MEDITATION INTERVENTION ACCOUNT
Carried out on 9th JULY 2024 by Emma Hamshare
FOR UAL LCF East Bank Room 1209
I gave a ‘Body Scan’ mindfulness meditation as part of our staff development day at LCF EAST BANK with five of my team members. Acting on my peer feedback I asked my Course leader to send out an email beforehand letting people know that they could arrive at 10am to join my meditation or at 10.30 to not join it, for our training and staff development day. Around 5/11 chose to join.
I began by rearranging the chairs in the room, asking everyone to move to the sewing chairs rather than tall stools we usually sit on at the pattern cutting tables. I gave everyone a brief introduction and asked about their meditation experience, most nodded to say they had tried some form of meditation before and only one person said that they had never really mediated before.
I explained that it is a common misconception that we are trying to ‘clear the mind’ in mindfulness meditation and that in fact all we need to do is pay attention to our thoughts and whenever we notice that our mind is not on the body, just bring your attention back to my voice and the body as guided. A key component of mindfulness is also non-judgement. So don’t judge thoughts as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, Just bring your attention whenever you notice you are thinking about something, and focus again gently each time.
I checked that everyone could hear my voice and their postures, encouraging them to have both feet on the ground and position their knees below their knees to give room to breathe into the belly, encouraging them to grab a coat to sit on if they needed something to raise their hips to achieve this and two did. I ensured until everyone was settled and in a good comfortable upright posture before the start.
Typically we would do the body scan lying down, however the studio at East bank is not set up for this it is a sewing and pattern cutting room. It can work just as well seated. This is a beginners meditation that is guided by me, there are not long gaps in my guidance, perhaps two or three periods of ten seconds or so at the beginning and end. I speak in a smooth slow voice and instruct students to simply pay attention initially to their breath, to bring the breath into the belly and then to move their attention to different body parts, beginning at the crown of the head and moving down towards the toes over the course of 25 minutes. The principle of this is to slowly come out of the head or mind and into the body. Although I chose not to explain this because without doing it, it could appear similar to the notion of ‘clearing your head’. The script can be found in the Practical Zen book by my teacher and Zen Master Daizan Skinner pages 38-43. (2018) Although I make slight adaptations to this including briefly mentioning ‘softening’ when placing attention, as I have found this particularly helpful, as a beginning, to working with pain. This approach relates to the ‘soft ointment meditation’ found in Practical mediation and Beyond (Skinner, p 86-89) However I largely stuck to the Body Scan script.
At the end of the meditation I led some gentle stretches and movement, always needed after sitting still for a long period. I asked for any thoughts and reflections and everyone gave very positive verbal feedback with three out of five saying that they felt relaxed. The student who had never tried it before said, ‘It’s really hard!’, I and I agreed, it is not easy to focus your attention and it comes with practice.
We talked about a noise interruption that happened during the beginning of meditation and I described ways that things had changed for me over time through many months of mediation practice, including that loud noises (even a blaring house alarm) in general bother me less.
I gave them each two pieces of paper at the end. The first was reflection only for themselves, I gave 5 minutes of silence and just prompted them to write any thoughts, feelings or reflections, recording whatever came up for them during the meditation. Reflecting after meditation in my experience is often where fundamental changes to the organisation of self can take place.
For the second piece of paper (We lost one piece of paper so one person emailed me their feedback the next day) I told the group that this was for my PgCert and asked them for their thoughts and opinions as fellow educators on any ways that I might be able to bring this into our teaching at LCF. My hope was that if people wrote down this feedback rather than giving it verbally it could be more honest as I am aware that my existing relationships with my colleagues might bring some bias into their reflections. And also that there are power dynamics at play here with our course leader meditating with us.
My colleague and I had a conversation about the ways that perhaps some of the philosophy of mindfulness might be useful as teaching tools and that it would be good to run further sessions and tools for staff.