The following is an excerpt from Amy Edelstein’s reflections when introducing a new group of students to a mindful breath practice, and their positive and enthusiastic response. This piece was originally published in the Inner Strength Foundation October 2018 newsletter.
You can also read the full piece on the Inner Strength Foundation website.
“As an educator, when you see insight dawning in one of your students, there’s nothing more fulfilling and encouraging.”
~ Amy Edelstein
This Fall has been a wonderfully busy one with a mixture of breakthroughs in the classrooms, conference exposure for the program, and internal training for our Inner Strength instructors.
When I was teaching last week, in a 12th grade Civics class at one of the Mayor’s Office of Education Community Schools (a turn-around school that welcomes outside providers to support students, parents, and the neighborhood), we talked a lot about the types of thoughts that crowd our minds all the time. Teens spoke about everything from friends to grades to work to family to money issues to safety issues. After explaining with some experiential somatic methods what it looks like to “get some space on thought” or dis-embed from our identification with everything in our minds, we did a short mindful breathing exercise.
Join Amy for Monthly Conscious Classroom Webinars
Each month in The Conscious Classroom Webinar, Amy will share reflections on what is working in classrooms where the Inner Strength program is serving several thousand teens each year. In these webinar sessions you’ll learn tools and perspectives that will support you and the teens you teach or mentor or parent. Sign up here to attend the free monthly webinar.
Coming up: Thurs. November 15 at 2:00 pm US ET
Cultivating Gratitude: Building a Culture of Thanks