DHARMA BUM LIFE: Community Feedback

San Diego Unified School District: Early Childhood Education Programs



March 10, 2008

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing this letter on behalf of Red Lotus Society. The Red Lotus Society has been collaborating with the School Readiness Program at King-Chavez for over a year. The Red Lotus Society’s Meditation Outreach Programs offer guided meditation at the beginning of the parenting classes at King-Chavez Academies. The parents share that the guided meditation helps them to focus on themselves and their family and in turn create positive relationships with the community at large. The Meditation Outreach Programs that the Red Lotus Society provides play a key role in strengthening the parent’s role as active participants in their children’s education.

Family support is essential in children’s educational success and it is with tremendous respect that I commend the Red Lotus Society for their dedication to children, family and community. In addition to parent programs, the Red Lotus Society also provides a weekly meditation for the 3rd, 4th and 5th Grade Students at King-Chavez during their school day.

The San Diego Unified School District offers a School Readiness Program that improves the ability of families, schools and communities to prepare children to enter school ready to learn. We offer preschool classes, health and social services, and parent and family support.

Should you need any further information please do not hesitate to contact me.

Laura Arzave
Family Literacy Resource Teacher

Comments from School Administrators, Teachers and Community Leaders in San Diego


Hello:

I just LOVE what you are doing with children!!! I am so happy you will get to share your love with our Carlsbad chapter in May. I was wondering if you would be interested in being a guest at any of our other Kids for Peace chapter meetings as well? We now have nine chapters in the San Diego area. May I invite our leaders to reach out to you?

Thank you for all you are doing for our children! It is so beautiful!!!!

Peace and Smiles,
Jill

Jill McManigal
Co-Founder and Director of Kids For Peace
www.KidsForPeaceUSA.org
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Hola:

It was great seeing you for Meditation this morning at King-Chavez. I can't believe it's going on a year since we started working together. You are doing great work my friend.

Laura Arzave, Family Literacy Resource Teacher
San Diego Unified School District
Early Childhood Education Programs
San Diego, CA 92123
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Meditation was great! Everyone loved and "needed" it! I look forward to having you attend our student roll call (370 Students) on the 4th. We are doing something special for our students on Saturday, March 8th from 8:00-12:00. We would love to have you there for the beginning to start us off with a meditation. Check your calendar.

Angela Kinlaw, Dean of "Students"
Community Health And Medical Practices
Crawford High School
San Diego, California 92115
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Thanks for helping to teach our kids about meditation! I think it has helped some of them in different facets of their lives.

Warmly,
Julia
Morse High School
Gardening Program
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Below is from the Seeds Of Leadership (SOL) at Morse High School - Youth Garden Program Newsletter:

Another visitor we’ve had the pleasure of meeting is Jeff Zlotnik from the Red Lotus Society in Downtown San Diego. He teaches people how to meditate to improve concentration and help relieve stress—all important skills for leaders to have! He led the SOL crew in a meditation and will come back every other week to share more of his knowledge about focusing on breath and being in the present moment. Thank you Jeff!
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Dear Red Lotus Society…..I can’t tell you how great I think it is that you are teaching meditation in schools….I even see Lindsay Community School included which I believe is in the Court School system. When I taught at the Group Homes I would try meditation with the students and most really liked it and would ask me to start the day that way……Bless you for giving such a beautiful gift to all these children. It will be something they can use their whole lifetime. Your adult students are very lucky to have you there also. Love, geri (community member)
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I just felt a wave of emotion and wanted to share with you. Thank you to the Red Lotus Society for doing what you do and sharing your work with the children here at King-Chavez Elementary. WE are blessed to have you.

Blessings.......
Lara Eisenberg
School Counselor
King-Chavez Academies
San Diego, CA 92102
"We seek Excellence in Academics, Arts and Athletics from the foundation of LOVE "
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hola fellas....

just wanted to say thank you for last night and what a pleasure it has been to make your acquaintances... the red lotus society, the meditation gardens, and the two of you are very inspiring to me and i feel very fortunate to have met you. i look forward to more discussions/experiences down this intriguing path!

