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Our courses and curricula are designed for under-resourced public schools facing high turnover rates and toxic stress. We offer educators practical skills for self-care, facilitation, and connecting with youth, providing simple, effective mindfulness practices that can be integrated into the school day and adapted for diverse environments.

Mindfulness truly comes from the inside out. We prioritize personal mindfulness practice as the foundation for successful programs.

Our curriculum requires no heavy prep, no big manuals, only limited class-time. And it integrates easily into your school day.

We believe the most effective way to grow Mindfulness in Education is one committed educator at a time.

Our expert-facilitated courses develop personal practice, mindful teaching, and how to teach mindfulness to others.

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Our vibrant, supportive network of more than 10,000 graduates are passionately bringing mindfulness to youth in all 50 states.

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Our website and courses provide our community members with inspiration and support, personally and professionally.

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Our Approach to Supporting Mindfulness in Education

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Our courses and curricula are designed for under-resourced public schools facing high turnover rates and toxic stress. We offer educators practical skills for self-care, facilitation, and connecting with youth, providing simple, effective mindfulness practices that can be integrated into the school day and adapted for diverse environments.

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Many educators are introducing meditation into the classroom as a means of improving kids' attention and emotional regulation.

Mindful Schools

A five-minute walk from the rickety, raised track that carries the 5 train through the Bronx, the English teacher Argos Gonzalez balanced a rounded metal bowl on an outstretched palm. His class-a mix of black and Hispanic students in their late teens, most of whom live in one of the poorest districts in New York City-by now were used to the sight of this unusual object: a Tibetan meditation bell.

"Today we're going to talk about mindfulness of emotion," Gonzalez said with a hint of a Venezuelan accent. "You guys remember what mindfulness is?" Met with quiet stares, Gonzalez gestured to one of the posters pasted at the back of the classroom, where the students a few weeks earlier had brainstormed terms describing the meaning of "mindfulness." There were some tentative mumblings: "being focused," "being aware of our surroundings."

Gonzalez nodded. "Right. But it's also being aware of our feelings, our emotions, and how they impact us."

Arturo A. Schomburg Satellite Academy is what is known in New York City as a transfer school, a small high school designed to re-engage students who have dropped out or fallen behind. This academy occupies two floors of a hulking, grey building that's also home to two other public schools. For the most part, Gonzalez told me, the kids who come here genuinely want to graduate, but attendance is their biggest barrier to success. On the day I visited, one of Gonzalez's students had just been released from jail; one recently had an abortion; one had watched a friend bleed to death from a gunshot wound the previous year. Between finding money to put food on the table and dealing with unstable family members, these students' minds are often crowded with concerns more pressing than schoolwork.

Still holding the bowl, Gonzalez continued with the day's lesson. "I'm going to say a couple of words to you. You're not literally going to feel that emotion, but the word is going to trigger something, it's going to make you think of something or feel something. Try to explore it."

The slightly built, 30-something Gonzalez, who wears a wide smile and a scruffy beard, first learned about mindfulness from his wife, a yoga teacher in schools around the city. His students referred to him by his first name, and Gonzalez addressed them just as informally-greeting them in the morning with a high five and a "Sup," or "How you doing, bro?" or even "Hey, mamma." He told me he strives to make school relevant-explaining what a "motif" is by comparing it to the hook of a rap song, for example-and believes in the value of hands-on teaching, emailing students individually to check in when they don't show up.

"First, sit up straight, put your feet flat on the ground. Let your eyes close." Gonzalez demonstrated as he instructed. Most of the 15 or so students followed suit-though a few scribbled surreptitiously to finish overdue assignments. Gonzalez tapped the bowl and a rich, metallic sound rang out. The class fell quiet as the note reverberated.

"Take a deep breath into your belly. As you breathe in and breathe out, notice that your breath is going to be stronger in a certain part of your body. Maybe it's your belly, your chest, or your nose. We'll begin with trying to count to 10 breaths."

There was silence but for the hiss of the 5 train pulling into the station, the clunk of garbage cans, the faint siren of a police car.

"If you get lost in thought, it's okay. Just come back and count again. Whether you get up to 10 or not doesn't really matter. It's just a way to focus [your] mind."

* * *

It may not be the typical way to start an English class, but Gonzalez's students were familiar with these five-minute mindfulness exercises-from counting breaths and focusing on the sensations of breathing, to visualizing thoughts and feelings-that he uses to help train their attention, quiet their thoughts, and regulate their emotions.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, the biologist who first coined the term "mindfulness" in the '70s, defines it as a state of mind: the act of "paying attention on purpose" to the present moment, with a "non-judgmental" attitude. But mindfulness is really a secular philosophy and set of techniques adapted from thousands-of-years-old Buddhist meditation traditions-ones that only recently landed in mainstream Western consciousness. It was Kabat-Zinn who first formally brought mindfulness into a medical setting; he developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, which used specific exercises to help patients dealing with chronic pain and is now widely applied in other therapeutic contexts, and founded the Center for Mindfulness at UMass Medical School.

