Make Mindfulness a Part of Your Warmup

Meditation is having a moment. Of course, it’s been around for thousands of years, but the rise of social media has created a momentous wave of interest in how these practices can help us to feel better and be better, and words like “meditation” and “mindfulness” can now be heard in conversions everywhere, from collegiate seminars to coffeehouses.

This is not just another hip wellness trend. This wave of excitement is backed by an ever-expanding collection of scientific data. Researchers have been hard at work “doing the homework” to substantiate the long-touted benefits of mindfulness and, while these studies are not without their caveats, it appears there is good reason to be excited.

Mindfulness, when practiced consistently, can bring about a long and diverse list of physical, cognitive, and emotional benefits. A regular practice of relatively short duration can enhance attentional capacities, decrease the intensity of stress, increase the ability to solve problems creatively, enhance satisfaction in relationships, and even improve disease markers such as chronically elevated heart-rate and blood pressure. Perhaps most importantly, most studies of meditation practice indicate that the participants increased their ability to emotionally regulate themselves and stay in positive emotional states, and that they spent less time in negative states such as rumination and anxiety.

Work has begun to replicate these types of studies in school-aged children, and the results are similarly encouraging. Children who participated in a regular mindfulness practice experienced all of the benefits listed above. Researchers also observed that younger participants experienced more ease in social relationships and were more skilled at establishing new friendships after participating in a mindfulness program. Think about how much that one aspect alone could impact the lives of your young students!

Most music educators would leap out of their chairs at the suggestion of a set of techniques that can improve their students’ ability to focus, think creatively, and to be emotionally aware and relationally connected. These are all of the meta-skills that build a culture of excellence in a music program. So we should ask ourselves: If meditation offers our students this benefit, how can we incorporate it into our instruction?

Cultivating Mindful Moments

The first step may involve dispensing with some of our preconceptions about what mindfulness meditation is. By now, most of us probably accept that we can practice effective mindfulness without wearing robes or shaving our heads, and that it’s not necessary to jettison ourselves to a mountaintop in Tibet or an ancient forest in Thailand. However, we may still associate mindfulness with sitting cross-legged on a cushion, being completely still and silent, and practicing “watching our breath” for fifteen minutes, an hour, or even longer.

This type of “formal” practice can be transformative. I recommend it to almost everyone who asks me about it, but most educators don’t have fifteen, or even five, minutes to spare during our lessons. However, this doesn’t mean that mindfulness cannot find a powerful place in our routine. After many years of practice, I now understand mindfulness more as an attitude-shift in our orientation toward life as opposed to a rigid adherence to certain techniques, and this attitude-shift can be practiced to great effect in as little as a few seconds, whenever we can remember to do it.

Shinzen Young, an influential American meditation teacher and author, describes this “attitude-shift” with great eloquence, explaining that “while our ‘default’ setting is to push-and-pull on everything; grasp at pleasure while closing down and turning away from pain, the fundamental attitude of mindfulness is to ‘Open Up and Turn Toward’ everything in the present moment.” Sitting down with the intention of practicing this attitude shift with great focus and clarity for a long stretch of time is wonderful, but many meditation teachers would argue that it is just as, if not more, effective to practice the shift as we go through our day, peppering and sprinkling our life with seeds of mindfulness until they grow into a more healthy and happy way of living.

This approach of cultivating “mindful moments” is something that we can easily share with our students. Our classrooms are already consistent and routine-based. We often have a few minutes at the beginning of class set aside for “fundamentals,” the basic skills that build the foundation of musicianship. Mindfulness belongs here. It is during this period where we can easily take 1-2 minutes to shift our attitude toward one of awareness, openness, and gratitude. Doing so consistently will create a powerful association in your students. YOUR class will be the one that “starts with mindfulness,” and they will begin to remember to be mindful just by being around you or in your rehearsal space. The attitude of mindfulness will become part of your culture, and that will lead gradually to all of the benefits touted by the science above, as well as more focused and effective rehearsals, and more emotionally engaged music making.

There are a variety of techniques that we can use to start this process. I am going to suggest a few of my favorites here, but I encourage you to get creative in designing short practices that work well for you and your students.

1. A Perennial Classic: Focus on Breathing

Full and relaxed breathing is integral to musicianship, (tone production for singers and wind players). You may already open class with breathing exercises. Before beginning any structured breathing or playing, invite the students to take a minute to feel the sensations of breathing in their body. You can guide them to notice sensations in the belly, the chest, the throat, the tip of the nose, or all of those areas at once. Emphasize relaxation, inviting them to notice any tension they are holding onto, and to let it gently relax, if possible. You may want to point out that distractions, such as discursive thoughts and daydreaming, are natural, and that there is no reason to be hard on yourself if you find it difficult to focus on the body. Simply be gentle and open, and notice what you can notice. You will be amazed at the sense of calm that even a minute of this can bring into your space.

