LEADING WITH LOVE
One afternoon in May, sitting on the floor in a small, private room at Fort Worthington Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore’s Clifton-Berea—one of the poorest urban neighborhoods in America—Kamaya, ten years old, in fifth grade, and Jahlil, ten, also in fifth grade, are talking about something new. It’s the role of mindfulness in their lives.
Kamaya’s father is in prison (“I don’t have my dad right now—he’ll be home next year”) and her mother has her own house; Kamaya lives with her grandmother. A natural chatterbox, Kamaya quickly mentions uncles and cousins and a great-grandmother, a big extended family. She says she got mad just last night, because she wanted to play with her friends, and her mother, who visits her sometimes, wanted her to go to sleep. But instead of fussing and yelling and waking her grandmother, who wasn’t feeling well, Kamaya “took a stress breath,” which calmed her down. She didn’t wake her grandmother. And then she went to sleep herself.
Jahlil is a different sort of child—so quiet you might worry about what he’s thinking or feeling. He lives with his mom, and has a three-year-old sister; a younger brother died in childbirth. Jahlil gets to see his dad, who takes him shopping for clothes and to his favorite sort of movies: “Scary movies.” He doesn’t like school: “It’s boring. My science teacher, I don’t know about him. He curses at me. Because my friends, and me, do bad things.”
When he curses you, what do you do? I ask Jahlil.
“I say in my mind, ‘He should be fired.’ And then I go to the corner and breathe.”
Jahlil and Kamaya are using the techniques of clearing their minds, of concentrating on their breath, being taught at Fort Worthington by Holistic Life Foundation, a local nonprofit started by three neighborhood guys almost two decades ago; it uses mindfulness and yoga to help