Mindfulness has also been harnessed in increasingly diverse contexts beyond health care-some uses more legitimate than others. Last year, the Congressman Tim Ryan introduced mindfulness into weekly staff meetings on the Hill, Time published a cover story on the topic, and CNN's Anderson Cooper dedicated a primetime segment to showcasing his own transformative experience at a mindfulness retreat center. Google, General Mills, the Seattle Seahawks, and the U.S. military have all embraced mindfulness as a means of boosting performance and productivity, while its potential as an antidote to the distractions and stress of everyday life is increasingly promoted within the general population and has spurred a cottage industry of books, magazines, and smartphone apps.

Even when the concept of mindfulness was created it was slightly nebulous; now, as it is reappropriated and circulated in the media, it has become even more so. The lack of a universal definition for mindfulness, along with its increasing association with celebrity and vague implications of spirituality, health, and happiness leave some skeptics dismissing it as a superficial, hokey fad. Meanwhile, practicing Buddhists and others who believe strongly in the spiritual roots of mindfulness are concerned that the meditation techniques are being poorly adopted without a proper understanding of the principles behind them, and the long-term commitment they require-a phenomenon they call " McMindfulness."

Still, the body of scientific research illustrating the positive effects of mindfulness training on mental health and well-being-at the level of the brain as well as at the level of behavior-grows steadily more well-established: It improves attention, reduces stress, and results in better emotional regulation and an improved capacity for compassion and empathy. Brain-imaging studies at Harvard and Mass General Hospital have shown that long-term mindfulness training can help thicken the cortical regions related to attention and sensory processing, and may offset thinning of those areas that typically comes with aging. Mindfulness is widely considered effective in psychotherapy as a treatment not just for adults, but also for children and adolescents with aggression, ADHD, or mental-health problems like anxiety. (It remains to be seen whether mindfulness alone is a sufficient replacement for other therapies. In a review last year of 47 different randomized clinical trials, The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that mindfulness training wasn't any more effective than other types of therapy, like drugs.)

This strong base of research, along with a growing body of supporters, are fueling the momentum behind mindfulness. And as Gonzalez demonstrates, it's now spreading to schools, where it could potentially have an impact on students' well-being; a quarter of American adolescents suffer from a mental disorder, according to a 2010 Johns Hopkins study.

The first major effort to use mindfulness in schools began in the UK in 2007 with a series of fixed lesson plans delivered in classrooms across the country. Interest in the movement has picked up pace since. This past July, Oxford researchers announced plans to launch a large-scale, seven-year, $10 million study on mindfulness in education next year. More than a dozen similar initiatives have sprouted in the U.S., grassroots programs that train teachers in mindfulness and generate their own curricula. Among the two largest are MindUP and Mindful Schools, the California-based nonprofit that trained Gonzalez, which continue to spearhead the country's steadily growing, but piecemeal, mindfulness-in-education movement. Since its founding in 2010, Mindful Schools has trained thousands of teachers through its online programs, most of them in California, New York, and Washington, D.C., who are said to have a total reach of 300,000 students.

After Gonzalez and his wife signed up for one of their six-week courses-Mindful Schools' training is open to any educator or mental-health professional who wants to teach mindfulness to young people-he was able to convince his school administrators to help him pay for a year-long certification program. Through a series of online lectures, weekly breakout sessions, monthly meetings, and two week-long summer retreats, Gonzalez worked on his own mindfulness skills, honing his ability to control his attention and regulate his own emotions while receiving specific guidance on how to teach those same skills to the youth populations he'd be working with. Gonzalez also received training about the biology of the nervous system, child development, and the neuroscientific basis for mindfulness's effects.

Not all mindfulness programs are in schools like Gonzalez's, where large numbers of students have been identified as disordered or disruptive, or struggle with mental-health problems and unstable living situations. Middlesex School, a prestigious boarding school in Massachusetts, requires that all incoming freshmen take a mindfulness course. The program, which was founded by an alumnus who used mindfulness to cope with both sports-related performance anxiety and T-Cell lymphoma, has proven popular among students. A vast majority-97 percent-of students surveyed in 2014 said they would recommend the course to others, reporting benefits ranging from better sleep and diminished stress to increased focus on schoolwork.

Education reformers have long maintained that there is a fundamental connection between emotional imbalance and poor life prospects. As Paul Tough argued and popularized in How Children Succeed, stress early in life can prompt a cascade of negative effects, psychologically and neurologically-poor self-control and underdeveloped executive function, in particular. The U.S. education system's focus on cognitive intelligence-IQ scores and academic skills like arithmetic-undermines the development of equally vital forms of non-cognitive intelligence. This type of intelligence entails dimensions of the mind that are difficult to quantify: It is the foundation of good character, resilience, and long-term life fulfillment. It is this part of the mind that mindfulness seeks to address.

