Mindfulness in the classroom

When Dr. Rob Roeser faces his class as an associate professor of psychology, he tells his students, “this is about you, it’s experiential. Keep a journal and practice.”

He takes them on a journey of mindfulness with meditation as a skill to achieve awareness, which he said focuses on breathing, feelings and sensations in the body.

As a result, “you have learning tools for your own life, to live less stressfully and have more satisfaction in daily living,” he said.

“I plant seeds that show the effectiveness of the benefits of creating emotional balance,” Roeser said. “The course is a taste, not a doctrine.”

Roeser brought his vision for a new course in contemplative education to Portland State.

He has recently returned from his trip to India with the Mind Life Institute, which included scientists, philosophers and contemplatives who met with the Dalai Lama.

From that came a plan to introduce adolescents and young adults to mindfulness. His first trip to India was as a Fulbright scholar in 2005.

The purpose of the Mind Life Institute’s journey to India was to assess the neurological benefits of meditation in creating emotional balance, Roeser said.

He is a senior program coordinator for the institute. The members collaborate for discussion and research, forming partnerships between science and Buddhism.

“We are seeing how mindfulness can reduce deleterious effects of destructive emotions on lives via collaborative research,” Roeser said.

Mindfulness connects mind, body and spirit, he added.

Roeser hopes to take the phenomenon of teaching the skills of contemplative mindfulness into educational settings, modeling other programs after his psychology class, which focuses on contemplative education and psychology.

To that end he collaborates with the Vancouver, B.C., school system.

“This is the developmental area of psychology,” he said.

He has been on a personal journey of scientific scrutiny studying the causes of happiness and suffering. The psychological insights and educational practices come out of many beliefs.

Reading about theories on meditation and mindfulness led him to investigate his own mind, he said.

“It helps you to be in the moment, to be experiencing sounds and feelings in a way that makes you a fuller human being,” Roeser said.

He believes adolescents and young adults are hungry for greater meaning in their lives.

“They are interested in what leads to positive experiences. They want experiential learning and what it means to investigate your own mind in a disciplined way and how meditation affects mind and body, not just to read science,” he said.

Mindfulness seeks to answer the intellectual questions of life, Roeser explained. He said self-knowledge gives people the potential not be buffeted from external influences.

“The Dalai Lama said he wants to bring the benefits of mindfulness and compassion to the larger world in a secular way so that early-in-life habits of heart and mind will have a lasting influence on society,” Roeser said.

He said leaders throughout the world have endorsed the idea of specialized training to create a more compassionate civilization.

He believes the world is going through change as it sees the effects of greed.

“We are too conditioned and influenced by habits and we need to move from ‘me’ and ‘mine’ to a more magnanimous ideal. That takes specialized training,” he said.

Roeser practices yoga and meditation daily, roaming among different wisdoms and traditions to enrich his own life, as well as inside his classroom

 “Sustainability is not just green, but kindness and mindfulness. They are hand and glove,” he said.