Miami Beach Senior High Alumni Teaches Meditation to Students

Elon Richman, a graduate of Miami Beach Senior High in Miami, Fla. recently returned to the school to launch a meditation program for students, following a 6-month trip he took to India, The Miami New Times reported.

“While I was in India, I did 10 days of silence, called Vipassana, and learned to meditate,” Richman tells the newspaper. “I had a lot of anxieties before that and I didn’t really know how to handle them. I didn’t know how to quiet the mind and all the chatter that goes on, and that was something really huge for me to learn. I wished that I’d known about this earlier, especially during that crazy period in high school, so I thought I’d take it there [Miami Beach Senior High] and see if I could share it with the students.”

The students welcomed it, along with the teachers and administration, he explained. “I put together a four-page proposal for a sort of ‘Ecology Club Presents: Meditation Time,’ that described when we would meet and what we would do for the thirty minutes, as well as some of the goals and benefits of meditation, and she dug the idea,” Richman said in the report.

The first meeting attracted between 25 and 30 students, who all had positive feedback, including feeling refreshed, and being able to tune out the noise outside of their classroom, Richman said.

“Basically, we meet at 2:35 once school gets out and spend the first 10 minutes discussing the benefits of meditation and I give a little bit of an explanation of the technique. We do a 2-minute practice run to make sure everybody’s comfortable and on the same page, then we do 10 minutes of silent meditation and afterwards, we talk about it,” Richman said in the report.

Eventually, he would like to see it adopted as part of the general school day.