* * *

Efforts to implement mindfulness in classrooms haven't always gone smoothly. Some parents and administrators have challenged its use in schools based on its religious roots-and in at least one instance even managed to shut a program down. As mindfulness is used more routinely in the medical sphere, these belief-based critiques are becoming less common. But the lack of evidence demonstrating the long-term academic impact of mindfulness has raised concerns about its role as an educational tool. Given the inherent nebulousness of mindfulness as a concept, and the grassroots status of the movement, these concerns are understandable.

Qualitative evidence touting the benefits of mindfulness in the classroom-like Mindful Schools' encouraging survey results and uplifting anecdotes from participants-is easy to come by, and several short-term research studies on elementary- and middle-school students have shown positive results. But serious questions remain about the overall efficacy of such programs on non-subjective measurements of well-being and academic performance, such as test scores, graduation rates, mental-health referrals, and overall life outcomes.

The lack of rigorous, robust, and long-term studies on mindfulness is what makes people like the Penn State University psychologist Mark Greenberg cautious. Greenberg works with the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning-one of the groups at the forefront of the two-decade-old social-and-emotional-learning (SEL) movement. The mindfulness-in-education movement has a lot in common with, and in many ways complements, SEL, since both aim to teach children how to build self-awareness, effectively handle their emotions, and empathetically manage their relationships. Unlike mindfulness, however, which takes more of an inside-out approach by helping students to slow down, intentionally focus their attention from moment to moment, and build compassion, SEL works from the outside in, teaching children a set of skills like how to mediate a conflict, or how to verbally express and explain their emotions to improve communication. Research shows that SEL programs alone have boosted kids' academic performance, as well as benefitting them socially and emotionally-but many believe mindfulness should also belong in the SEL toolkit.

Linda Lantieri, who helped found the SEL collaborative and has been working on these issues for decades, argues that the best approach to education combines mindfulness and SEL skills rather than treating one as a sufficient replacement for the other. While Greenberg agrees with Lantieri, he is a sober voice amidst the hype and enthusiasm about mindfulness, earning him the fond title of "curmudgeon" in some circles. "We don't know if these effects last," Greenberg told me. "Right now the promised benefits far exceed the actual findings." He is also concerned that mindfulness is just one "flavor of the month" that may detract attention from SEL programs supported by more substantial evidence. (Greenberg recently co-authored an impressive longitudinal study that followed hundreds of students as they progressed from early childhood through young adulthood and found that poor social-emotional skills in kindergarten helped predict negative outcomes across multiple domains of education, employment, criminal activity, substance use, and mental health.)

Mindful Schools is aware of these criticisms, and is beefing up its research efforts. In 2012, the group worked with a University of California at Davis research team to conduct a randomized controlled study of three elementary schools in Oakland, California. They sent in outside mindfulness instructors for 15 minutes, three times a week, to teach some classrooms but not others, and reported that mindfulness improved students' behavior and ability to focus, as well as teachers' sense of well-being-though the research design had several main points of weakness, mostly involving the challenge of measuring children directly rather than through teacher assessments. Mindful Schools' new research director told me that the group is eager to conduct more studies that are even better-planned, focusing more on the efficacy of the kind of integrated training Gonzalez received. The field is so new that techniques evolve rapidly, constantly going through phases of trial-and-error-so it remains to be seen whether current or future findings can convince skeptics of mindfulness's effectiveness.

* * *

Back in the Bronx, after a minute or two of the day's mindfulness exercise, his own eyes also closed, Gonzalez ran through a list of emotions: Happy. Sad. Excited. Mad. Bored. Loving. Worried. Jealous. Silly. The second item on this list seemed to especially resonate with an 18-year-old at the front of the classroom, a young woman with dark skin, shimmering pink lip gloss, and perfectly plucked eyebrows. Sitting up straight with her hands in her lap, her composed posture belied the challenges she faced shortly before transferring to Arturo A. Schomburg two years earlier.

"I didn't know anybody. I was very depressed. I didn't want to be in school," she told me in a hushed voice at the end of class. Shortly before transferring to this school, her favorite big brother had been hit by a car. She said she'd watched him fall into a coma, and sat by his side until his heart stopped; soon after that, she'd seen one of her friends get shot in the head and bleed to death in the street. During the quiet minutes set aside for mindfulness exercises in class, she would often cry.

Now, she writes in perfect, neat script as she fills out a worksheet to accompany the day's mindfulness exercise. But she told me she wasn't always so eager to participate. "I used to write, 'I hate this, I don't want to do this.' I ripped those papers up," she said. But one day when she was in a particularly dark mood, something clicked. "Argos told me to close my eyes. Then he said, 'Connect to your breath.' He always used to say it, but I never really did it until then." Gonzalez told me that his Mindful Schools training had specific segments dedicated to working with trauma.

