It’s Friday morning and a cool breeze blows, shaking the leaves off the trees at the Senior Chapel at the Upper Campus of Ojai Valley School. The human voices that would normally fill the campus are absent, replaced instead by the voices of birds ringing through the air.
Students sit on cream-colored benches, damp with morning dew, as the sun warms their backs and as Advanced Placement Psychology teacher John Valenzuela begins speaking to them in a soft, soothing voice. He asks them to close their eyes and encourages them to drift away, following a floating thought. The only thing that matters this early morning is their mental journey as they sink into deep reflection here on top of the hill.
Welcome to Meditation Club, a group created by Valenzuela for students to convene and feel serene. Mr. Valenzuela came up with the idea after he tried meditation with his AP Psychology class and noticed that his students appeared to be more focused and attentive.
“Meditation is a mental exercise that shifts one’s focus from looking outside to looking inside, and when students turn on this appliance, sometimes they experience a shock,” he said.
In addition to providing a place where students can become better focused, the club also puts students in a calm state of mind, perfect for a stressful school day.
Valenzuela encourages students to meditate based on the many health benefits it gives to those who do so regularly. For example, meditation can decrease stress and can make it easier to move through difficult times. Having all experienced the anxiety of the teenage years, many can agree that having a coping mechanism is vital to the growth of teenagers.
Also, many schools have implemented meditation and have seen a spike in test scores and a steady decrease in absences. However, meditation isn’t for everyone. It’s virtually impossible to meditate if one is unwilling to.
“One has to own their readiness to have a beginner’s mind,” Valenzuela said.
Unlike other clubs, Meditation Club has no attendance requirement. Students can go weekly, but most drop in and out as they please.
Junior Evelyn Brokering attended her sessions because she was curious about the practice of meditation. She had never done it before, and wondered what its benefits would be.
“It’s cool because you never get to settle for more than 10 minutes during the school day,” Evelyn said. “It’s a different world. You get the opportunity to close your eyes and be calm, and just think about what’s being said. It made me really happy.”
The Senior Chapel is the home base for this weekly gathering. Valenzuela chose it because of its peaceful qualities.
“It is from this vantage point that meditation is really very powerful since it reorganizes our perceptions of the world,” he said.
The pleasant mountains and the lush green plants easily put those who go to this club at ease. It is the perfect habitat for meditating, as it brings an almost spiritual feeling to the gathering.
Those who go to the club agree.
“Everything seemed so much more clear and there was all this light and color around me,” said freshman Lilli Trompke about opening her eyes after a meditation session. “While we were sitting there and meditating, I forgot where I was. I didn’t feel like I was sitting on a bench on campus, it was more like a secret spot somewhere in my mind.”