The Misunderstanding of “Mindfulness”

By Jasdeep Kler

Our youth lack avenues for creative expression. From public classrooms to juvenile detention facilities, today’s youth have limited access to trauma-informed creative arts programming. Adolescents and young adulthood are critical periods in developing healthy behaviors, hobbies, and creative forms of expression. Incarcerated youth, who are predominantly male and people of color, often lack access to high-quality creative arts programming. The Youth Arts Alliance (YAA) addresses this need by providing a variety of art workshops, taught by trained teaching artists, including mural making, mosaics, poetry, and now, mindfulness.

Mindfulness has recently gained popularity but remains misunderstood. I often describe mindfulness as a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s experience without judgment. Fostering mindfulness is a skill, and like any other, requires practice and support. Developing mindfulness has been shown to decrease rumination, enhance capacity for attention, and improve emotion-regulation. There are many ways of developing mindfulness, and the benefits often spill-over into other areas of life, including school. With support from the Albert Schweitzer Fellowship, YAA, and staff at the School of Public Health, I have developed a trauma-informed mindfulness meditation curriculum. This curriculum will provide all YAA teaching artists the skills and knowledge to incorporate mindfulness into their regular teaching practice.

Currently, I lead two 12-week long workshops that focus on creative writing, visual arts, and mindfulness. The primary aims of these workshops are to provide useful skills, build a sense of community, and have fun.  A secondary purpose of these workshops is to inform the tools and training I offer teaching artists. My short-term project will lead to broader organizational and cultural changes within YAA as they incorporate mindfulness practices into the teaching artist curriculum.

YAA, as an organization, understands the role they play in the broader juvenile punishment system and are actively working to implement institutional change. Thus far, YAA has lobbied for increased investment in arts programming, both in correctional facilities and community centers, institutional incentives for engaging in art-programming, and a greater focus on upstream prevention. Critically, YAA views all involved youth as stakeholders and advocates in this space. YAA, through its art programming and community events, offers youth a platform to speak on their experiences. These celebrations often include correction facility staff, judges, family, and prosecutors, which fosters empathy and institutional change.

The current criminal punishment narrative is often viewed through the lens of “guilt” and “innocence” or “perpetrator” and “victim.” These celebrations complicate this binary. Incarcerated youth speak to this complexity – of being someone who has both inflicted and suffered from harm. These events humanize justice-involved youth and speak to the therapeutic benefits of creative expression in processing complex trauma.

Jasdeep Kler is a student at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and 2019-20 Albert Schweitzer Fellow, Detroit Chapter