"I noticed that I could feel [my breath] in my chest," she told me, "And at that moment, I felt so relieved. The only thing I could think in my mind was, 'I'm ok.' And, I don't know-from that day on, it just didn't hurt anymore." She told me she hadn't been in fights the way she once used to. Her four other brothers are in jail, and she is convinced it's because they didn't get the mindfulness training she now has. "Your emotions drive you mad," she said, but escaping them is possible by "focusing on now." (Our conversation also benefitted from the fact that I myself have some knowledge of mindfulness; I discovered it during a year off from college as I struggled with anxiety and depression.)

Another student told me she was skeptical about mindfulness but admitted that it could be helpful. She told me that she initially refused to do the exercises, sitting defiantly while others participated. Some of the tasks-like tapping your thumb to each finger individually, to narrowly focus attention on your fingertips-did nothing but irritate her. Eventually, though, she realized she was alone in her resistance, and she began to go through the motions, largely because she likes and respects Gonzalez. She was also struck by a movie Gonzalez showed them that compared two jails, one that trained prisoners in mindfulness and one that didn't. The prisoners who learned mindfulness were much happier and more successful when they got out. Still, ultimately, she maintains that she doesn't see the point.

* * *

Beyond the issue of scientific evidence, bringing mindfulness into classrooms raises other questions: How does it fit into the traditional teaching model? Could any teacher teach mindfulness, or does it require a significant personal investment? Is opening teachers up to dealing with their students' emotional and psychological needs, in addition to their academic ones, encouraging a blur between teacher and therapist?

Gonzalez doesn't think so. "My intention as a mindfulness instructor is to give students some very simple and basic tools so they can learn to self regulate. That's the beginning and end of it." When a student is dealing with emotional trauma, Gonzalez said he's been taught to keep his advice general-to remind the student that everyone suffers and feels pain, but that life is a gift to be treasured.

The clinical social worker at Gonzalez's school-a large man with a warm baritone voice-thinks mindfulness supports the school's overall SEL mission. "At times all the roles blur-teachers, therapists, social workers. Especially in a school like this. If you don't address the noise in a kid's head that they bring in from the outside, I don't care how good a teacher you are, you're not going to have much success."

He was convinced that Gonzalez is on the right track; and that all teachers should get something akin to mindfulness training, given that they must deal with undiagnosed mental conditions on a regular basis. While they are not therapists, they "can at least ease some of the stress in the moment. Long enough to have somebody intervene."

Greenberg's view about the teacher-as-therapist issue is also clear: "Teachers teach many things that are therapeutic. They are managing children's behavior all day long, but that doesn't make them therapists, that makes them good teachers. Some of the same ideas we teach in therapy are also applicable to all people."

Beyond helping his students, Gonzalez also thinks mindfulness helps him to cope with the strains of teaching. He believes he now draws clearer lines in his relationships with students-giving them the skills to help themselves, rather than feeling that he needs to be the one to heal them-and copes more healthily with the trauma the job exposes him to, whether directly (in a previous teaching job, he said a student once stumbled into his office bleeding from a stab wound) or indirectly through working with a grieving student.

Gonzalez ultimately thinks that mindfulness may go furthest if applied to teacher education as a way to help prevent burnout-a major issue, given that 20 percent of teachers in high-poverty schools leave within their first year. Greenberg agrees. One of the ongoing research projects he and his colleauges are involved in is the Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education (CARE) program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, that focuses on the well-being of the teacher and instructs teachers on emotional awareness, techniques for emotion regulation, and ways to apply these skills to teaching. Greenberg and others suspect that mindfulness specifically tailored to teachers and their struggles-stress and time management, for example-and incorporated into their initial training might do as much or more to improve classroom performance than trying to teach children directly. In its annual surveys, Mindful Schools has found that a majority of the teachers it has trained experienced lowered stress, more connection with students, and higher job satisfaction.

By the end of Gonzalez's morning class, the quiet, focused tone had long faded. Several students stood up from their desks, leaning over each other, laughing, knowing that personal challenges await them outside the classroom, just as they always have.

Over the chatter, the student with the glossy pink lips told me that hearing Gonzalez say the word "sad" triggered a flashback to all of those overwhelming memories of grief and pain she has been working to move beyond, but that it was okay. "Those feelings are there, but they won't kill me," she said. "I still have my days where it's not easy, but mindfulness helps me a whole lot. Honestly, I feel like if I'd had this before, it would have been easier."

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Lauren Cassani Davis is a former editorial fellow at The Atlantic.

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What Happens When Mindfulness Enters Schools

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Many educators are introducing meditation into the classroom as a means of improving kids' attention and emotional regulation. A five-minute walk from the rickety, raised track that carries the 5 train through the Bronx, the English teacher Argos Gonzalez balanced a rounded metal bowl on an outstretched palm.

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A couple of months ago, I arrived early to pick up my son at preschool. A few of his classmates were acting especially rowdy that day, and their teacher was trying to calm them down before handing them over to their parents. She rang a little bell and said, "Deep breath, everyone." They inhaled. They exhaled. It worked.

In another time I wouldn't have thought much of this. But these days, when meditation is increasingly being seen as way to gain a "competitive edge," a deep breath isn't always benign. Was my son being taught mindfulness?

