PAUSE

Parent Booklet

Last Updated May 2019

 Why Pause?

• Pause teaches the students the importance of

recognising the signals in their body that their brain
sends them.

• Pause teaches the students the three key parts of

the brain that are responsible for thinking,
emotions and long term memory.

• Pause empowers students to self-regulate their own

behaviour by taking notice and acting on the signals
they receive from their brain in a positive way.

• Wellbeing underpins the way children feel about

themselves and how they relate to others.

• Pause improves children’s wellbeing by teaching

them about Neuroscience and Mindfulness.

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 3 Key Parts of your Brain

Name Function

Prefrontal Cortex Owl – Thinking part of the brain

Part of the frontal lobe
Responsible for - Executive function, Decision making Problem
solving, Complex thought
Amygdala Guard Dog – Emotional part of the brain
Part of the limbic system
Responsible for processing our emotions
Hippocampus Elephant – Memory part of the brain
Part of the limbic system
Responsible for forming, organising and storing memories

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 Make a Mind Jar
Pause Mind Jar
In the early weeks of the
Pause Program, the
students are asked to make
a Pause Mind Jar

The Pause Mind Jar has two

purposes:
1. It represents how the
brain looks when the
amygdala fires, all our
thoughts, feelings and
emotions are swirling
around in the brain.
2. It is used as the first
self-regulation tool in
the Pause Process.
Students shake their
mind jar, place their
hands on the anchor
spot (stomach) and take
some deep breaths.

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Hand Model of the Brain

Become Pause Detectives

Notice what signals your Amygdala sends you before it fires:
• Butterflies in your stomach
• Fast beating heart
• Hot face
• Sweaty lip
• Clench teeth
• Tense fists
• Wriggly body

If you act on these signals, and do one of the behaviours from the
Pause Process, you have a good chance of calming your Amygdala
down before it completely fires and sends your Prefrontal Cortex and
Hippocampus offline.

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 6 Pause Behaviours

There is a space between the Balanced Brain and the

Flipped Lid (Amygdala Fire) where students can notice
the signals that their brain has sent them. This is
where they can Pause and use one of the Pause
Behaviours from the Pause Process.

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What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the quality of paying attention in an open, balanced and curious way.
Mindfulness can be applied to all sensory experience, thoughts, and emotions.

What are the benefits of mindfulness?

30+ years of research has shown the benefits of mindfulness in adults to range from
decreased stress and chronic pain to improved emotional and mental well-being.
This
plus emerging research on children offers compelling evidence to support using
mindfulness in education. The application of mindfulness by students may improve
academic achievement, mental health, and inter- and intra-personal relationships.1
Studies find that learning mindfulness benefits students in terms of improved:
• Attention • Empathy and understanding of others
• Emotion regulation • Social skills
• Behavior in school • Test anxiety and stress

How is Pause being taught at my child’s school?

The Pause Project provides 16 lessons of Neuroscience, Mindfulness and Positive
Education training to your child’s school. Your child’s teacher is learning along with
your child and has received background research, lesson plans and resources to
help assist them in implementing Pause into their classroom. A trained Pause
teacher is teaching the 16 Pause lessons to your child through 2 weekly sessions.

http://www.mindfulschools.org/about-mindfulness/research/
http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00603/full

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Pause Posture – Mindful Bodies

“Never slouch,
as doing so compresses Pause for a moment
the lungs, Observe how your
overcrowds our vital body feels
organs, Relax your shoulders
rounds our backs and Adjust your posture
throws us off balance.” Have a Mindful Day.
Joseph Pilates

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Heartfulness

Life is precious
and
Mindfulness
gives us the
tools to live
deeply,
to connect
authentically
and to open
our hearts
fully.
Meena Srinivasan, author of
“Teach Breathe Learn”

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Use Weather Symbols
to describe or represent your emotions –
called Internal Weather it’s sometimes easier to say
“I’m stormy” than “I’m angry”!

You don’t have to be positive all the time.

It’s perfectly okay to feel sad, angry,
annoyed, frustrated, scared and anxious.
Having feelings doesn’t make you a
“negative person”. It makes you human.
Lori Deschene

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Mindful Movement
Mindful movement is exercise performed with
awareness. It involves mental focus, to train your body to
move optimally through both athletic activities and
everyday life. It's exercise that makes you move smarter.

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Reticular Activating System

The Reticular Activating System

(RAS) of the brain stem is considered
as one of the most important
systems which facilitates the
functioning of sensation and
attention.

