Welcome to A Quiet Place. A Place Full of Mind…

This place exists everywhere for everyone at every moment, which is the present moment.There is in fact nowhere else to be. The past is a memory highlighted by the emotional charge whether positive or negative of the experience and at each retelling it changes and shifts according to the audience, the mood, indeed that very present moment. The future is speculation informed by the emotional charge of the past which in itself is a story…it is all a story…your story.

Interest in Mindfulness, a concept inherited from Buddhism, is now being utilised by psychologists as a secular technique to alleviate a variety of mental and physical conditions. In itself it is a small part of meditation techniques but a simple and useful part for those who have no wider interest in meditation. It has been adapted for the western mind.
The application of these techniques on an individual level is another story of course. Persuading anyone to change their behaviour is very difficult. Gentle steps and on going support is really the only effective way to intervene when symptoms are in crisis. 

New findings have shown:

• A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation. (Zeidan, Journal of Neuroscience)
• Increases in mindfulness correlated with reductions in burnout and total mood disturbance, as well as increased stress resilience. (Krasner, JAMA).
• Participants who received mindfulness training showed a 42% decrease in the frequency and severity of primary IBS symptoms. (G. Andersson, Behavior Research and Therapy)
• Mindfulness meditation affects brain activity. Brain waves associated with integration increase during compassion meditation. When meditating, brain scans found increased activity in the following areas of the brain: insula, termporal pole/superior temporal gyrus, anterior cingulate, while the amygdala is less active. Overall, this is consistent with decreased arousal and an increased sense of well-being. (S. Lazar)
• Meditation improves attention. (Jha et al., 2007), (Slagter 2007), (Pagnoni & Cekic 2007), (Valentine & Sweet, 1999)
• You don’t have to be a seasoned meditator to see positive changes to your brain. New meditators who went through an 8-week meditation program saw changes in gray matter concentration in brain regions involved with learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking. (Lazar, Psychiatry Research, 2011)

“Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.”  

Thich Nhat  Hanh –Stepping into Freedom, monastic practice for monks

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” 
Thich Nhat  Hanh –Peace is every step.

“Each place is the right place--the place where I now am can be a sacred space. ”  
Ravi Ravindra The wisdom of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras

“. . . I feel we don’t really need scriptures. The entire life is an open book, a scripture. Read it. Learn while digging a pit or chopping some wood or cooking some food. If you can’t learn from your daily activities, how are you going to understand the scriptures? ” 
 Swami Satchananda The Yoga Sutras

“The heart surrenders everything to the moment. The mind judges and holds back.” 
 Ram Dass  “Be Here Now”

“I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.” 
Alan Watts “ Future, Past, Real”

Awareness: Ram Dass

Living in the present: Alan Watts

- Penny Moon

Speechmark author The Practical Well-Being Programme

Importance of mental wellbeing among SEN children

Evidence shows that children and young people with SEN can be up to six times more likely than their peers to experience mental health problems.* So, just why is this? Well, firstly, all of the usual issues that can affect any child, will also affect those with SEN. Secondly, children and young people with SEN can often experience lower self-esteem than their peers, be more vulnerable to bullying, have difficulties understanding social situations and making friends, and can feel isolated from their peers, both academically and socially. 

Some may also find that they have less independence than their classmates, or can find it harder to recognise and talk about their emotions. All of these things can in turn increase the risk of mental health issues.

Mental health difficulties in young people with SEN can also often be missed or overlooked.  Sometimes it can be easy to put issues down simply to a child’s SEN (‘Oh, anxiety is just part of his dyslexia’, ‘She’s bound to feel lonely and left out because of her autism’). School staff may also feel that they lack the expertise to help a child with SEN (‘But he has ADHD so will need specialist support. I don’t know how to help him.’), or indeed that they lack the background in mental health to be able to make a difference.

So, what can we do as educators to promote mental health in children and young people with SEN?