My colleague Michelle Goldberg has written about the way mindfulness meditation morphed from a spiritual to a self-help practice, one that businesses use to make workers more productive and boost profits. In recent years, schools have increasingly turned to mindfulness as well, in order to improve children's behavior and ability to pay attention. When my son's teacher instructed those children to breathe, it revealed to me just how inescapable the great mindfulness monster's blubbery grip on our culture has become. I decided to look into how exactly schools are using mindfulness and whether I could free myself of the worry that this cult would shape my son into a shiny, corporation-ready humanoid.

Mindfulness is a secularized approach to Buddhist meditation in which practitioners learn to observe their thoughts and feelings and, if things go according to plan, achieve more control over them. In order to teach children mindfulness, teachers will instruct their classroom to spend a short amount of time sitting quietly and observing their breath and the pitter-patter of their minds. Later, the children might share these observations with their classmates. Many mindfulness curriculums also include lessons on cultivating gratitude and appreciation of one's senses; one popular method involves giving children two raisins and encouraging them to observe the differences between them-how they feel, smell, sound, and, eventually, taste.

Because there is no single group or institution overseeing mindfulness in education, nobody knows exactly how many teachers have incorporated these techniques into their classrooms or how they're doing it. The nonprofits MindUP and Mindful Schools say they've seen a steady increase in the number of teachers seeking their guidance in recent years; MindUP says it's reached 500,000 students around the world over the last decade, and Mindful Schools says it reached 300,000 in the U.S. in the past five years. These groups-along with the dozen or so other curriculums from other mindfulness-in-education startups that have sprouted up in recent years-say that mindfulness is a useful tool for counteracting rising levels of anxiety and depression among children. A number of studies, albeit small and often advocate-funded ones, back them up. One of the largest to date looked at the effectiveness of the Mindful Schools program on around 400 low-income, mostly minority elementary-school students. It found that after five weeks of regular mindfulness sessions, teachers reported that students became more focused, participatory, and caring. Another study from the United Kingdom found improvements in the mental health of students enrolled in a mindfulness program.

It's fairly intuitive that a moment of quiet and reflection during the day would provide some benefit to stressed-out children. Still, I suspected that mindfulness was just a symptom of how we overprogram our kids, not a corrective to it. We should be subtracting things from our kids' days before we start adding things in. Also, while some children might eagerly await an opportunity to observe their minds, others are bound to resist it. And another thing-what is the distinction between helping children to be "mindful" and simply getting them to sit still and behave?

When I talked to experts, though, I realized that at least some of my skepticism is misplaced. "Mindfulness is a way to stop the bleeding, and sometimes a Band-Aid does help," said Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Education and co-author of Overloaded and Underprepared: Strategies for Stronger Schools and Healthy, Successful Kids. "This is something teachers can do immediately and isn't that difficult to implement. You get a lot of bang for your buck, and anyone who is against it isn't thinking clearly." While Pope concedes that mindfulness does add yet another item to teachers' and students' endless to-do lists, it's also something that teachers actually have control over, as opposed to extending recess or reducing standardized testing.

Many advocates share my concern that mindfulness can provide cover for controlling or disciplining children rather than providing them with relief from stress. In the recent undercover video from the Success Academy charter school, a teacher angrily commands a first-grader to "Go to the calm-down chair and sit"; at one Baltimore high school, teachers can send disruptive students to the "Mindful Moment Room." "Unfortunately, more schools are focusing on performance and grit rather than moral character," said Vicki Zakrzewski, education director of University of California, Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center. Zakrewski said that good programs balance the self-control side of mindfulness with its more prosocial aspects.

"What we don't want is for people to think of this as a way to shut kids up or get them to produce-that's how corporations are framing mindfulness' benefits, but it's not what we are trying to do," said Billy Bicket, director of strategic development at Mindful Schools. "What we want to do is give children tools to live more considerately."

So if one day my son comes home and tells me about the new mindfulness program at his school, I'll be fine with it. Although the evidence on mindfulness remains relatively scant, there's enough of it to suggest that some school-based meditation is far more likely to help my son than hurt him. Ultimately, I realized that it isn't mindfulness that scares me but the way in which its promises resemble those of unstructured moments-how easy it would be to see mindfulness as a replacement for unscripted activities like resting, daydreaming, and improvisation. It's not.

No matter how my son responds to meditation, I'm going to make sure his day affords him enough free time to figure out whatever it is that will bring him feelings of calm or grace. Maybe it's walking to the corner store with his dad. Maybe it's sitting on my lap and watching the sky turn to night. Maybe it's playing with Legos. Maybe it's meditation. Providing him with a chance to discover it is something I promise to be mindful about.

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Is Teaching Mindfulness in Schools Just a Way to Mold Shiny Corporate Humanoids?

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A couple of months ago, I arrived early to pick up my son at preschool. A few of his classmates were acting especially rowdy that day, and their teacher was trying to calm them down before handing them over to their parents. She rang a little bell and said, "Deep breath, everyone."