~namaste
josh (college student)
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I just wanted to thank you for the visit out to Jackson Elementary today! We really appreciated it. I am so relaxed right now! The moms were so happy to know that you will be coming back each Monday! Please send me a schedule of your classes. Thanks again! I just had a thought! Would you be available to do a 15 or 20 minute meditation session prior to one of our Center Administrator meetings? Talk about a lot of people
with stress!

Richard Joniaux
Center Administrator
Even Start
Child Development Programs
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The kids would like you back at Morse High School! So yes, every other week for a half hour would be great-either Tuesday or Thursday or Saturday works at the beginning again, if you like.

Warmly,
Julia
Morse High School
Gardening Program
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Thank you again for leading our staff through a meditation this morning. It was a powerful way to start the day!

Nicole Ervin (Staff)
Community Health And Medical Practices
Crawford Educational Complex
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It’s all good!! We’re just happy to have you here!!!! We’ll see you today!!
Peace,
Dawn (Teacher at Lindsay School, yoga/meditation program with pre/post-natal teens
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Just wanted to thank you for spending the afternoon [sitting through a lecture] and sharing your knowledge and application of meditation for my students! It was great! a loving hug,

Samantha Hurst (Professor at University California San Diego)
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Hello: My name is Danae. I met you in my anthropology class a few weeks ago (Meditation Class). I am wondering if you would like to teach a meditation class to a group of ICU nurses? Some of my nursing friends and I got together and decided that we wanted to have a day each month that is devoted to self improvement/taking care of ourselves. This month there will be three of us providing healing touch along with aromatherapy. If you have any interest, or are willing please let me know.
Thank you, Danae
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Hola Jeff!

Meditation was great this morning. You are truly making this world
better one soul at a time.

Laura Arzave, Family Literacy Resource Teacher
San Diego Unified School District
Early Childhood Education Programs
San Diego, CA 92123

I want to thank everyone for your support and beautiful energy that you contributed to the DBC throughout 2007! It has been an amazing year for a place that opened with no sign, no website, no phone number, and no advertising. We believed that if we opened the doors and created the space for meditation, people would come and sit, which is exactly what happened!

We thank all the volunteers, sponsors, teachers, and Dharma Bums for making the DBC such an ideal place for the community to learn and practice meditation.
The DBC has not only opened doors for thousands of people to meditate, we have entered into the community and are teaching meditation and yoga in many places, which are listed below:

1. King-Chavez Elementary School (56 kids - 12&13 yrs old, 5 days a week, yoga/meditation)
2. King-Chavez Elementary School (30 kids - 9&10 yrs old, once a week, meditation)
3. King-Chavez Elementary School (15 parents – meditation taught in Spanish, once a week, meditation)
4. Jackson Elementary School (25 parents – meditation taught in Spanish, once a week, meditation)
5. Cortez-Hill High School (25 kids - 16&17 yrs old, once a week, meditation)
6. Lindsay Community School (starting soon), (15 parenting teens, once a week, yoga/meditation)
7. SDSU Student Meditation Group, (8 college students, once a week, meditation)
8. Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), (8 adult men, once a week, meditation)
9. SecondChance (5 adults (homeless/former prisoners), once a week, meditation)

As many of you know, all of this work is done on a volunteer basis and the DBC is a branch of MMG, which is a 501(c)(3) NPO. It is our mission to continue to offer all classes for free to the community, so we rely on donations to keep us going.
It is at this time we ask that each of you helps us with a donation to continue to support the work of the DBC. Any amount is greatly appreciated, as there is no amount too small. All donations made before December 31st are tax-deductible for the 2007 calendar year.

Please use the link above to make an online secure credit card donation. Checks may also be made out to MMG and mailed to:

MMG
540 3rd Avenue
San Diego, CA 92101

We wish you all a happy holiday season and healthy New Year!

Namaste,
The Dharma Bum Center

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: June 16, 2007
OAKLAND, Calif., June 12 — The lesson began with the striking of a Tibetan singing bowl to induce mindful awareness.

