Mindfulness at Work: 7 Places Where Employees Benefit from Meditation

Mindfulness, the practice of being awake to the present moment, is now in vogue in American workplaces as varied as Google, Goldman Sachs, Aetna and General Mills. Backed by scientific research of the cognitive benefits of ancient Buddhist meditation, corporate types thinking of productivity and the bottom line quickly trained their workers how to focus using mindfulness. Outside of finance, tech and manufacturing industries, NationSwell found seven more workplaces where you find employees reaping the benefits of meditating on a regular basis.

1. Concert Hall

Where: Tempe, Ariz.
After studying mindfulness for four decades, Ellen Langer, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is renowned as the field’s mother. Her concept of mindfulness differs from the common practice, in that she believes no meditation is necessary to change the brain’s chemistry; instead, she achieves mindfulness by existing in a state of “actively noticing new things,” she tells NationSwell.
As part of her research, she once split the Arizona State University Symphony Orchestra into two groups and instructed each to play a piece of music by Johannes Brahms, which she recorded. Langer asked the first group to remember their best performance of the familiar piece and try their best to replicate it. She told the other group of musicians to vary the classical piece with subtle riffs that only they would recognize. Langer taped both performances and played them side-by-side for an audience. Overwhelmingly, listeners preferred the second one. To Langer, it seemed that the more choices we make deliberately — in a word, mindfully — as opposed to the mindless repetition, the better our end-product will be. The most important implication for Langer came later, when she was writing up the study: In America, she says, we so often prize a “strong leader to tell people what to do,” but as the orchestra’s performance proves, when an individual takes the lead instead of doing what someone instructs her to do, a superior result is the likely outcome.

2. Primary School

Where: East Village, New York City
“The research is pretty conclusive: when kids feel better, they learn better. One precedes the other,” declares Alan Brown, a consultant with Mindful Schools where he offers mindfulness training to the private school’s freshman and sophomores. Brown incorporated a serious practice into his life at a week-long silent retreat, after “jumping out of my skin, reading the toilet paper, doing anything but to be with your own thoughts and with yourself.” He now teaches kids how to be attuned to themselves and recognize feelings that may be subconsciously guiding their lives, like when they’re hyped up with sugar or are stressed out about a test. (Solutions: spending a moment in a designated corner calming down, breathing through a freakout to restore higher cognitive functions.)
As someone in the caregiving profession, Brown reminds himself and his fellow teachers they need to adopt mindfulness practices as well. With them, “the way I interact with others comes from a place of much greater compassion for the kids: clearly this young person, who is not a fully-formed, self-regulating adult, is probably trying their best and probably has some really significant hurdles outside the classroom. I’m not going to let that get to me.” If teachers expect similarly enlightened behavior from their kids, Brown adds, they have to know, “You can’t teach what you don’t have in your own body” and better embrace a meditative practice to see the results at every desk.

The UMass Mindfulness in Medicine program teaches the benefits of meditation to their staff members.

3. Hospital

Where: Shrewsbury, Mass.
Modern mindfulness was formalized in 1979 at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where Jon Kabat-Zinn created an eight-week meditation routine to reduce stress for the hospital’s chronically ill patients that’s now replicated worldwide. Back on the medical campus where it all started, a new mindfulness program is being offered this summer for the people on the other side of treatment: the physicians, nurse practitioners and care managers.
The Mindfulness in Medicine program works to combat the frequent feeling of dissatisfaction about a lack of patient interaction among doctors. Instructor Carl Fulwiler gives lectures about the clinical research on meditation’s benefits, teaches 90-minute workshops for busy staffers and leads full-blown courses for a dedicated few. His teachings focus on how to avoid burnout with strategic pauses; by taking a breath immediately prior to seeing a patient, doctors can focus solely on the interaction. “Often they’re thinking about what’s the next thing they have to do or the documentation. They’re not even hearing a lot of what the patient is saying,” Fulwiler observes. With mindfulness, they can see what “might be contributing to a bad encounter, what’s preventing us from being empathetic, compassionate and more efficient in our style of communication?” The whole interaction may be over in three minutes, but having that time be meaningful is vital for helping the healers themselves feel the rewards of a demanding job.

