Meditation In The Field Of Education: The David Lynch Foundation

MEDITATION IN THE FIELD OF EDUCATION

Nowadays, people are affected by different sources of physical and emotional stress every day. As a consequence of this, our lifestyle is unhealthy and we need to release all this tension from our bodies. This way of living is affecting people in modern societies and there is an increasing tendency to go to the gym, play sports or do yoga or Tai Chi to relax. Teenagers are also influenced by this stressful lifestyle even though they are young. As a result, their performance at school is not as high as teachers expect. Adolescents sometimes feel anxious, nervous or stressed. Some of them even become extremely violent. As a solution of this stressed society in modern

The foundation was created in 2005 by the practitioner of Transcendental Meditation (TM), David Lynch, who is also a filmmaker, painter, musician, actor, and photographer. The David Lynch Foundation claims that scientific studies have been conducted on the benefits of the TM program at more than 200 independent universities and medical schools including: Harvard Medical School, Yale Medical School, University of Virginia Medical Center, Stanford Medical School and University of Chicago Medical School. These researches have been conducted all over the world the past 40 years. (davidlynchfoundation.org). Benefits which were reported on education are: “21% increase in the high school graduation rate, increased attendance and decreased suspensions for high school students, increased intelligence and creativity, 40% reduction in psychological distress, including stress, anxiety and depression, reduction in teacher burnout and perceived stress” (davidlynchfoundation.org). The David Lynch Foundation has a head office in our country in Buenos Aires since

This was the situation at The Visitacion Valley middle school (San Francisco, USA) where teachers and the principal were working together with transcendental meditation programs in the hope of changes. The institution has 500 students aged 11-13 and in 2007 a meditation programme called Quiet Time was developed with impressive results that led to more schools in San Francisco introducing the programme. Barry O’Driscoll, the physical education teacher said students lived in a violent community and that The Visitacion Valley middle school was one of the San Francisco's toughest institution. At first, teachers did not believe that meditation would work, however, students sat and mediated during 15 minutes twice a day. The teacher claimed that he saw dramatic transformations in his students helping them cope with stress. O’Driscoll said “Students seemed happy. They worked harder, paid more attention, were easier to teach and the number of fights fell dramatically.”