate students’ exploration of effective coping mechanisms in the management of stressors, a primary tenet of individual counseling within the ASCA (2004) national model.

Students may then use mindfulness practices to build self-acceptance and appreciation of others’ circumstances. Learning to accept thoughts, feelings, and physical reactions in a nonjudgmental way may help students become more understanding, respecting, and valuing of both self and others, thereby enhancing safety of the school community (ASCA, 2009)

The practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental, purposeful, inner-self attention must be taught, as it is not an innate aspect of human development. Experiential techniques and specific exercises in concentration are often used in teaching mindfulness. Continual and persistent practice is important because mindfulness is a way of learning how to cognitively modify instinctual observational techniques and become increasingly aware in a nonjudgmental fashion (Kurash & Schaul, 2006). The school setting may be ideal for such practices, as students may apply these techniques and skills during counseling sessions, in class, socially, and at home.

School counselors may encourage mindfulness with students by helping them learn to be OK with not knowing what to do in a situation or with an emotion, taking ownership for each reaction, and accepting oneself as a continual work in progress. Although there are a multitude of techniques that may be implemented when learning to experience mindfulness, the most common include reoccurring experiential descriptions, body scan, and breathing techniques.

When working with children and adolescents, mindfulness can be used to help them accept mistakes, differentiate the aspects of life they can and cannot change, accept uncertainty, and recognize that some suffering may be needed to develop decision-making skills. As students are able to engage and apply mindfulness practices, they develop a stronger ability to face, manage, and overcome difficult situations. By facing these issues through the lens of mindfulness, students may be empowered to take ownership of their lives, make stronger choices, develop enhanced academic abilities, and cultivate stronger social skills.

References

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154487101.pdf

https://confidentcounselors.com/2018/01/22/using-mindfulness-in-school-counseling/

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/mindfulness/definition#how-cultivate-mindfulness