1. Promote mental wellbeing strategies – just because a child has SEN does not mean they won’t benefit from the same strategies as others: teaching them to recognise their strengths, to cultivate positive emotions and to understand their emotions. Many will also benefit from improving their problem-solving abilities and self-esteem.
2. Ensure that you know referral procedures in your setting for specialist support for students experiencing more significant difficulties.
3. Try not to make the situation worse. Sometimes it can be easy to have a deficit-based approach to students with SEN, focusing on what they can’t do, or on closing the gap between them and their peers. It is important that we don’t eliminate the ‘fun’ and vocational aspects of the curriculum which these pupils in particular will benefit from, and that we focus on accelerating strengths and increasing enjoyment of school as these things will have a positive knock-on effect on a child’s wellbeing.

From the book: The Sky's the Limit

 - Victoria Honeybourne

Speechmark author The Sky's The Limit

*NASS (2015) Making Sense of Mental Health, online, www.nasschools.org.uk/nass/making-sense- mental-health/

A visual thesaurus can make all the difference

The idea for The Blob Visual Emotional Thesaurus came from my experiences teaching writing in the classroom. Like most teachers, the need to encourage children to edit and improve their work is an endless task. Having a pile of thesauruses in the middle of each set of desks is helpful to further enrich children's vocabulary.

This was especially true when it came to developing characters feelings -teachers who encourage children to include this in their stories usually end up getting happy or sad! When I told them to look for alternatives in the thesaurus, they would select the most unusual, because they had no idea what these words meant.

In the Visual Emotional Thesaurus, this has been overcome in two ways. Firstly, every feeling has an image to visualise how a character might feel. When trying to use words outside of their experience, that is essential. Secondly, a visual range of feelings has been developed so that children can select how intensely their character might be feeling.

This book has been developed to empower writers and to reduce the need for teachers to have to intervene during the redrafting process.

The Blobs have been used to illustrate the feelings. They have no gender, age, fashion or colour, enabling all children to read and identify with the feelings. Blobs have been used in all key stages of education, which means that confident infant readers can access these emotional words as well as older children.

- Ian Long

Speechmark illustrator of Blobs

What do you think about when you have toothache?

Please consider that question before we move on?

I was in Bradford recently. Facilitating a team of workers who are on the frontline
and facing difficult behaviour and aggression daily. Yet they love the young people they work with.

Those who had been excluded from school, little response, little change and little sign of hope. Still each of the group yearned to be of developmental assistance to them.

I asked them that question:

'When you have toothache, what do you think about?'
No pause.
An immediate answer from one worker
as we all stood in the circle -
"Toothache"
was the answer.

If we have toothache we struggle to concentrate on anything else.
Restless as a wolf - we feel like the cheese is falling off our cracker. Nothing else really matters.

We can see a person's behaviour but we cannot see their experience.
We can be so preoccupied by their behaviour that we don't see
beyond behaviour.

Difficult behaviour can get under our skin.
Feelings rise within us.
As emotionally intelligent as we may be the feelings we have stimulate us, sometimes, to make a regrettable response.

This is applicable in the staff room, the classroom, the team meeting, the prison, the street, the office, at home, and certainly not only when we are transacting with humans with special needs.

The way I work on awareness and skill development is by using Experiential Exercises including Blob Tree Tools.

The objectives are:

•          Become more aware of our own feelings.
•          Becoming more able to get into contact with them.
•          Develop emotional literacy by being able to give each a feeling name.

So there in Bradford we throw the Blob Feelings Ball around the circle.
'Motion changes emotion' I say.

An activity, doing, is the best way to learn - to practise.
So the ball is thrown around the circle, the miss-catching it is part of the-bouncing-around fun as the ball creates smiles as humans live in expectancy as to who will receive the ball next.

The Blob figure nearest your right thumb -
'what does that Blob feel like?' I ask.
I ban the use of 'happy or sad' as all feelings can be tossed in those headings.
So minds are stretched - everyone engaging in the struggle to articulate.
Even seasoned professionals struggle to find the appropriate word.

I often ask more questions as 'right thumbs' develop their literacy.
'Describe a young person you know who feels like that?'

'When one of your youngsters feels like that, what behaviour does it drive?'

When a group is ready - the questions may become deeper and more personal-
'When did you last feel like that?'

