Interview with Dr. Thao Le

What is the Pause Space and how do you see the campus community engaging in it? 

My mindfulness course has evolved and continues to evolve depending on the students. But the Pause Space was developed because I wanted a physical place to cultivate the practice so that students taking the course weren’t limited to doing the exercises only in class. The Pause Space was another venue in which students as well as the community could also join the practice. Ultimately, my intention is for it to be a service space to help students, faculty, staff, or anyone from the community to connect with themselves. Don’t we all need to pause? 

There’s a small community of us who have continued to gather throughout this whole pandemic. Every Friday we gather and some students casually drop in. Sometimes though my schedule doesn’t allow it, but somehow it always works out, and it’s helpful to have fellowship in the practice. 

What lessons do you wish you knew when you first started the Pause Space?

 I wish that there was more administrative support. When we start initiatives as educators, it’s based on our own resources. I would like to have a more aesthetically pleasing and welcoming space because the physical environment is important. 

I also could have been more politically involved. The university’s counseling center offers important mental health services but many students come to my course saying they were told by their university mental health and academic counselors to take my course. My class was never supposed to be a counseling course and it is not. Maybe I should have reached out to the counseling center and offered to do a collaboration. I don’t want to encroach upon anyone’s territory, for me I see it more as a service, a prevention service, and a skill that could be helpful to students in their learning journey. 

What advice would you give to educators hoping to bring mindfulness into their campus communities? 

Do it. You learn by trial and error and you learn a lot when you try it yourself, rather than take the learnings from others. If I were to tell you how to cook a dish and there’s a recipe, unless you do your own cooking, you’re not going to know which ingredients work and what the dish tastes like- everybody’s got their own flavor and style. 

When I first asked some of my colleagues about starting a mindfulness course, they dissuaded me saying that you can’t mix religion and science, or religion with education. This has nothing to do with religion. I’m not professing to make everybody mindful or promoting any religion, but I didn’t get any slack. I went ahead and did it anyway. So that’s why I say let’s do it! 

You also recently wrote two children’s books on mindfulness: Mindfulness with Aloha Breath and Akahai. How do these books fit into your overall vision for mindfulness in education? 

This was my attempt to address a fundamental concern about the cultural adaptation of mindfulness curricula. Hawaii educators acquire most of the resources on mindfulness from mainstream mindfulness curriculum being promoted on the mainland, and it’s not always culturally relevant with little buy-in among line staff like teachers. These two children’s books are based in the local culture. It’s important to fuse the values that are locally meaningful. So that’s why I felt compelled to create Mindfulness with Aloha Breath and Akahai, which means kindness in Hawaiian. Plus, Uncle Bruce Keaulani, a Native Hawaiian cultural practitioner, said I must do it because he tells me I’m Hawaiian, I guess at heart!