Eat or Be Eaten….. OR…. Tracking Greater Self-Control

In the book The Way of the Mindful Education, Daniel Rechtschaffen suggests that perhaps one of the first forms of mindfulness was animal tracking.

Close your eyes for a minute and put yourself in the footsteps of someone from a time in which you did not go to the store for food. Take a deep breath and picture yourself getting ready to track an animal you need, to be able to feed your family. From childhood you were taught by your elders how to track the animals you were seeking out. The way they taught you was to take you on a tracking hike. They showed you the tracks, they spoke the words into you. You didn’t sit and read about the tracking process, you lived it as you were taught it.

As you were living the teaching of tracking animals you were also taught to have an awareness of yourself and your surroundings. You were taught that as you tracked an animal, it was very likely, another animal was tracking you. If you wanted to survive you needed to have a total awareness of your present moment. You needed to be mindful!

This mindful living taught you to calm your body, slow your breathing, keep your focus on the present and your surroundings. As you learned about animals, you learned to control yourself. You were living your lesson of self-control.

George Leoniak the author of The Mindful Tracker, is an internationally known and certified tracker who teaches mindfulness alongside tracking. He talks about not putting projections into the tracking experience. He states it is best to have an open mind and not assume a track is a squirrel track until you study it, track it, and know it. He talks about how this relates to how we see ourselves and others and not putting projects onto others and getting to know them and getting to know ourselves.

George talks about never taking cell phones into a tracking environment to ensure you are full submerged in the experience, to find the zen, to be mindful. We can use this lesson to help us remember to put aside distractions an be fully present in our mindful experiences.

If you’d like to learn more from George check out his website - http://mindfultracker.com/

Now that we have explored the origin of mindful tracking and creating self-control let’s find a way to live this and pass it along to our students.

I would not suggest taking your students on a tracking adventure outside. That being said we can do a mock-tracking inside.

For this week’s mindfulness, after you have worked with your students to understand that background to mindful tracking, practice the tracking!

Maybe you simply read to them from the blog. Or maybe you get super creative and create a tracking story to tell your students. Make sure to talk about taking slow deep breaths, having quiet steady slow steps, keep focused wide eyes, and use your ears to listen for signs of what is and is not in your surroundings.

After you have created the back story, taught the mindful self-control, practice! Please!!! I have taken the time to put animal tracks around the building. I encourage you to take a mindful walk around the building, find a set of animal tracks (there are a few different sets) and track the animal.