Awareness always precedes skill.
By becoming aware of our own emotional literacy, or lack of, we can then be more sensitive to the feelings of others. More importantly, we can begin to see beyond behaviour to be more in touch with a person's toothache.

Next time I will click about working with special needs groups. I want to share some methods of how I engage them with the crisp objective of making available more tools for their life toolbox.

- Pip Wilson
Beautiful Human Person
Speechmark author of Blobs

Hearing Voices is Actually Like Being in an Abusive Relationship

Hearing voices is one of the most shocking mental experiences that a person can have because it immediately raises the question: Am I mad? Beyond this, voices are highly abusive, and attack the person’s self-worth. As such they are totally and instantly disruptive in the person’s life.

In my whole career as a clinical psychologist, I have never come across any other group of people who are so consistently battered by their mental experiences. However, following closely are those nearest to the person who is experiencing voices and who ultimately become their carers. Shock, confusion, anger and ultimately grief and hopelessness assail the carer.

Hearing voices will need specialist attention and here we discover the third group of people who are often floored by voice-hearing; the clinicians and other workers who get involved. There were many occasions that training was requested for clinicians in this area so that they could be equipped with some tools to assist their clients.

On the Frontline with voices speaks to all three groups and it is constructed to do so from within each group’s frame of reference.

One further objective of my book is to fit with early intervention, as the longer voices are present, the more they become embedded and the more they disrupt the person’s life. It is also true that within the context in which they commonly occur, it all becomes a family breaker and may in fact cause stress related mental health problems in carers as well.

For me it has always been a privilege to work with people troubled by voices as the experience is no less than someone trying to survive an abusive relationship. This then is my point of departure; strategies to deal with an abusive relationship so that the person can once again take up their rightful place in society.

Keith Butler 
Speechmark author of On the Frontline with Voices - A Grassroots Handbook for Voice-hearers, Carers and Clinicians

Finding Ways to Develop the School Ethos

The 35 lesson plans provided in the No Outsiders book are only half the story; they will have little impact unless we create a whole school ethos where the moral code is reinforced and brought to life. The No Outsiders ethos must be seen to be relevant and real for children to sign up to it and the first three chapters in the book explain how to do this.

We look for examples to use in assemblies and class discussions to show that it’s not just us in our school believing in No Outsiders; lots of people in the UK and around the world also believe in No Outsiders and their actions every day demonstrate this.

The photo (above right), taken from the BBC newsbeat website, shows two unknown men helping out people affected by floods over Christmas. I have used this photo in assembly all week as it encapsulates the No Outsiders spirit perfectly.

I start by asking the children what is happening in the photo and the usually say, “They are helping the old man” so I ask why do you think he needs help? The two men on either side are wearing coats and hoods; it looks like one of them has rain on his hat; where do you think they might be? Has anywhere in the UK had lots of rain recently?

We talk about the floods in Northern England and how it affected people then I ask, so what are the men doing here? I tell them these men visited houses in Blackburn that had been flooded and offered help. They found this stranded man who had no lunch so they made him boiled eggs.

I then ask the children, how are the men in this photo different from each other? Children have answered the men have different skin colour, the two men on other side are Muslim and the man in the middle is not (to which I reply yes, that may be so but we can’t always know someone’s faith by looking at them; you can be white and Muslim, and the two men on either side may not identify as Muslim). I press on asking for more differences; are they the same age? Are there any disabilities evident?

Then I ask the children to consider, did the two men decide before setting out, that they would only help men? Or that they would only help people who were Muslim? Or that they would not help people who were gay? Or that they would only help people who were elderly?

We all agree that the two men clearly would have agreed to help anybody and everybody. The reason is because the two men, like us, believe there should be no outsiders. They didn’t care if the man they helped was white, elderly, wore glasses, had a different faith, didn’t care about his sexual orientation or indeed whether he was male or female! That is what is so great about living in the UK today – we are all different and we all help each other. It’s a wonderful place to be!

Andrew Moffat

Speechmark author of No Outsiders in our school: Teaching the Equality Act inprimary Schools