Emotion and Meditation

The EQ Factor was very enjoyable to read. But why did I have this emotion of joy? As I read and while I reflected afterward, I continually recalled different books, podcasts and news stories related to this subject that I have encountered in recent months. My sense of joy came from the connections I made between this article and Gad Saad’s book The Consuming Instinct which covers the innate evolutionary influence on what we eat, clothing we wear, give as gifts and consume for entertainment. I also made a connection to Sam Harris’ Podcast with Paul Bloom, The Virtues of Cold Blood, in which they discuss the potential problems of allowing empathy to direct our lives. Finally, I connected the story of a parent negatively imprinting a behavior and response on a child early in life to this article from the Atlantic, No Spanking, No Time Outs, No Problem.

I worked in two different life skills classrooms for a total of 7 years. During that time I encountered a wide range of behaviors and emotions from the students and the staff as we ALL worked through the days together. I have been to a dozen professional development classes and Mandt training where the instructors preach the mantra that “behavior is communication” and I agree. These trainings always suggest ways to identify and safely assist students with escalating behavior and emotions. However, we rarely discuss ways to pre-teach emotional intelligence and recognition. The classes and licensed teachers that I have worked with have rarely spent time in this subject area.

I found the anecdote about the high school who was adding EQ to its curriculum to be fascinating. For many years, I have thought that teaching students (ALL students, not just Life Skills students) how to recognize and manage their emotions and behaviors could be massively beneficial. I believe that part of my success in calmly and safely working with students in escalated behaviors is due to my own personal ability to manage my own emotions. For the last two years, I have begun to practice mindfulness meditation. This practice has further improved my ability to deal with my emotions and to recognize emotions in others. Ideally, I would love to find a way to implement the practice of meditation into my own class someday. I am sure there are some obvious hurdles in the way of this goal but there is also a growing body of research that supports the efficacy of meditation for improving multiple aspects of life, including emotional intelligence. I know from personal experience that when I start my day with  5,10 or 20 minutes of meditation I feel more relaxed, clear headed and able to manage the problems that come up in everyday life.

“You should sit in meditation for 20 minutes per day, unless you are too busy, then you should sit for an hour.” - Old Zen Saying