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Theodore Rigby for The New York Times
A student holds an instrument used in mindfulness techniques.
With the sound of their new school bell, the fifth graders at Piedmont Avenue Elementary School here closed their eyes and focused on their breathing, as they tried to imagine “loving kindness” on the playground.
“I was losing at baseball and I was about to throw a bat,” Alex Menton, 11, reported to his classmates the next day. “The mindfulness really helped.”
As summer looms, students at dozens of schools across the country are trying hard to be in the present moment. This is what is known as mindfulness training, in which stress-reducing techniques drawn from Buddhist meditation are wedged between reading and spelling tests.
Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects.
During a five-week pilot program at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, Miss Megan, the “mindful” coach, visited every classroom twice a week, leading 15 minute sessions on how to have “gentle breaths and still bodies.” The sound of the Tibetan bowl reverberated at the start and finish of each lesson.
The techniques, among them focused breathing and concentrating on a single object, are loosely adapted from the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn, the molecular biologist who pioneered the secular use of mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts in 1979 to help medical patients cope with chronic pain, anxiety and depression. Susan Kaiser Greenland, the founder of the InnerKids Foundation, which trains schoolchildren and teachers in the Los Angeles area, calls mindfulness “the new ABC’s — learning and leading a balanced life.”
At Stanford, the psychology department is assessing the feasibility of teaching mindfulness to families. “Parents and teachers tell kids 100 times a day to pay attention,” said Philippe R. Goldin, a researcher. “But we never teach them how.”
The experiment at Piedmont, whose student body is roughly 65 percent black, 18 percent Latino and includes a large number of immigrants, is financed by Park Day School, a nearby private school (prompting one teacher to grumble that it was “Cloud Nine-groovy-hippie-liberals bringing ‘enlightenment’ to inner city schools”).
But Angela Haick, the principal of Piedmont Avenue, said she was inspired to try it after observing a class at a local middle school.
“If we can help children slow down and think,” Dr. Haick said, “they have the answers within themselves.”
It seemed alternately loved and ignored, as students in Ms. Graham’s fifth-grade class tried to pay attention to their breath, a calming technique that lasted 20 seconds. Then their coach asked them to “cultivate compassion” by reflecting on their emotions before lashing out at someone on the playground.
Tyran Williams defined mindfulness as “not hitting someone in the mouth.”
“He doesn’t know what to do with his energy,” his mother, Towana Thomas, said at a session for parents. “But one day after school he told me, ‘I’m taking a moment.’ If it works in a child’s mind — with so much going on — there must be something to it.”
Asked their reactions to the sounds of the singing bowl, Yvette Solito, a third grader, wrote that it made her feel “calm, like something on Oprah.” Her classmate Corey Jackson wrote that “it feels like when a bird cracks open its shell.”
Dr. Amy Saltzman, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif., who started the Association for Mindfulness in Education three years ago, thinks of mindfulness education as “talk yoga.” Practitioners tend to use sticky-mat buzzwords like “being present” and “cultivating compassion,” while avoiding anything spiritual.
Dr. Saltzman, co-director of the mindfulness study at Stanford, said the initial findings showed increased control of attention and “less negative internal chatter — what one girl described as ‘the gossip inside my head: I’m stupid, I’m fat or I’m going to fail math,’ ” Dr. Saltzman said.
A recent study of teenagers by Kaiser Permanente in San Jose, Calif., found that meditation techniques helped improve mood disorders, depression, and self-harming behaviors like anorexia and bulimia.
Dr. Susan L. Smalley, a professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A. and director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center there, which is studying the effects on schoolchildren, said one 4-year-old noticed her mother succumbing to road rage while stuck in traffic. “She said, ‘Mommy, Mommy, you have to sing the breathing song,’ ” Dr. Smalley said.
Although some students take naturally to mindfulness, it is “not a magic bullet,” said Diana Winston, the director of mindfulness education at the U.C.L.A. center. She said the research thus far was “inconclusive” about how effective mindfulness was for children who suffered from trauma-related disorders, for example. It is “a slow process,” Ms. Winston added. “Just because kids sit and listen to the bell doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be more kind.”
Glenn Heuser, who teaches a combined fourth- and fifth-grade class at Piedmont, said one student started crying about a dead grandparent and another over melted lip balm. “It tapped into a very emotional space for them,” Mr. Heuser said. “They struggled with, ‘Is it O.K. to go there?’ ”
Although mindful education may seem like a New Yorker caricature of West Coast life, the school district with possibly the best experience has been Lancaster, Pa., where mindfulness is taught in 25 classes a week at eight schools. The district has a substantial poverty rate, with 75 percent of students qualifying for free lunch.
Midge Kinder, a yoga teacher, and her husband, Rick, started the program six years ago at George Ross Elementary, where their daughter Wynne taught.
Camille Hopkins, the principal, said initially she was skeptical. Growing up in South Philadelphia, “I was never told to take an elevator breath”— a way of breathing in stages, taught in yoga — “or hear the signals of chimes to cool down,” Ms. Hopkins said.
But the stresses today are greater, she conceded, particularly on students who lived with the threat of violence. “A lot of things we watched on TV are part of their everyday life,” she said. “It’s ‘Did you know so-and-so got shot over the weekend.’ ”
In after-school detention, children are asked to “check in with their feelings,” Ms. Hopkins said. “How are you really changing behavior if they’re just sitting there?”
Yolanda Steel, a second-grade teacher at Piedmont, said she was hopeful that the training would help an attention-deficit generation better manage a barrage of stimuli, including PlayStations and text messages. “American children are overstimulated,” Ms. Steel said. “Some have difficulty even closing their eyes.”
But she noted that some students tapped pencils and drummed on desks instead of closing their eyes and listening to the bell. “The premise is nice,” Ms. Steel concluded. “But mindfulness can’t do it all.”

