Teaching mindfulness and EQ in China
ILLYA SUMANTO
I have consistently been recognised as ‘the teacher with the singing bowl’ wherever I have taught in China.
Parents, bosses, and fellow teachers were weirded out until they understood why I always carried the instrument around.
Typically, before every lesson begins, all the students I teach are invited to straighten their backs and breathe with me once I hit the bowl with its wooden stick.
Four-seven-eight. Breathe in, pause, and breathe out.
I want to share one success story from this mindfulness practice with you.
When I first came to China, I landed in an ESL learning centre to flaunt flashcards to kindergarten children with zero background in English.
It was difficult for me to connect with them emotionally due to language barriers, let alone reason the mindfulness practice.
Some kids showed resistance as the practice was unfamiliar to them, but it gradually became a class culture.
One day, a conflict between two six-year-old boys happened in class that made one of them run amok.
He was screaming in Mandarin and violently kicking chairs around.
All the other kids were shocked, and I did not really know what to say to him because I could not speak his language except, “Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out”.
He eventually followed, breathed with me, and calmed down.
Echoing this incident, I began teaching feelings to these students with those flashcards.
Now that they had learned the primary ones, they were asked after our mindfulness practice at each following lesson, “How are you feeling today?”.
Because of this routine, when a child was in a bad mood, I could already initiate intervention by guessing their feelings aloud.
“Are you feeling sad?” “Are you feeling angry?” If they nodded, I would ask if they needed a hug, water, or alone time, supplemented with body gestures.
Upon leaving the language school, these young Chinese kids who could barely speak English when I started working there could express even more complex emotions, such as feeling lonely, confused, and indifferent. I was proud.
The mindfulness practice and my initiative to normalise emotional dialogue enabled these young ESL learners to develop self-regulation and emotional competence.
Not only that, the class culture that I had created fostered a healthy relationship within our little classroom community.
Illya Sumanto is the founder of Empathy For Youth Academy, a virtual school that focuses on the learning of EQ and empathic communications. Her pedagogy has been spread across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. She is the author of From Me To We: Teaching Children Taboo Topics for Empathy through Spoken Word Poetry in Malaysia and is now a doctorate candidate at the Wilkes University of Pennsylvania.