4. Government

Where: Washington, D.C.
Change rarely comes to our nation’s capital, but that’s okay in Rep. Tim Ryan’s mind. A meditative practice equipped him to deal with legislative gridlock and partisan bickering. The seven-term Democrat representing northeastern Ohio practices mindfulness in a half lotus position for roughly 40 minutes daily — a regimen he began after attending one of Kabat-Zinn’s retreats in 2008, after which he gained “a whole new way of relating with what was going on in the world,” Ryan tells The Atlantic. “And like any good thing that a congressman finds — a new technology, a new policy idea — immediately I said, ‘How do we get this out?’” Ryan first wrote the book “A Mindful Nation,” exploring the ways mindfulness is being implemented across America, and today, in sessions of the House Appropriations Committee on which he sits, the representative advocates for more funds to be deployed to teach meditation tactics. The money may not be forthcoming just yet, but that hasn’t stopped mindfulness from gaining more new converts like Ryan every day.

5. Police Department

Where: Hillsboro, Ore.
Last month, Americans watched videos of officer-involved shootings in Baton Rouge, La.; St. Paul, Minn; and North Miami, and they read about the five cops who died in a sniper attack in Dallas. While those crises were deeply felt by civilians nationwide, they were only a glimpse of what cops encounter regularly. “Law enforcement is a profession that is deeply impacted by trauma. On a daily basis, we bump up against human suffering,” says Lt. Richard Goerling, head of Hillsboro Police Department’s investigative division and a faculty member at Pacific University. “It doesn’t take very long for police officers’ well-being to erode dramatically,” he adds, ticking off studies that track early mortality and cardiovascular issues among public safety professionals.
Through the organization Mindful Badge, Goerling teaches several police departments in the Portland area and in Northern California how mindfulness can better cops’ performance: sharpening their attention to life-or-death details, cultivating empathy and compassion that’s crucial for stops and searches and building resilience before encountering trauma. The theory goes that once an officer receives mental training, he can sense when a stressor in his environment is activating his flight-or-flight reactions and then check those instincts. “If a police officer is in their own crisis,” Goerling suggests, “they’re not going to meet that person in a way that’s totally effective.” The lieutenant is aware mindfulness isn’t a cure-all for “a landscape of suffering,” but he believes it’s a first step to changing a “broken” police culture that takes its officers’ health for granted.

6. Athletic Competition

Where: San Diego, Calif.
BMX bikers may not seem like a group that’s primed for meditation, but when an elite biker stuttered with anxiety at the starting line, his coach James Herrera looked into any way to solve the problem of managing stress before a high-stakes event. Herrera soon got in touch with the Center for Mindfulness at the University of California, San Diego, and he signed up his seven-man team for a small study into the effects of meditation on “very healthy guys who are at the top of their sport,” lead author Lori Haase tells NationSwell. Over seven weeks, the bikers practiced a normal mindfulness routine, but with extra impediments like having their hands submerged in a bucket of icy water to teach them to feel the sensation of pain, rather than reacting to it cognitively. As the weeks went on, their bodies seemed to prepare for a physical shock, without an accompanying psychological panic. In other words, participants’ bodies were so amped up and hyperaware that they didn’t need to react as strongly to the stressor itself compared to an average person. The study didn’t test whether it made them faster on the course, but it seemed to suggest that reaction times could be sped up by using mindfulness to slow down.

7. Military

Where: Honolulu, Hawaii
Like cops, members of the military have much to gain from situational awareness. A couple seconds’ of lead-time for a soldier to notice someone in a bulky jacket running into a public square could prevent a suicide bomb from taking out dozens of civilians and comrades abroad. But that’s not all mindfulness is good for in a service member’s line of duty.
Before soldiers even leave home, they must deal with leaving family and putting other aspects of their lives on hold. To prepare soldiers for deployment, University of Miami neuroscientist Amishi Jha offered mindfulness trainings at an Army outpost on Oahu to soldiers heading to Afghanistan. To fit the program into an already crowded training regimen, Jha drastically cut down the standard 40-hour model to an eight-hour practice scattered throughout eight weeks. Despite the stress of leaving that could sap the mind’s attention and working memory — “everything they need to do the job well when they’re there,” Jha notes — the mindfulness trainings prevented their minds from wandering. Tentative research Jha’s still conducting suggests those benefits persist post-deployment. Her session was just like boot camp, Jha found, only for the brain.

