Embodied Mindfulness: A New Perspective on Recreating Learning Experiences, Attention Training, and Intersubjective Interactions

Document Type : پژوهشی

Author

• Zainab Mahdavi

PhD from Ferdowsi, University of Mashhad

10.22067/fedu.2024.80911.1251

Abstract

Mindfulness is the method of studying attention and discovering experience; it is increasing in educational research in Western universities and demonstrates itself in publications and curricula. Therefore, applying mindfulness in the educational system can improve the methods of learning and attention. This paper first studies modern mindfulness and its results. Then criticizes its challenges & limitations that are affected by theoretical foundations. Originally, mindfulness took a holistic position and was not confined to one aspect. Today, neuroscience, cognitive science, and clinical psychology reduced mindfulness to the psychological dimension. In comparison, it is extended in many aspects like ethical, spiritual, cultural, and social. Although mindfulness achieved brilliant results, it might act as an inner technological control tool that is normalized and internalized. In neurophenomenology, however, the Buddhist origins and ethical-spiritual features would be kept, respected, and accepted results from empirical areas. Neurophenomenology proposes enactive & embodied mindfulness awareness to preserve all mindfulness features. Mindfulness is something more and beyond recovering from mental illnesses. It follows healing in ethical conduct to reach self-transcendence and intersubjectivity relation. Thus, this paper explains embodied mindfulness and considers its educational implications according to the neurophenomenology perspectives.
Keywords: embodied mindfulness, enaction, neurophenomenology, learning experience, attention training, intersubjective interactions
 
Synopsis
Education is the process of mind making. So, we need a method to help us understand our educational experiences profoundly. Mindfulness is the method of studying experience. In the last decade, scientific research about mindfulness has increased. The findings could transform the fundamental realm philosophy of education and its sub-branches like curriculum, educational technology, and educational planning (Burrows, 2011; Thierry et al., 2018). Nevertheless, mindfulness and its remarkable results have not found a place in the education system in Iran yet. Generally, the mindfulness techniques in Iran have more used as a clinical or cognitive therapy especially mental issues such as anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and etc. (Kaviani et al., 2005; Pourhosein et al., 2019). Since the findings indicate that mindfulness training improve cognitive, emotional, emotional function and can make better the processes of attention, memory and learning, therefore, mindfulness approach can help resolving educational problems and give opportunity to students reflect on their pedagogical experiences precisely. However, there is a crucial point that has to be considered about mindfulness training and using mindfulness in education. Mindfulness originally is holistic as the human. It means mindfulness should comprise multiple psychological, social, moral, and cultural dimensions. Western researchers used to apply mindfulness in clinical, and psychological ways and its effect on neural activities or mental personal disorders. While this dimension is only a part of whole mindfulness. Mindfulness cannot reach its goal by considering only one aspect that modern mindfulness uses today. Thus, choosing a reductionism or holism position will determine different consequences for the education system. Firstly, the paper presents Western and Buddhist views of mindfulness and then, proposes embodied enactive mindfulness according to the neurophenomenology perspective is rooted in Buddhism. This position makes modern Western mindfulness more perfect and fruitful.
Neurophenomenology is the methodological stream that chooses different methods compared to theories like representationalism, dualism, Physicalism, and empirical realism. In this view, if cognitive science is to include human experience, it must have some method for exploring and knowing what human experience is. It is for this reason that neurophenomenology focus on the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness(Varela et al., 2017). Mindfulness in the enactive embodiment approach should not be considered as a private realm but a form of specific knowledge to shape the states and behaviors of mind-body in the environment. The term embodiment imply that the mind is not just settled inside the head, but is embodied in the whole organism embedded in its environment (Thompson, 2001). Our sensorimotor actions interact with our social-cultural context. Our mind can obtain a new perception in every moment and in contrast, erase our previous perceptions or presumptions (Shapiro & Stolz, 2019). It means the biases obtained by right and wrong learning that emerged in interaction with the environment are constantly subjected to restudy and reconstitute.
Thus, the embodied reflection first needs to ignore the expired perspectives that emphasize mind-body separation. Embodied mindfulness has more responsibilities than supporting cognitive-emotional powers and individual psychological treatment. Moral, social, and spiritual education is also considered. Thompson (2017) as an outstanding neurophenomenologist believes that Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction or MBSR was meant from the beginning to be a clinical program orthogonal to common narratives of health and well-being, a laboratory for a more experiential and participatory medicine, a vehicle for self-education, healing, and transformation rather than a new therapy. However, it has changed its plan and now, it has little value from the perspective of healing, transformation, or liberation. Consequently, modern mindfulness has gradually separated from the holistic and comprehensive original view. Morality is an inseparable part of every mindfulness practice even morality is not mentioned formally as secular mindfulness programs are acting like that. Educators and teachers can guide students to establish a true moral foundation.
Conclusion: the embodied mindfulness; the mind art for sense-making of learning experience
Embodied mindfulness tries to modify the unwilling gap between mind-body and help the theory and practice domains in education. However, it needs some experience in the classroom and encourages teachers and students to reflect on their bodies. The thinking should not be apart from something isolated from their own, and the mind shouldn’t be considered apart location where they only contemplate. Indeed, consciousness is created in their environment where they have intersubjective and inter-body interactions with others.
The embodied education emphasizes interaction actions and engagement of students to the environment, subject matters, and contents which they all are the mind content students. The process of learning and its experiences would be more constant in embodied education. For example, teachers try to attract the student’s attention to how the learning experience is built. Perhaps, narrating the story might be fascinating for learners. Describing how eyes and tongue movement, the activities of ears, hands, walking, teacher’s hand movement, blackboard, tablet, digital devices, or even the object of a science lesson and the whole space of the classroom play a role in creating the student’s learning experience. This is the simple explanation of embodied mindfulness that can amplify their consciousness, attention, and reflection.  However, mindful reflection is not only about the experience shaping but reflection itself is a form of experience. The reflection can interrupt everyday habitual chain patterns. Habitual chains mean eliminating artistic, passionate, and innovative aspects of our daily lives and becoming automatic, impulsive, and robotic activities. In contrast, mindfulness is the opposite of habitual patterns. Through embodied mindfulness, students get the opportunity to reflect on their learning experience at the moment. In addition, since embodied mindfulness happens in the class which is a part of the large context, it is social. Students interact with others and learn how to go beyond themselves and think about their classmates as a part of themselves. This is self-transcendence the feature can take a person beyond individuality, and care about other people such as his/herself.
 

Keywords

• embodied mindfulness
• enaction
• neurophenomenology
• learning experience
• attention training
• intersubjective interactions

Main Subjects

• Educational Philosophy

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