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Abstract

Interest in applications of mindfulness-based approaches with adults has grown rapidly in recent times, and there is an expanding research base that suggests these are efficacious approaches to promoting psychological health and well-being. Interest has spread to applications of mindfulness-based approaches with children and adolescents, yet the research is still in its infancy. I aim to provide a preliminary review of the current research base of mindfulness-based approaches with children and adolescents, focusing on MBSR/MBCT models, which place the regular practice of mindfulness meditation at the core of the intervention. Overall, the current research base provides support for the feasibility of mindfulness-based interventions with children and adolescents, however there is no generalized empirical evidence of the efficacy of these interventions. For the field to advance, I suggest that research needs to shift away from feasibility studies towards large, well-designed studies with robust methodologies, and adopt standardized formats for interventions, allowing for replication and comparison studies, to develop a firm research evidence base.

Keywords

Mindfulness meditation Children Adolescents Families Schools

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References

1. Baer, R. A., & Krietemeyer, J. (2006). Overview of mindfulness- and acceptance-based treatment approaches. In R. A. Baer (Ed.), Mindfulness-based treatment approaches: Clinician's guide to evidence base and applications (pp. 3-17). Burlington: Academic Press.

2. Brown, P. L. (2007). In the classroom, a new focus on quieting the mind. The New York Times. Available from http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/16/us/16mindful.html .

3. Center for Mindfulness. (2009). University of Massachusetts Medical School. http://www.umassmed.edu/cfm/index.aspx .

4. Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice. (2009). University of Wales, Bangor. http://www.bangor.ac.uk/mindfulness .

5. Foley, D., Baille, A., Huxter, M., & Price, M. (2007). Mindfulness training for individuals whose lives have been affected by cancer: A randomised control trial of mindfulness based cognitive therapy. Unpublished paper, presentation to the V World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, Barcelona, Spain, July, 2007.

6. Hayes, S. C., Masuda, A., & de Mey, H. (2003). Acceptance and commitment therapy and the third wave of behavior therapy. Gedragstherapie, 36, 69-96.

7. Mahr K. (2007). ADHD kids can get better. Time, 12/11/07. Downloaded from http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1683069,00.html on July 7, 2008.

8. Murrell, A. R., & Scherbarth, A. J. (2006). State of research and literature: ACT with children, adolescents and parents. The International Journal of Behavioral Therapy and Consultation, 2, 531-543.

9. Singh, N. N., Singh, A. N., Lancioni, G. E., Singh, J., Winton, A. S. W. & Adkins, A. D. (2009). Mindfulness training for parents and their children with ADHD increases children's compliance. Journal of Child and Family Studies (published online 26/03/09). doi: 10.1007/s10826-009-9272-z .

10. Suttie, J. (2007). Mindful kids, peaceful schools. Greater Good, Summer,4(1) 28-31. Available from http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/greatergood/archive/2007summer/suttie.pdf .

© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009

Authors and Affiliations

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mindfulness-Based Approaches with Children and Adolescents: A Preliminary Review of Current Research in an Emergent Field

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Interest in applications of mindfulness-based approaches with adults has grown rapidly in recent times, and there is an expanding research base that suggests these are efficacious approaches to promoting psychological health and well-being. Interest has spread to applications of mindfulness-based approaches with children and adolescents, yet the research is still in its infancy.

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Sharing is caring.

Here at the Positive Psychology Program, we have been discussing several different aspects of mindfulness for the past few weeks. In particular, we have explored various ways to learn about mindfulness, practice it, and even where to study the art of teaching mindfulness to others. But where did mindfulness come from, and why have so many people in the West recently become interested in it?

There is no easy answer to this question, but one solution is to trace the lineage of mindfulness from early Eastern religions to its modern, secular presence in Western science. This article will cover mindfulness, its roots in Hinduism and Buddhism, how it relates to yoga, and how it came to be popular in so many circles in the Western world. Finally, we will discuss the most relevant aspect of mindfulness for our purposes, which is how it fits in to the field of positive psychology.
"Find Out What Is Preventing You And Your Clients From Meditating Effectively"
The History and Origins of Mindfulness

Mindfulness is a practice involved in various religious and secular traditions, from Hinduism and Buddhism to yoga and, more recently, non-religious meditation. People have been practicing mindfulness for thousands of years, whether by itself or as part of a larger tradition. This article will cover some of the Eastern traditions which have embraced mindfulness, as well as how it has become popular in the West.

In general, it can be said that mindfulness was mostly popularized in the East by religious and spiritual institutions, while in the West its popularity can be traced to particular people and secular institutions. Of course, even the secular tradition of mindfulness in the West owes its roots to Eastern religion and even certain practitioners of Eastern religions. This is where any discussion of the history of mindfulness should begin.