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It’s Not a Stretch to See That This Yoga Teacher Makes a Difference to At-Risk Teens

Just think back to the stress and anxiety of high school. Many teens need a little guidance to navigate the angst-ridden time, and one California teacher is proving that a little bit of stretching, meditation, and sticky mats can work wonders.
Erin Lila Wilson, the founder and executive director of RISE Yoga for Youth, is bringing a sense of peace and calm to at-risk high schoolers in the Bay Area, Huffington Post reports.
Take Alex Ramirez, a student at San Francisco’s Mission High School who got into fights with her mom and couldn’t focus in school. According to the RISE website, after joining Wilson’s yoga program, her GPA went from 1.6 her freshman year to an impressive 3.5 her sophomore year, and now she’s a 4.0 senior who’s in the process of applying to colleges.
“It helped me find a balance in life,” she said of the program. Alex said yoga has also helped improved her and her mother’s relationship because they practice yoga together.
MORE: Mindfulness Isn’t Just a Hot Trend. It’s Improving Low-Income Schools
Alex’s story may be unique, but here’s why yoga for isn’t just for New Age hippies. Yoga promotes relaxation, mental focus and a healthy way to manage stress. And for teens who might come from rough backgrounds and difficult family situations, the sense of inner-calm that yoga brings might be just the solution. (You might remember our story on how meditation worked miracles for this inner city high school in San Francisco.)
Since its launch in January 2012, RISE Yoga for Youth has expanded to seven other at-risk bay area high schools.
“From the moment I started, I just totally fell in love with teaching teens,” Wilson told Huffington Post. “I realized that it’s such a gift to bring these practices to young people, because young people are so open and so receptive, and they can take these practices and these tools with them for the rest of their lives.”

Mindfulness Isn’t Just a Hot Trend. It’s Improving Low-Income Schools

When kids can’t concentrate on their studies, it’s probably because their attention is focused on everything else going on in their lives. Consider the students at Coronado Elementary School, a low-income, public school in Richmond, Calif. Jean-Gabrielle Larochette, a teacher at the school, had his formerly rowdy class of kids practice the calming method of “Mindfulness,” a trendy meditation-like exercise that preaches “living in the moment,” for 15 minutes every day. The method showed such amazing results that he went on to found the Mindful Life Project, a non-profit that seeks to empower children through mindful living. Larochette told Mindshift that all the schools his organization works with have seen drops in disciplinary action. Other studies have shown that practicing mindfulness may also reduce ADHD behaviors and increase attention in young students.
MORE: How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools
“Before we can teach a kid how to academically excel in school, we need to teach him how to have stillness, pay attention, stay on task, regulate, make good choices,” Larochette told the publication. Mindfulness may be a trendy relaxation method for adults, but it looks like it’s helping kids stay on track, too.

How Meditation Is Bringing Calm to San Francisco’s Toughest Schools

When the bells sound twice a day at Visitacion Valley Middle School in San Francisco, students who used to be too rowdy to even sit still close their eyes and spend 15 minutes clearing their minds. They’re practicing transcendental meditation in the classroom. Visitacion Valley is one of a handful of Bay Area schools that has instituted a Quiet Time program as a way to reduce stress and help kids focus. At this school, which is in an area that boasts the second-highest crime rate in the city, and where gunfire can be heard throughout the day, the program has worked miracles.
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“When I arrived at [Visitacion Valley] 13 years ago, it had the highest absenteeism rate, the highest suspension rate, the highest teacher turnover rate, and the lowest academic achievement rate,” says James Dierke, the Visitacion Valley principal who brought the program to life in 2007. Less than a year after starting Quiet Time, which is in part funded by the David Lynch Foundation, attendance rates at the school climbed to 98.3 percent. The number of suspensions fell by 45 percent. And standardized test scores and grade point averages increased significantly. Administrators credit meditation with some of those gains.
“The research is showing big effects on students’ performance,” Richard Carranza, San Francisco schools superintendent, told SFGate. “Our new accountability standards, which we’re developing in tandem with other big California districts, emphasize the importance of social-emotional factors in improving kids’ lives, not just academics. That’s where Quiet Time can have a major impact, and I’d like to see it expand well beyond a handful of schools.”
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