“Inhale all the love the universe has to offer,” Lloyd Jones told a group of high school students at the beginning of second period. “Exhale anything that doesn’t benefit you.”
A student wearing an ROTC shirt sat, legs crossed, eyes closed, breathing, his fingers touching in a Buddhist mudra, or hand gesture. He was surrounded by 10 other students, all black and Latino, in a room given over to the Mindful Moment program.
All the other students at Patterson high school in Baltimore were doing something similar. Every morning, the school broadcasts 15 minutes of breathing exercises and meditation instruction.
“Even though you may not engage in the practice actively, you still hear it every day,” said the school’s principal, Vance Benton, of the recordings, which also play at the end of the day.
The program is intended to help students cope with the prevalence of death, violence, and turmoil in their lives, Benton said.
“When you look at our children and you compare their situations every day, they feel like it could be their last day. Every day they feel like they may have to take someone else’s life if it came to it. Every day they’re dealing with a close friend or comrade or family member that was killed senselessly.”
Patterson high school serves students living in tough neighborhoods, in a city that is set to reach 300 murders and 1,000 nonfatal shootings by the end of the year. Some of the students are also immigrants whose families escaped violence in Central America. Benton compared what his students go through on a daily basis to the experiences of soldiers serving in a war.
After the program came to Patterson high school, the number of most disciplinary issues were roughly cut in half, according to Benton.
“Whenever there is a child who is acting up or not focused, getting into a fight, the teacher can refer this child to the Mindful Moment room. They sit down with our staff, we have about 15 minutes with them, they do some active listening to figure out what it is the kids are complaining about, whatever is going on. They’ll lead them through some breathing exercise, meditation, give them some tea, send them back to the class,” said Andres Gonzalez, one of the founders of Holistic Life.
It was a risky proposition, bringing yoga and meditation into an inner-city school and taking up instruction time in core subjects, such as reading, in which many of his students struggled. But Benton felt he did not have a choice: they couldn’t focus on reading if they couldn’t deal with their trauma.
“When this opportunity was brought to me, I knew we had to do something that was not ordinary because we have a situation and we have issues that are not ordinary,” Benton said.
The founders of the Holistic Life Foundation, which leads programs in almost 20 other schools, fit the bill. Like the students, the founders and staff are mostly African American or Latino.
“If you look at the founders and our staff, we don’t look like your ordinary everyday yoga instructors,” said Gonzalez. “There are four or five of us on our staff with some dreads; most of us are wearing a superhero T-shirt or a comic book T-shirt or a Star Wars T-shirt.”
Brothers Atman and Ali Smith founded Holistic Life with Gonzalez in 2001 after they met on the University of Maryland party scene. “We were pretty wild guys, but it got to where the end of the night, a few drinks in you and you’re talking about life and philosophizing about the meaning of life and what’s the point of us being here and why are we here,” Gonzalez said.
Ali and Atman, who were raised as what Gonzalez calls “hood hippies”, grew up with a meditation practice but they had moved away from it until one of them spotted a book on the subject at their godfather’s house. “We were all into superheroes and comics a lot so when he opened up, it is amazing stuff you get from meditation, like superpower-type stuff, and we were all like: ‘We wanna learn this shit right here.’”
In 2002, they started their first school program and have since been able to hire some of the original students to work as instructors in the program. Some of these students end up spending a lot of time in the Mindful Moment room with the instructors, who are available throughout the day to help students who are dealing with emotional issues, distractions or trauma.
Despite the drop in behavioral issues, Benton says much of the progress isn’t measurable. He tells the story of a student who was having some issues, but when he went to the Mindful Moment room, the staff was not available. “So he sat down in the main hallway by the door and engaged in his meditation. This is when I knew something was going on, when I knew he felt comfortable enough to sit down outside in this main hallway on the first floor with his eyes closed engaging in his meditation,” Benton said.