Meditation in the Classroom

American filmmaker David Lynch has been doing Transcendental Meditation twice a day, every day, since 1973. In 2005, he formed a foundation to teach TM to schoolchildren and people considered to be 'at risk'.

A few years ago I received an email with a quote from Lynch's book about TM, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity. I bought a copy, read it, and promptly sent an email to The David Lynch Foundation asking how I could become involved in bringing TM to my local schools.

I soon received an email from someone who is part of the DLF's "Canadian operations". He followed the email up with a phone call but I wasn't home for the call. In his message he said he would try calling later, but I never heard from him again. He didn't leave a phone number for me to reach him at, and neither he nor DLF ever responded to my subsequent emails.

In the meantime, I watched a number of You Tube videos about DLF. Seeing an auditorium filled with school kids doing TM convinced me that I should be teaching kids to meditate.

So I contacted the local school board to find out if they wanted me to instruct teachers on how to make meditation part of their school routine. I suggested it could be part of a professional development day, but the stumbling block seemed to be an unwillingness to pay for such a service. I was told I would probably have to get the teachers to agree to bear the cost, and how unlikely it was that they would be willing to shell out as little as $10-20 per person.

Next I wrote to various ministers in the Ontario government urging them to mandate meditation in the classroom. Someone from the education minister's office informed me that the province's revised school curricula suggests meditation for Grades 1-8 to address substance abuse, and for Grades 11 and 12 to manage stress.

Somewhere along the way I wrote an email to the principal's office of the local high school suggesting they hire me to teach meditation to their teachers, but I never received any kind of reply.

I also learned TM and introduced mantra meditation to my classes.

Eventually I got a break when two teachers from the high school approached me to teach meditation to their Grade 12 Philosophy class. They asked if I could discuss meditation in the context of Daoist, Buddhist and Confucian philosophical traditions. So I put together a Powerpoint presentation covering the bare essentials of the Dao, the Buddha, and Confucius, finishing up with a 20-minute meditation.

For the most part the kids were receptive to the whole experience, and the feedback I got from the teachers was very positive. My visit was even covered by the local paper.

In fact, it was that experience that led me here.

In my effort to create a useful, impactful presentation for those schoolkids, I convinced myself that I had simplified the art and science of meditation to the point that anyone could learn it, with or without a teacher, using just this blog and the soon-to-be-released iPhone/iPad app.

Only time will tell if I'm right.