The inmates’ letters started to arrive at Jenny Phillips’s home in Concord, Mass., during the summer of 2002. For five years they’ve kept coming — 200 at last count, written by 14 men serving time in the Donaldson Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison with a death-row capacity for 24 inmates outside Birmingham, Ala.
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“Jenny, you have become a driving force of inspiration in my life,” read one typical note, from Edward Johnson, now serving a life sentence for aiding and abetting a triple homicide.
Ms. Phillips, a cultural anthropologist, psychotherapist and now documentary filmmaker, cemented this bond during the filming of “The Dhamma Brothers,” a documentary she began in 2002 chronicling a 10-day meditation retreat in Donaldson. She interviewed the 36 participating prisoners (called “the dhamma brothers” after the Dhamma, or dharma, the term for the collective teachings of the Buddha) for hours, discussing their childhoods, their crimes, their struggles to get through each day in lockup and the Sisyphean challenge of trying personal transformation inside an often-hopeless prison culture.
One result is an emotional documentary about the benefits of meditation for a most unlikely set of candidates. But until a year ago, the film was shaping up as a different story than the uplifting one it has become.
The impetus for the film came in 1999. Ms. Phillips, who had volunteered in Massachusetts prisons and conducted research on prison culture, heard that some inmates were informally practicing meditation inside Donaldson. After trading letters with the meditation group’s leader and traveling to the prison to meet the men, Ms. Phillips, herself a meditator, wondered if a more formal and intensive program could further help the men’s stress levels. (Similar programs have long been proven successful in some prisons in India.) Ms. Phillips approached two meditation teachers, Bruce Stewart and Jonathan Crowley, to lead a Vipassana meditation course — a 10-day meditation program held in complete silence — at Donaldson.
As Buddhism inches toward the pop culture mainstream, practitioners are taking its tenets of mindfulness, acceptance and compassion to populations in need of spiritual guidance, namely prisons and centers for troubled youths.
Prisoners have been practicing meditation on their own through outreach programs for years. The Prison-Ashram Project began in 1973 and in 1989 the Prison Dharma Network was founded, an umbrella organization now encompassing over 100 prison volunteer groups from different Buddhist traditions. Donaldson’s 10-day course would mark the first time that an intensive retreat would be held in such a high-security prison in the United States, Ms. Phillips said.
Along with her crew, Ms. Phillips documented the process: cushions and sleeping mats were laid down in a Donaldson gym, where the participating prisoners meditated in complete isolation. Convicts serving life sentences for gruesome crimes focused on their breath, much like the Buddha taught more than 2,500 years ago.
“No one thought these guys could tolerate a 10-day meditation course,” Ms. Phillips said in a phone interview. But the prisoners did more than tolerate it.
“We were finding that after this 10-day course, inmates were better able to control their anger and better able to conduct themselves,” said Dr. Ron Cavanaugh, director of treatment at the Alabama Department of Corrections, who worked with Ms. Phillips to bring Vipassana meditation to Donaldson. “The initial group had about a 20 percent reduction in their disciplinary histories.” After the course ended and the film crew returned to Massachusetts, the Dhamma brothers continued meditating daily, with a longer sitting once a week.
But months later, in July 2002, they received word that they would no longer be allowed to sit, and Ms. Phillips would no longer be allowed to film.
“The chaplain had reservations about inmates turning into Buddhists and losing his congregation,” Dr. Cavanaugh said. “He called the commissioner; the commissioner called the warden and told the warden to shut down the program.”
The Dhamma brothers were now only a community in spirit. “I felt responsible,” Ms. Phillips said.
“Perhaps in my greediness of making a film,” she added, “I had hurt these people. When you’re in such a state of deprivation anyway, and you’re deprived of things that are so helpful to you — it was absolutely devastating.”
For the next four years Ms. Phillips corresponded by mail with the Dhamma brothers. “I didn’t think we’d ever get back in again,” she said.
While Ms. Phillips and Mr. Cavanaugh continued to hope that the Vipassana courses could return to Donaldson and the Dhamma brothers, Ms. Phillips and her team — the editor and co-director Andy Kukura of Boston’s Northern Lights Productions and another director, Anne Marie Stein — resigned themselves to making a film that would be “a downer,” Mr. Kukura said.
But in December 2005 Ms. Phillips received a call from Dr. Cavanaugh informing her that the administration had changed at Donaldson, the meditation program had been reinstalled and the film crew could come back.
“It was the perfect way to resolve the film,” she said. “It would’ve been a film of failure — failure to do something meaningful in the prison.”
Now her crew and the Dhamma brothers hope for more festival support (it’s already winning awards on the circuit, including a tie for best documentary at the Wood Hole Film Festival) and, eventually, a commercial audience for the movie. “Letters from the Dhamma Brothers,” an accompanying book of the letters the inmates sent to Ms. Phillips and the Vipassana teachers, is scheduled for publication in early 2008 by Pariyatti Press.
“It appears that it was a miracle that this happened in the Deep South in one of the worst prisons in the country in the first place,” Mr. Stewart, the Vipassana teacher, said. “It also seems like a miracle that we’re back. But it’s just cause and effect. If the men hadn’t had this keen desire for self-improvement, I don’t think this would’ve happened.”