Before we begin, a quick note - some commentators argue that the history of mindfulness should not be reduced to Buddhism and Hinduism, as mindfulness also has roots in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Trousselard et al., 2014). That said, most modern Western practitioners and teachers of mindfulness learned about mindfulness in the Buddhist and Hindu tradition, so this article will focus on mindfulness from a Buddhist and Hindu perspective. This should not be taken as a denial of mindfulness's roots in the other religions, and interested readers are encouraged to seek out information about mindfulness as it pertains to these other religions. One possible starting point comes from Leisa Aitken, a clinical psychologist and practicing Christian, though this is just one of many options.

A Brief History of Hinduism

is widely considered to be the oldest extant religion in the world, but it is hard to define its history. This is because it initially arose as a synthesis of many religious traditions around the historical region that now makes up India. In other words, Hinduism has no single founder and no concrete starting point. In fact, the religious tradition was not even called Hinduism or considered a singular entity until British writers started calling Vedic traditions "" in the 1800s.

With all that said, the earliest traditions which have since been incorporated into Hinduism arose more than 4,000 years ago in the Indus Valley in what is now Pakistan. This is why Hinduism is considered the oldest religion in the world. This religious tradition continued to develop in Vedic writings 2,500-3,500 years ago. These writings in cluded rituals and the worship of Gods common to modern-day Hinduism.

About 1,500-2,500 years ago, more texts were composed which are now involved in present-day Hinduism, including texts introducing the concepts of dharma and temple worship. While these religious traditions continued to develop, they were already pretty recognizable as Hinduism by this time. Hinduism experienced some competition in India a few hundred years ago with the rise of Islam, but 19th-century reformers revitalized Hinduism and helped tie it to the national identity of India. One of the reasons this was initially successful was because middle-class Indians started identifying with Hinduism around the mid 19th century (Hatcher, 2007). This connection was then solidified about a hundred years later with the Indian independence movement.

Mindfulness has been intertwined with Hinduism for millennia. From the Bhagavad Gita's discussions of yoga to Vedic meditation, the history of Hinduism reads in part like a history of mindfulness. Of course, it is only a partial history, and another crucial player in the history of mindfulness is Buddhism. It should be noted, however, that even Buddhism itself owes a great debt to Hinduism.

A Short History of Buddhism

Compared to Hinduism, Buddhism's history is much more well-defined. Buddhism was founded around 400-500 B.C.E. by Siddhartha Gautama, who was referred to as the Buddha from then on. Gautama is thought to have been born and raised around modern-day India and Nepal. Based on where and when Gautama was raised, it is safe to say that many Hinduist teachings informed his upbringing.

In fact, Buddhism and Hinduism share many commonalities. The most obvious is the one mentioned above, that they both arose in the same region. Beyond that, both Hinduism and Buddhism are greatly concerned with the concept of dharma, a concept that is very difficult to define or translate but includes a way of life that is in harmony with the natural order of the universe. Despite the shared presence of dharma in both of these philosophies/religions, Buddhism is definitively not a subsect of Hinduism because Buddhism does not concern itself with the sacred writings of the Veda (Hacker & Davis, Jr ., 2006).

In general, Buddhism is a religion (though sometimes considered to be a not-necessarily-religious philosophy) that aims to show its followers the path to enlightenment. Since The Buddha's lifetime, it has split into several different traditions, including Theravada Buddhism and Zen Buddhism. Today, Buddhism is probably most often thought of by non-practitioners in the terms of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama, an individual who is thought to be an enlightened teacher of Tibetan Buddhism.

Mindfulness may be even more involved in Buddhism than it is in Hinduism, as mindfulness (Sati) is considered to be the first step towards enlightenment in Buddhism. In fact, some sources even consider the English word "mindfulness" to be a simple translation of the Buddhist concept of Sati. The fact that mindfulness is such a crucial aspect of Buddhism combined with the fact that many Western influences in mindfulness studied under Buddhist teachers (as we will explore later in this article) shows that Western mindfulness is largely indebted to Buddhism.

How Mindfulness Relates to Yoga

Yoga is related to Hinduism and Buddhism, two religious traditions which are both concerned with mindfulness. Yoga and mindfulness can also be directly related, as some yoga practices incorporate mindfulness. Some mindfulness meditation practices such as the body scan are very similar to yoga, as they both involve awareness of one's body. There is a lot of overlap between mindfulness and yoga, both historically and presently.

Some yoga practices can even just be considered mindfulness practices, and vice-versa. One study examined this idea by measuring mindfulness in people who practice yoga (Gaiswinkler & Unterrainer, 2016).

The researchers found that people who are heavily involved with a yoga practice had higher levels of mindfulness than people who were only slightly involved with yoga or who were not involved in a yoga practice.

This indicates that yoga is positively correlated with levels of mindfulness, and that some forms of yoga and some forms of mindfulness are striving for the same end goals.

Interestingly enough, while the origins of yoga coincide with the origins of Hinduism, so does the recent rise of yoga's popularity in the West coincide with the rise of mindfulness. This underscores the intertwined nature of Buddhism, Hinduism, mindfulness, and yoga. But how exactly did all of these ideas, particularly mindfulness, start gaining so much popularity in the West?

