Ryne Rogers
AH120 Writing in the World
Professor Mason
Argumentative Paper

The New Technique

Imagine yourself back in high school; you are a student sitting at a desk with this year’s final exam. You have a sharpened pencil, calculator, and a bottle of water; also you have a total of four hours of sleep because you have been up since three in the morning studying all of your precalculus notes. At this point the questions are looking the same, and you have to get an “A” to even pass the class. You are getting on an “edge,” you try to work out the problem however the numbers do not look quite right. You look at the clock and see that you have only ten minutes left to complete the exam. Now you are frantic to even finish; you’re making simple errors that even a 5th grader would not make. Suddenly you hear, “Time!” now you are just putting down random answers and praying. Has this happened to you before? You do not only share this stressful scenario but also with so many others. With as many people come just as many remedies; from taking Red Bull, Five Hour Energy, or even drugs, trying to take this pressure away. Now let me inform you of another remedy that might work and that you have heard of before, meditation. Now many believe that this “ritual” is tacky and would not help students manage their stress, although some believe the contrary. One of the biggest advocates of meditation in the classroom is David Lynch, a film director and author of Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, And Creativity. In this writing he describes when meditation was tested at schools that caused less violence and improved grades. Previously stated many believe that this is one big sham, it is the belief of others and myself that the use of meditation is not a sham, it would be rather effective in an academic setting. Now I know that meditation has not been used regularly in any school curriculum, and the idea seems somewhat silly. It basically gives students extra time to sleep during class while the teachers are getting paid to do nothing. It is also taking up the time in which the students should be learning something more constructive such as math or science. However with the next few paragraphs I will be discussing how such “silly things are actually beneficial to any student. The benefits in which meditation would help in the instructional setting is limitless, however lets focus this spectrum down to three subjects which can be applied in the classroom. The first is health related issues; the scenario I discussed in my opening paragraph caused a very stressful environment for the reader, now just imagine how the student felt. Stress from school can cause so many different types of health problems for students. Just to name a few of the conditions; they range from simple complications such as sleep problems too more severe such as depression. Now every student has had to go without a full eight-hour sleep cycle but it should not be something that is a regular occurrence. It should also never escalate to the stage of depression. These and various other symptoms of stress provide a working environment that is unfriendly to the student both physically and physiologically. However a study was done by the Georgia Institute for Prevention of Human Diseases and Accidents upon what affect meditation had on blood pressure and heart rate. The study showed that with “simple breath meditation lowered blood pressure and heart rate in a group of normotensive youth.” Also it states that this technique that was used to lower both blood pressure and heart rate “is easily learned and practiced at no cost.” This simple form of meditation can be done in someone’s spare time or at the beginning of a school day, which is just what Carmen N’Namdi did in Detroit. Every morning and afternoon “the kids meditate ten minutes,” and the results are staggering. The kids are in better spirits, improving their grades, and are excelling at many levels. Now David Lynch does not just discuss using meditation only as a tool to shut down doors leading into stress but also using these techniques to open up new creative ideas. Being able to think outside the box is very important to all students. Great students are not the ones who just relearn what has known by others but by learning new things that no one has ever known. This is huge point in which Lynch discusses in his paper saying that if someone who has enough stress “won’t be able to create,” and if the same person has enough conflict “it will just get in the way of your creativity.” Although many people believe that the darkness in their lives gives them inspiration for whatever projects they create, Lynch believes that meditation will not prevent anyone’s “edge” but only enhance it. The ability to catch the “big fish” is the main point of Lynch’s article that is the ability of the person using meditation to widen their perception. This is oddly familiar to the work of Aldous Huxley known as Doors of Perception. In Huxley’s experience he discusses how he used the drug mescaline he was able to gain a larger perception, or in his words “Mind at Large.” This is described by Huxley as the ability of: Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.
Now the ability to gain this altered consciousness is different between Huxley and Lynch, where one uses a drug while the other a practiced technique but both end with the same result. The ability of being creative and being stress free is something very difficult especially in today’s day age. With deadlines becoming shorter, and the demand of performance just as high as ever students are becoming more stressed out. To react to this growing demand, students are trying so many different things to cope with their stress. Students are so stressed out that they often overlook meditation; a technique that is cheap, easy to learn, and that is effective. These techniques can be easily put into a schools curriculum and daily schedule in order for students to perform at a much higher level. With the use meditation students will less violent, more at tentative and basically be better overall students.

Work Cited

"Impact of Meditation on Resting and Ambulatory Blood Pressure and Heart Rate in Youth. | Mendeley." Free Reference Manager and PDF Organizer | Mendeley. Web. 06 Dec. 2011. .
Lynch, David. Catching The Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousnesss, And Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2006. Print.

Huxley, Aldous. The Doors of Perception: New York: Harper & Row, 1954. Print.