The filtering process that goes on in

the RAS is known as sensory gating.
This means that strong sensations
from one set of sense organs are
allowed to pass, while information
from the other sense organs is
temporarily held back.
www.psychologydiscussion.net › ... › Reticular Activating
System (RAS)

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 Thoughts

Chris Bergstrom from Blissful Kids states:

“Mindfulness is simply… noticing what is happening right now.
Mindfulness is taking notice of how your body feels and what you
see, smell and taste. Mindfulness is ….. feeling emotions in your
body, perhaps through a tightness somewhere, or a good
sensation. Mindfulness is also noticing what your mind is doing.”

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What is Bucket Filling?

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Growth Mindset

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Gratitude

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 Resilience –
Dealing with Change
Resilience in learning, as in life, is about being able
to persevere through setbacks, take on challenges
and risk making mistakes to reach a goal.
Judy Willis Guardian Tue 12 Jan 2016

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Kindness

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Empathy

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How can | support Pause at home?
Informal practice at home
You can use or refer to Pause anytime.
• Making reference to 3 Key parts of the brain in different family situations.
• Prompting children to “notice how you are feeling right now” momentarily guides
them inside. When you do this regularly they will start to notice, unprompted
more often.
• Referring to the 6 Pause behaviours and encouraging your child to use them.
• If there is a particularly emotional situation, ask your child if there is anything
they’ve learned in Pause sessions that might help them at that moment. Ask
them where they feel that emotion in their body and what happens when they
gently notice that emotion and take some mindful breaths.
• It’s usually not helpful to suggest Pause at the height of a difficult moment. Wait
until the situation has settled some. When your child is calmer, talk about what
happened. Ask how Pause might have helped in that moment. This increases the
likelihood of them remembering to apply Pause next time.

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When will | see a difference in my child?

This is one of the most common questions parents ask, and an important
one.
• We often see and hear of changes after day-one of Pause beginning.
But, as with any skill or talent, Pause takes practice and changes will
come suddenly as well as gradually. Research evidence suggests that
even small ‘doses’ of neuroscience and mindfulness can have important
effects on our biology and attention.2
• Pause does have the potential to affect great shifts in behavior,
attention, and emotional regulation. Keep in mind that when someone
has difficulty in any of these areas, it is usually a deeply engrained
pattern or habit. It takes time to retrain ourselves.
• A useful analogy is the Slow Food Movement or the idea that “good
things take time.” Mindfulness is an innate human capacity that we
would ideally cultivate our entire life. We may see improvements in
certain areas and recognize that other things take longer.
• Your understanding and practice of mindfulness will enhance the

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benefits in your child.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/43/17152.short

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 Key Terms
Here is a list of the most common words we use in teaching Pause. After a few lessons, students
really take to this new vocabulary. We often hear stories of students spontaneously using these
words in the classroom, on the playground or at home.

Mindfulness: Mindfulness means paying attention to your experience, or noticing things on purpose, in a curious and
open way. We can be mindful of everything including sound, sight, smell, taste, touch, our thoughts and our
emotions.
Pause Posture - Mindful Bodies: The posture we use for practicing mindfulness. A “Pause Posture” is still, quiet, calm,
relaxed yet upright. Students need not always have a Mindful Body, but when they are prompted they know exactly
what needs to change in order to “get into” a Pause Posture - Mindful Body.
Anchor: Our “anchor spot” is the place where we feel our breath most obviously. It’s the place that holds our
attention, just like an anchor holds a boat in place*. The three most common places people feel their breath are: 1)
the belly; 2) the chest; 3) the nose. Any place is fine, as long as you can feel the breath there, choose one place and
stick with it.
Mindful Breathing: This is the foundation of most mindfulness lessons. Although we learn to be mindful of almost
everything we do, mindful breathing happens in every class. Mindful breathing helps us to see where our attention is:
when it’s present, and when it’s wandered away. Mindful breathing can help us calm down, help us be present, and
help us remember to notice our experience, whatever it may be at any given moment.
Heartfulness: is anything that develops empathy, kindness and caring. Lessons that cultivate heartfulness include
sending kind thoughts, cultivating generosity and gratitude, and developing kindness in social situations like the
playground or recess.
6 Pause Behaviours: These are six behaviours that anyone can do to help themselves calm their brain and
emotionally self-regulate.
 Pause – shake mind jar
 Pause – take 3 deep breaths
 Pause – have a drink of water
 Pause – name how you are feeling
 Pause – go to the calm down area of the classroom/home
 Pause – go for a walk
Self-regulation - Self-regulation is the ability to understand and manage your behaviour and your reactions to feelings
and the things happening around you. Children start developing this ability from around 12 months.
Self-regulation in young children | Raising Children Network
https://raisingchildren.net.au/toddlers/behaviour/understanding.../self-regulation

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In your everyday life always
remember to:
Practice the Pause!
Practise the Pause:
When in doubt, Pause
When angry, Pause
When you are stressed or
frustrated, Pause
When you Pause,
listen, feel and be present

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