Mindfulness
Discover Mindfulness at Middlesex
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness can be summed up as “inner education.” Mindfulness practice helps us to be a scientist of our experience and supports us in:
- Understanding and training our attention
- Seeing thoughts, emotions, and feelings more clearly and learning to relate to them in a more skillful way
- Becoming aware of the habits of our own mind and intentionally cultivating particular qualities that are more aligned with our values
- Learning how to better connect and attune with others, and developing more awareness of our relationship with our environment.
The School Community Model
At Middlesex we have a full-time faculty member dedicated to supporting our entire school community (students, faculty, staff, parents, and alumni) in mindfulness practice. In all the mindfulness programs, the decision to practice mindfulness is always up to the person. It is always an invitation.
Director of Mindfulness Program
For the past decade, Nina Bryce has been teaching mindfulness and developing wellness programming primarily at Harvard University, from its School of Education to the College’s Dean of Students Office to its Center for Wellness & Health Promotion. At the same time, she has been a teacher with Inward Bound Mindfulness Education, planning and leading immersive mindfulness retreats; she also served on the design team that formed WholeSchool Mindfulness, a nonprofit that brings mindfulness education into schools and campuses. A Morehead-Cain Scholar, Nina earned her B.A. in American studies (with minors in women’s and gender studies) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she received her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School.
History of Mindfulness
In 1979 Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn (parent of two Middlesex alumni) held the first secular mindfulness course, called Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, at UMass Medical School. Now mindfulness has become a mainstream influence in medicine, psychology, business, and education and featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 2014. Over thirty years of research supports the use of mindfulness, which include improvements in attention, sleep, emotional regulation, self-esteem, anxiety, depression and ADHD. Recent brain imaging research, including work by Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, shows that mindfulness practice positively alters the structures of the brain associated with learning, memory, empathy, and stress.
Mindfulness Speakers at Middlesex
On June 16th, 2017, Middlesex hosted the Northeast Independent School Mindfulness Conference in partnership with the Independent School Health Association. You can read a report of the conference here.
