Playing with the Present

Funded by a Creative Collaborations grant from Arts Council Wales, this project collaborated with students of Ebbw Fawr Community Learning Centre to develop an innovative and creative mindfulness curriculum.

Due to the pandemic we didn’t manage to finalise the experiment in co-design, though many important lessons were learnt about how to make mindfulness more accessible and fun to classes.

Aimed at ages 11-18 it is guided by the principles of creative, participatory and experiential learning.

The program works with Prof. Richard Davidson's Emotional Styles and in particular the ‘four pillars of well-being'. - Attention, Outlook, Resilience and Generosity. Students are introduced to mindfulness techniques that help strengthen the neural networks related to these styles in the brain: circuits that also map on to the four different kinds of meditation – concentration meditation, loving-kindness, open awareness and compassion meditation.

In this spiral curriculum we revisit the four pillars over three phases. The first phase presents each style through PowerPoint slides and exercises that help us to understand the approach.

In the second phase the class participate in creative group processes which support them to give expression to each emotional style.

We practice bringing awareness to the patterns of brain activity associated with each style, enacting scenarios in which we find ourselves during our day to day lives.

In the final phase we prepare an immersive theatre experience for others which creates a task based context that demands our ‘presencing’ of the emotional styles. Thus integrating the approach and practice so that there is an embodying and felt experience of each style.