Brianna Ghey's mother Esther wants mindfulness taught in every school.
‘What if I’d done this, or if I’d done that? What if I hadn’t shouted at her this time’, Esther Ghey kept asking after her daughter Brianna was stabbed to death.
Brianna was just 16 when ‘would-be serial killer’ Scarlett Jenkinson and ‘very smart sociopath’ Eddie Ratcliffe lured her to Culceth Linear Park and murdered her on February 11 last year. Both were 15 at the time.
The horror sent thoughts and regrets racing through Esther’s head, but she managed to keep them at bay.
‘When Brianna died’, she told Metro, ‘I would go for walks with my eldest and my husband, and we would really take that time out to notice the blossoms and the birds and the beauty in the world.
‘In that moment, we were okay, even though around us it was horrific. I suppose it’s giving yourself that peace and that space in the eye of the storm.’
She added: ‘Those thoughts still do come into my mind, but I can choose whether to ruminate on that or not.’
‘I have good days and I have bad days, and as time is going on, you have less bad days.’
What helped was something Esther has been practicing on and off for the last eight years – mindfulness.
‘If I’d have asked Brianna to practice mindfulness, she would have just been like, “You’re so weird mum, why are you trying to make me do this?”‘, Esther said.
‘And I think I might have been the same as a teenager.’
But as an adult, it’s been a lifeline.
Overwhelmed by stress and anxiety as a full-time mature student with two primary school kids, she looked for a way to silence what she calls ‘negative self-talk’.
After exploring different coping methods with an app, Esther settled on meditation as her go-to technique, generally once in the morning and again at night.
‘It’s really built that mental resilience, that mental strength and empathy’, Esther said, ‘not only to other people but also myself.’
You can see that in her approach to the family of Jenkinson.
After she was sentenced to life in prison with a minimum term of 22 years, they thanked Esther for her ‘incredible selflessness and empathy towards our family’.
They then met in their hometown of Warrington in March this year to discuss Esther’s Peace in Mind campaign, calling for mindfulness training in every school.
‘The tragedy last year has affected so many, and changed so many lives’, Esther said.
‘We lost our beautiful Brianna, but Scarlett’s family’s lives have been changed forever too.
‘I wanted to sit down with Scarlett’s family to find out how the last year had affected them.
‘It was a positive and respectful meeting which allowed us to initially get to know each other.’
Eager to share the tools that helped her survive a life-changing tragedy, Esther has raised more than double her £50,000 target for her Peace in Mind campaign.
More than 100 teachers have already signed up for, or completed, an eight-week course provided by the Mindfulness in Schools Project.
This means nearly every school in Warrington has at least one teacher trained to guide students in mindfulness.
Esther would like to see this rolled out to every school in the country, introduced in primary schools when ‘they’re so much more receptive’.
She believes it will solve not just the ‘mental health crisis in our young people’, but also improve society as a whole.
When you look around – at the riots running rampage in the last week, at the knife crime terrorising our streets, or at the conspiracy theories that plagued the family of Jay Slater after he went missing – there’s no shortage of problems to solve.
Esther said: ‘[Mindfulness] gives you that space before you react
‘One of the reasons why I wanted to support mindfulness in schools was because, after Brianna died, I saw some really horrible comments online.
‘And if these people picked up their phones, saw an article and had that time before they typed that comment, then they would really be able to see that their comment is not something that that’s going to help anybody.
‘It would probably prevent some of these things from happening. If everybody just had that space before they reacted, then there’d be a lot less problems in the world.’
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