Teenage boys are not known for deep contemplation, but if if gets them out of detention then it seems meditation can be very appealing.
At Balgowlah Boys, a comprehensive public school on the northern beaches, students can now swap an afternoon detention for meditation.
In a darkened classroom last week, about 20 barefooted boys spent an hour breathing, relaxing and clearing their minds. And while they may have been sceptical before their first class, the boys who rolled out of bed for the early-morning class were converts.
For Kobe Edwards, the meditation class was a ticket out of 90 minutes of detention. But he also surprised himself by enjoying it.
“I felt really relaxed. I will probably come back again,” Kobe said.
For 14-year-old Jerald Paul, he expected meditation to be “pretty boring” but after the class he was surprised at how relaxed and rejuvenated he felt.
“It was better than I thought, better than detention,” he said.
The idea for a meditation class came from the school’s year 10 advisor, Sebastien Hartog, as he spent one afternoon supervising a detention class.
“I spent an hour and a half staring at these boys and them staring back at me and I thought there had to be a better use of everyone’s time,” Mr Hartog said.
“The boys can chose to do meditation instead of detention and hopefully learn tools to avoid being on detention in the first place.”
Former English teacher Loraine Rushton has been teaching yoga and meditation in Sydney schools for the past 16 years.
She said an increasing number of public and private schools were seeing the benefits of yoga and were offering it to HSC students before their exams, to elite athletes or including it as part of their sport and wellbeing programs.
“Schools are really thinking out of the box…I taught yoga as part of a school’s religious program for seven years and I definitely think schools are seeing the benefits of yoga and that it provides a foundation physically, mentally, emotionally and socially for life,” Ms Rushton said.
Balgowlah Boys’ principal, Paul Sheather, said positive psychology was an important part of the school’s philosophy.
Mr Sheather said the number of boys placed on detention had been steadily decreasing and he hoped meditation would help lower the number even more.
“We first tried yoga two years ago and it was really popular…now with meditation we hope it will be a useful tool to help the boys de-stress,” he said.