Permission to Pause: Embarking on the New Year with Balance and Connection

The people I work with know that I’m strongly oriented toward action, driven by an awareness of the critical urgency in all that needs to be done to ensure that every child can thrive academically and know that they belong. But recently, as 2024 was coming to a close, I paused to reflect on the work I’ve been doing with my colleagues, and I found myself recalling a moment where I stepped away from the action and found something I didn’t know I needed. I want to talk about that pause and what it gave me, as I think it speaks to the challenges of our work and how to keep showing up with all our heart for those challenges. 

Supporting well-being

These challenges can be prodigious, and they can exert a toll on the well-being of the people taking them on. In HMH’s 2024 Education Confidence Report, HMH researchers asked educators what they needed to support their well-being. These were the top three responses: 

1. A more balanced workload
2. More time for myself during the day
3. More personal resources to support mental and physical health and well-being

The day I found something I didn’t know I needed, I was hurrying from one meeting to the next. I had just come from presenting to my fellow HMH executive leadership team (ELT) members about one of my key responsibilities as HMH’s Chief Equity & Inclusion Officer: support for HMH’s employee resource groups (ERGs). The meeting went well, a gratifying reminder that my ELT colleagues and HMH in general have established HMH ERGs as a fundamentally important way in which we support one another in the work we do. Whenever I’ve sought support for our ERGs, the answer has usually been affirmative coupled with, “When do you need it?”

After that successful meeting, I joined a call with the HMH Mindfulness ERG, and the session started with the pause that ultimately meant so much to me. It was a collective mindfulness moment, with the facilitator leading us all through a short practice in which we centered ourselves and checked in on how we were feeling in our body and our mind. Especially because of the success of the previous meeting, I didn’t think I was carrying any stress from it, but maybe because I know how much is riding on our work supporting teachers and students, some stress was there. I noticed during the mindfulness moment that the tension in my shoulders eased as the practice went on. In just a few minutes, I felt calmer, more centered, more resilient, and more connected with the other ERG members in the meeting.

Gratitude for mindfulness

I was so grateful for that moment, not only for how it made me feel but also for how it crystallized the power of working together deeply and empathetically, a power that’s at the center of our ERGs. The feelings of connection that the ERGs bring is not extracurricular to our work but is 100% a part of the work we do to support teachers in helping students grow with a sense of belonging. This is work that we can’t do if we aren’t doing it together, leaning on one another, growing from one another, and encouraging one another to take time to reconnect to our own best selves.

Others share my gratitude for the HMH Mindfulness ERG for drawing on the strengths, interests, and kindness of its members to carry out its mission to “cultivate inner calm, clarity, and resilience through mindfulness practices for professional and personal growth.” One HMH Mindfulness member said, “I feel more connected to my coworkers when we have these sessions, and it gives me a chance to step away from the passion of work to relax a bit.” Another said that the sessions “make me pause and remember I am a WHOLE person, not just a member of a staff.”

These feelings of connection and wholeness can help in relatively small ways, such as getting through a challenging day. As one Mindfulness member said, “I did a guided meditation before a presentation and it really helped me not be so nervous. I was way more relaxed.” The feelings can help in comparatively large ways, too, as evidenced by one member who said that the support, practices, and community of the Mindfulness ERG changed their thinking: “Attending these classes for a few years now helped me center and process stress more effectively. I now have tools where before I had none.” 

Permission to pause

Scientific research continues to show the benefits of mindfulness. Overall, “the psychological and physical health benefits of mindfulness meditation are strongly supported by research,” concludes one research summary from the American Psychological Association. The APA lists a far-reaching range of results such as how mindfulness reduces stress, boosts working memory, and improves cognitive flexibility.

Of all the promising research and praise for mindfulness, my favorite might be this one, where during an HMH Mindfulness ERG session, the facilitator said that everyone had “permission to pause.” An attendee then said this permission “made me tear up.” In this response I can feel, first, the discomfort of someone so committed to their work that they feel they can never pause; I can feel the relief of someone first understanding that it is OK to take a pause, to check in and connect with your best self; and I can feel how this pause is giving that person a renewed sense of energy and purpose.

I encourage you now and going forward to give yourself permission to take that pause. One of the powerful elements of mindfulness practices is in their efficiency. You don’t need to carve out a lot of time for it to have a meaningful and lasting impact. But please don’t take my word for it. As you look ahead to the new year, I hope you’ll consider establishing a practice of taking a little time for yourself each day to step away from the action.

If you have access to Ed, HMH’s learning platform, then you can take advantage of our library of teacher-supporting resources on Teacher’s Corner. These include mindfulness-focused resources, like videos to practice breathing techniques. If you introduce mindfulness into your teaching, I believe you’ll find that you get something from it that you didn’t even know you needed, and you’ll be able to return with renewed balance and power to the indispensably important work of trying to reach and inspire every student.

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