Fort Worth Report
A lot about policing has changed in the 12 years Aaron Oden has been with the Arlington Police Department. In that time, he’s seen a rise in national scrutiny of police misconduct, increased oversight mechanisms and a shift in the way officers are expected to approach the job.
“There’s an arduous process to becoming a cop. … You are excited about coming into this job and naive,” he said. “You wanna help people, catch bad guys, and you don’t understand the impact of the things you’re gonna see and potentially what you’re gonna have to do.”
The stress of the job builds up. Without an appropriate release, it can be deadly.
“You don’t have to have a mat. You don’t have to wear special clothes,” she said. “It’s like, if you have a brain and you’re stressed out and you’re living in this world, almost for everybody, mindfulness in some way applies.”
Mindfulness is a collection of practices meant to cultivate awareness of self and environment, according to The Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. Although the tradition is thousands of years old, oft-cited mindfulness research began publishing in the U.S. in the early 1980s.