2. Other Somatic Sensations: Grounding in the Body

Breath sensations are an excellent focus object, but we can expand from there into the other felt sensations that are happening in our body. One particularly powerful technique is to focus your attention on the feeling of your feet on the floor. Invite students to notice the solidity and firmness of the ground, and how it effortlessly supports the weight of their bodies. From there, ask them to investigate any tense feelings in their bodies, and to see if they can “let them drop” into the support of their chair and the floor. It’s quite common for students to notice tension in their shoulders and their necks and faces, and relaxing those patterns can feel wonderful. This “ground-then-relax” technique is also a great intervention for students (and conductors) who experience stage fright.

3. Auditory Sensations: Connect with “Silence”

Are you guilty of the following? Your students come into your class continuing conversations that started in the hallway, getting folders and binders out of bookbags. They may be unlatching and relatching cases and assembling their instruments. The opening seconds of music class are an eruption of auditory chaos. Too often, we leap straight from that maelstrom into our warm-up, with no silence in between. We know that it’s crucial for our students to be able to listen to and critique music with focus and clarity, but we launch straight into the cognitive load of asking them to play or sing without providing a chance for the “noise of the day” to die down.

Tell your students that “the tuning note always arises from silence.” Or, even better, say “we’re going to have a silent minute together before the tuning note.” Instruct your students to “listen to the silence.” They may enjoy doing this with their eyes closed. After a few days of this, someone will point out the obvious. There is no true silence. When the chatter and noise of entering class dies down, what remains is still an intricate world of sound. They will hear the heat or the air conditioning and the hum of the electricity in the walls. They may hear trees rustling in the wind outside or the subtle sounds of other classes next door. They will hear breathing and coughing and bodies shifting in chairs. They may even hear their own heartbeat subtly in their ears. Instruct them to listen openly to whatever comes up.

The takeaway is this: There may be no such thing as external quiet. But true “internal quiet” comes from taking a stance of openness and listening very carefully to what is happening in the present moment around you. It is this quiet, spacious and steady state of mind that we want to bring into rehearsal, as well as all of our interactions with one another.

4. Visual Power-Ups

You can lead your students through a series of exercises that will increase their level of visual focus and clarity. This is super-fun, and it’s a great tool for learning how to respond to the gestures of a conductor. The big idea is to start with a relatively large object and focus on it, and to then lead the students through a process of making the object more and more refined.

My favorite example: Hold for 5-10 seconds at each stage.

• I would like for everyone to look at me (the conductor) please.
• Now, focus on my right arm
• Focus on my right hand (holding the baton)
• Now Focus on the baton itself
• Focus your eyes on the very tip of the baton.

This can be done with the notes on a sheet of music, a poster in the classroom, the student’s hand, or anything else, as long as it follows the pattern of progressively investigating finer and finer details.

5. Gratitude

The feeling of gratitude is a stellar object for a short meditation. Orienting toward gratitude opens our hearts to empathy and compassion, and is a good reminder of our own vulnerability. This is a great attitude to carry into music-making, especially on more sensitive, chorale-type pieces.

Again, students may enjoy closing their eyes. Invite them to visualize one person or animal in their life for whom they are thankful. It may be a family member, a friend, a teacher or a pet. Ask them to visualize this person clearly in their heads, and then to give them a big smile and say “thank you.” Gratitude for things like “running water” and “clean clothes” is excellent too, but directing the feeling toward another human being or animal is particularly powerful.

On occasion, you may want to take this a step further and ask the students to actually reach out to their gratitude partner and say thank you. A great colleague and friend of mine, on the day of big performances, likes to tell students to “take out their phone, text one person that helped you to get to where you are today, and say thank you.” That encapsulates the spirit of this practice perfectly.

Some of your students may pull back slightly the first few times you suggest these practices. That is completely natural. An attitude of grace and openness is not the norm in modern life, especially not for teenagers. Inform your students that these exercises are not mandatory, and that they do not have to participate if they are truly uncomfortable. Extend these practices as an open invitation to well-being, and then give them a few days to let their guard down. You will likely be amazed at how meaningful this part of rehearsal will become to some of them.

Science continues to demonstrate the benefits that are created by regular mindfulness practice. I hope you will experiment with some of the ideas in this article in order to experience those benefits firsthand. There is huge overlap between the traits that are strengthened by mindfulness and the traits that are important to being a well-rounded musician, and I believe that mindfulness needs to be part of the classroom tool-kit for every serious music educator. Please reach out to me and let me know how these techniques worked for you and your students, and please share any other mindfulness techniques that you have discovered or created on your own.