As a teacher, I see the effects of mismanaged mental health on a daily basis. Whether its students who turn to social media and vaping because they were never taught how to regulate their emotions, or well-meaning teachers who end up projecting their stress on their students because they have been forced into burnout by the unattainable expectations for educators.
In fact, I am blown away by the simultaneous need for and avoidance toward mental health awareness. As frustrating as it is to witness, I get it. I too was once in denial of my mental health struggles. I had seen so many examples of people mismanaging their mental health struggles by self-medicating with drugs and alcohol or by controlling their environment when they feel out of control on the inside, that I didn’t see myself as part of the mental health community. I was happy to tell myself I wasn’t like them, and that I was too strong to let my thoughts get the best of me. I told myself that for as long as I could, until I had no choice but to stop lying to myself.
If I could have, I would have continued to lie as long as I could. It was easy to say, “That doesn’t happen to me” or “I don’t need help.” It was the easiest to lie to myself during the darkest times when I would subtly throw out a lifeline only to be met with the response, “You know you can always tell me if you need anything,” only to think to myself: Isn’t that what I’m doing right now?
I’ve come to realize that when the people you feel the closest to haven’t done the mental health work for themselves, they will not only be incapable of helping you, but they will unintentionally make things worse.
Why are we able to acknowledge that no one is in perfect physical health yet we can pretend that there are people who do not need to take care of their mental health? Especially when it has become abundantly clear that the people who are the most reluctant to talk about mental health awareness are the ones who are in need of it the most.
The most magical experience that mindfulness has brought me occurred when I first started my Yoga Teacher Training. I have been doing yoga for decades so when I started my training, I thought I was well above average in terms of my abilities. In fact I scoffed at the idea of needing blocks or a blanket in my practice. Those are for beginners, I told myself. But as I started to learn the foundations of yoga, I realized what I had been doing wrong for all those years. I had been practicing the wrong form and I had seen forcing myself into advanced poses as “mastery.” Boy, was I wrong! As a student of yoga, I returned to the beginner’s mind. This gave me a whole new outlook – not only on yoga, but also on life. I focused entirely on my form and my breath and needed the blocks and blanket to truly embrace each pose. Using the props helped me truly experience the mind/body connection of yoga that I had been missing out on all these years. Once I understood the importance of building a foundation of my practice and not rushing to completion, I began to wonder if there were other areas of my life where I was skipping past the good parts as I hurried to check another thing off my mental to-do list. Turns out, I was rushing through every aspect of my life instead of living in the moment.
Learning to live in the moment (a.k.a. mindfulness) transformed my focus on “what’s next?” to “what’s happening now?” and magically changed my life. Once I saw the immense effects mindfulness was having on my personal life , I decided to apply it to my teaching, too.
Again, like magic, the day-to-day frustrations began to wane as I stopped making assumptions about what I thought was happening and just allowed myself to be in the present moment. As I focused on regulating myself, I was able to co-regulate my students.
The response has been overwhelming. My students have let me know through email and face-to-face conversations how much they enjoy the mindfulness activities and they even offer me suggestions for what to try next.
Check out the magic of mindfulness for yourself by following me @amindfulakashian on Instagram where I post a new activity every Monday for teachers to try in their classrooms.
