Orland Evangelical Free Church | New York Times Readers and Mindfulness

The story by Patricia Leigh Brown, "In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind," was a hit. It was published Saturday, June 16^th, and remained #4 on the Times most e-mailed list Wednesday. Brown describes how mindfulness techniques are being taught to elementary school children in Oakland to help them gain self-control.

As one part of American culture swings further toward acceptance of eastern religions as mainstream, another part reacts with astonishment, dismay, and even rage. Evangelicals see the growth of Buddhism, yoga, and more generic New Age philosophies as a kind of cataclysm.

How should we respond?

For many, ridicule is a great start. Brown takes us to a classroom where a session "began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness." Hear the cackles, the rednecks saying "Ommmm," and the Rush wannabes cracking wise.

Brown knows that the ridicule even comes from parts of the Times readership. One teacher commented that the new teaching was "Cloud Nine-groovy-hippie-liberals bringing ‘enlightenment' to inner city schools." Brown herself concedes that it "may seem like a New Yorker caricature of West Coast life."

But ridicule won't take critics of mindfulness training very far. We're talking about skilled educators who know how to make a classroom do exactly what they require. Making fun of them won't overcome their methods, nor will it necessarily win over the audience of children they influence.

The implementation of such programs is methodical. "During a five-week pilot program at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, Miss Megan, the ‘mindful' coach, visited every classroom twice a week, leading 15 minute sessions on how to have ‘gentle breaths and still bodies.' The sound of the Tibetan bowl reverberated at the start and finish of each lesson."

Among other kinds of training, children are taught "focused breathing and concentrating on a single object." Says one researcher, "Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention. But we never teach them how."

So critics of mindfulness training are up against daily class routines that work their principles into developing minds through repetition. Ridicule won't overcome rigor.

The programs being tested in schools also have the backing of scientific research. They were "loosely adapted from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 to help medical patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety, and depression." Kaiser Permanente recently studied teenagers in San Jose and "found that meditation techniques helped improve mood disorders, depression, and self-harming behaviors like anorexia and bulimia."

So critics of these techniques will have to discredit roughly twenty-eight years of medical journal articles. Again, ridicule isn't up to the job.

And for many children, the techniques seem to be helpful. One 11-year-old boy said, "I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat. The mindfulness really helped."

Another boy "defined mindfulness as ‘not hitting someone in the mouth.'" In spite of the simplicity of his concept - or maybe because of it - the boy seemed to his mother to be applying it. She said, "[O]ne day after school he told me, ‘I'm taking a moment.'"

Is it wise to ridicule something that works for people in their own experience?

Evangelicals would be wrong to embrace mindfulness techniques. They would also be wrong to despair of stopping the techniques' influence. We will have to respond to the deceptions of Buddhist spirituality with the spiritual power of Christ in our own lives. We will have to show better self-control than those who claim to gain it through meditation - especially control over our AM radio sarcasm.

The problem we face is this: Brown mentions a 4-year-old trained in mindfulness who sees her mommy get angry in a traffic jam and says, "Mommy, Mommy, you have to sing the breathing song." This toddler has gained her moral framework for life from Buddhism. When she grows up, these principles will be prejudicial with her. And it won't be her fault.

You will encounter her when she's 18, and the call of God on your life will be to show her the truth of Jesus Christ. How will you do so?