An Integral View of Mindfulness Practices and the Perception of Challenge Within a High School Setting

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter was to examine how mindfulness-based strategies are taught within four different classroom settings in a large urban high school and how they impact students' perceptions of challenge. Two different approaches toward mindfulness training were represented in the four classrooms: the first derived from an explicit, outcomes-based approach within a Yoga class setting with a focus on awareness of personal experience; the other was embedded and implicitly connected to the subject discipline of natural science with a focus on situated being. Integral methodological pluralism (IMP) was used to gather data from multiple viewpoints: phenomenological interviews, structural analysis of language frequency and comparisons, ethnographic observations, and hermeneutic interviews. Integral theory was used to analyze the data and identify the individual and cultural themes. Systemic influences are discussed in connection with these findings, and implications for implementation of mindfulness in relation to perception of challenge are explored.