Meditation in schools is not a religious practice that raises any church-state issues.
By Nick Street
LA Times
July 25, 2007

'At quiet time we try to be as calm as we can," says Reko, a seventh-grader at Ideal Academy, a Washington, D.C., charter school that incorporates a 20-minute transcendental meditation program into each school day. "We close our eyes and think of our mantra so we can be relaxed." On the other side of the country, students at Emerson Elementary School in Oakland practice techniques called "mindfulness" that have been adapted from Buddhism. The children learn to follow their breath, watch their thoughts and focus their attention by listening to the tone of a Tibetan singing bowl until the sound is too faint to hear.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-street25jul25,0,2301065.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

"See the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums
refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, and
general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em Zen Lunatics who go about
writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures." --Jack Kerouac

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=940CE1DB173BF937A2575AC0A9659C8B63

www.tricycle.com - The Daily Dharma

Wherever You Go, There You Are


When you dwell in stillness, the judging mind can come through like a foghorn. "I don't like the pain in my knee...This is boring...I like this feeling of stillness; I had a good meditation yesterday, but today I'm having a bad meditation...It's not working for me. I'm no good at this. I'm no good, period..."

This type of thinking dominates the mind and weighs it down. It's like carrying around a suitcase full of rocks on your head. It feels good to put it down. Imagine how it might feel to suspend all your judging and instead to let each moment be just as it is, without attempting to evaluate it as "good" or "bad." This would be a true stillness, a true liberation. Meditation means cultivating a non-judging attitude toward what comes up in the mind, come what may.

-Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go, There You Are