Episode 41 Accessible Mindfulness
0-0:12 Orthotonics Accessible as Gravity plays and fades out
0:13 Hello and welcome to Accessagogy a podcast about accessibility and pedagogy. I’m your host Ann Gagné and this podcast is recorded on land covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and within land protected by the Dish with One Spoon Wampum Agreement, which is the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe peoples.
0:32 Welcome to episode forty-one, in this episode I want to discuss something that has been bothering me for years and I often bring it up to different people who do this as part of their facilitation practices, but sometimes I’m dismissed or ignored when I bring it up, and that is mindfulness practices. In particular, I want to talk about how we need to think about mindfulness practices in a way that is a little bit more accessible.
1:02 So mindfulness practices, some folk call these maybe grounding exercises need to be accessible if this is something that you choose to do in your facilitation practice. So this isn’t a mindfulness is bad episode, it’s more of a hey have you thought that maybe you could make your mindfulness practices a little bit more accessible and how they are framed now sometimes can be super activating for your participants and maybe you want to change that kind of episode.
1:32 So to start it would be important to make sure that we’re kinda talking about the same thing when we’re talking about mindfulness practices. So what I’m referring to here are any series of typical exercises, or activities, or practices that folk ask participants to do often at the beginning of a workshop in order to kinda make themselves “present” in the space. And so I know that this is a podcast and you can’t see me doing my quotation marks around the word present as I say it, but trust me I’m making air quotes marks around present.
2:05 So what does that look like? Well traditionally there’s this one that happens a fair bit where the facilitator will ask folk to notice what they’re hearing, what they’re smelling, notice what they’re feeling, something like a five senses type exercise. And this exercise often sets me up for a workshop that makes me present in all kinds of bad ways to be honest, because I don’t have a sense of smell, and I’m masked indoors and when I’m in public. I also have tinnitus (or tinnitus) and so often the only thing that I’m hearing is a very high pitched squeal and I really don’t need to be reminded of that when I’m really trying hard to be “present” in quotation marks.
2:51 Another one of these exercises can be breathing exercise that asks the participant to think about like where they’re holding tension or where they’re holding feelings. And again, I need some kind of warning about these exercises as do many others, right. Some folk join webinars and meetings because they actually need a distraction from all the things that are rattling in their bodyminds, and they didn’t necessarily come to a workshop on inclusive learning outcomes or inclusive learning practices to remember that they’re grieving their friend who just died you know?
3:22 So I hope that these examples, I’m laughing because that happened to me this week, so I hope that these examples give you an idea of what I’m talking about when I’m referring to mindfulness exercises. But also I hope that my reasons for why they’re problematic, at least to me, can get you to see how they could easily be problematic and activating for many in your spaces, and it would actually like start your workshop in the opposite way that you really want to start it. So I acknowledge that most people do these exercises because they think that it’s a great way to make sure that people put their minds in the space they’re in and forget like a previous bad meeting they were just in. But it also assumes that folk can do that, and fun fact, a lot of people can’t do that and that’s kinda a normative assumption that rests at the heart of a lot of these activities.
4:16 So what I would like to do today is not say, scrap all your mindfulness exercises cause I think they’re important, they’re important to your workshop, they’re important to the framing that your workshop’s about. But what I’d like to do is give you three ways of reframing those mindfulness exercises that could be a little bit more inclusive and a little less activating.
4:37 So one, one way to make these exercises more inclusive and less activating is to reframing them by emphasizing that folk can participate in ways that are meaningful to them in that moment. Just by adding that word meaningfulness can help the participants see that there’s not just one monolithic way of doing this exercise, or being in the moment. This acknowledges that everyone is joining this space in their own moment in time and with their own bodyminds.
5:06 And this leads to two, which is try to avoid your mindfulness exercises to be determinant on particular sensory engagements or activities or actions. So no more of those what do you smell prompts, no more of those what do you hear prompts, no more asking folk to put their feet on the ground, which some people are wheelchair users or simply can’t touch the ground with their feet. So instead ask them to you know sort of attune to their own bodymind needs that they may have in that moment, which may or may not be sensory, and just to acknowledge them and share if they feel comfortable.
5:47 So this in fact might be a nice way to move the workshop towards more you know of a conversation around accessibility needs that the facilitators can support. So maybe enabling captions if they’ve been forgotten, or maybe addressing the temperature in the room if you have the capacity to change that, or maybe making sure that the facilitators are using microphones for example. This kind of bodymind awareness could go much further than just asking for specific sensory engagements in the participants and they can engage in ways they are meaningful to them.
6:20 And then finally three, flag that this is how you are going to start the session, and then give the participants an option to leave if that’s what they want. If you strongly feel that mindfulness exercises need to be done in a certain way, and some people are simply not in the bodymind space to do that kind of work to start, but are interested in the topic of your workshop as a whole, then let them know that this is an exercise should take you know a couple of minutes, and encourage them to leave the space, or to do something else, or to mute or to log off, and do whatever works for them and then come back.
6:54 Honestly there’s nothing worse than feeling trapped in a space and having to do an activity or an exercise that you’re simply not physically able to, or emotionally ready to do. So don’t put your participants in that space. I know you mean well, honestly I know the motivation is to make sure that folk are there to do the work, but you also you need to acknowledge stims, you need to acknowledge the need for folk to use fidgets, you need to acknowledge that how each person is in a space is going to be very different depending on the person and depending on the day. So the way that you make the space more inclusive and meaningful to the participants is to ensure that there is not just one way of being in that space, or being in their bodyminds and to share that with others.
7:38 So that’s it, that’s episode 41 of Accessagogy, with a discussion of the use of mindfulness practices and how we can maybe make them a little bit more inclusive and less isolating for disabled and neurodivergent folk in your workshops and seminars.
7:52 Remember that I want this to be a space where we can ask questions and share concepts that you’d like me to discuss. So if there’s anything that I mentioned here as it relates to mindfulness practices and you want me to elaborate, please ask.
8:04 As always if there are any ideas or aspects of your pedagogy that you’d like me to address in this podcast, please feel free to send me an email at Accessagogy so that’s acc e ss a gogy at gmail dot com. I’ll try to include as many of these suggestions as possible in the podcast because ultimately, this podcast is for you. So that’s it, that’s episode 41 of Accessagogy, thanks so much for following along and asking how can I make my space more accessible today? Have a great week!