How Mindfulness Went From East to West

Perhaps the biggest influence on bringing mindfulness from the East to the West, at least recently, was Jon Kabat-Zinn. Kabat-Zinn founded the Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and the Oasis Institute for Mindfulness-Based Professional Education and Training in it. This is also where Kabat-Zinn developed his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, an eight-week program aimed at anyone looking to reduce their levels of stress (as the name suggests).

Kabat-Zinn learned about and studied mindfulness under several Buddhist teachers, including Thich Nhat Hanh (an influential and popular figure in Western mindfulness himself). This gave him an Eastern foundation in mindfulness that he integrated with Western science to develop MBSR. This integration with Western science was a crucial aspect in helping mindfulness gain widespread popularity in the West.

MBSR served as an inspiration for another mindfulness-based therapy program, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), aimed at treating Major Depressive Disorder. This and other integrations of science and mindfulness helped popularize mindfulness in the West, particularly for audiences accustomed to Western science and unfamiliar with Eastern practices.

One reason that it took a Westerner to adopt Eastern traditions for a Western audience is the different world views that are prevalent in each hemisphere. An entertaining discussion of some of these differences (such as individual versus institutional thinking, and cyclical versus linear thinking) comes in the form of a TED talk from Devdutt Pattanaik, which can be seen here. The talk is delivered from an Indian perspective, which is particularly relevant for this subject.

Aside from academic science, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Joseph Goldstein also played a crucial role in bringing mindfulness to the West when they founded the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in 1975. The IMS helped introduce mindfulness meditation to the West, and the combination of mindfulness meditation and MBSR helped popularize mindfulness in the West within both clinical and non-clinical populations. Of course, the IMS is just one of many organizations that have helped popularize mindfulness meditation in the West and in the United States in particular.

Mindfulness' Role in (Positive) Psychology

Mindfulness plays an important role in both the greater field of psychology and positive psychology specifically. MBSR and MBCT have become accepted tools for psychologists to treat a variety of patients with, showing the usefulness of mindful teachings in traditional psychology. As for positive psychology, mindfulness meditation has become a useful tool for anyone looking to increase their levels of well-being, and MBSR has also become popular in non-clinical populations.

Some might even say that psychology and positive psychology have finally started to understand mindfulness teachings in a way that Eastern traditions have known for millenia. In particular, Western science has now evolved to the point where it can evaluate the effectiveness of practicing mindfulness, making mindfulness an attractive option for those who are skeptical of Eastern traditions for whatever reason. As mindfuln ess can be practiced in many different ways for many different uses, it makes perfect sense as an instrument for any Positive Psychology practitioner's toolbox.

In fact, a group of researchers recently attempted to directly integrate mindfulness with positive psychology in an intervention they called the Positive Mindfulness Program (Ivtzan et al., 2016). The goal of this study was to combine mindfulness training and positive psychology interventions for the purpose of increasing the well-being of participants. The researchers were successful in doing so, showing that positive psychology and mindfulness can easily be combined in a research setting. As if that was not already interesting enough, the entire study was conducted online, showing that positive psychology is an excellent vehicle for bringing the ancient practice of mindfulness into the modern Western world.

Mindfulness Practice and Philosophy

So what is mindfulness, and what does the practice of mindfulness look like? As mentioned above, it could be a yoga practice that involves mindfulness. It might involve setting aside time for mindfulness meditation sessions, or it could involve practicing mindfulness during every day activities (such as washing the dishes, as Thich Nhat Hanh advocates).

In fact, mindfulness is so easy for anyone to practice that several different mindfulness exercises can fit into a single breezy pamphlet. Mindfulness can be practiced individually or as part of a group during a retreat.

Mindfulness can of course be practiced for the sole purpose of becoming more mindful, but there are also several mindfulness practices and organizations which are aimed at specific groups of people. One example is the Mindful Warrior Project, which is just one of the groups aimed at helping military veterans use mindfulness to increase their well-being post-combat. There are also various groups focused on teaching mindfulness to children, such as the Kids Programme from Youth Mindfulness.

The point is that no matter who you are or what your daily life consists of, there is most likely a mindfulness practice tailored to you. This versatility makes it accessible to all who are willing to learn and put just a little bit of time in. This is a key part of the philosophy of mindfulness, whether it is practiced religiously or in a secular matter. After all, mindfulness practitioners are all striving for the same thing, whether they call it mindful awareness or enlightenment, and very few (if any) mindfulness traditions are based on restricting their teachings to an exclusive group.

A Take Home Message

Mindfulness is a tradition which has a rich history steeped in religious and, more recently, secular institutions. The fact that it has found so many devotees among both the religious and the secular in both the East and the West shows the universality of its teachings. Anyone looking to start practicing mindfulness can choose their preferred starting point, whether it be Hindu scripture which is thousands of years old or Westernized teachings which are merely decades old, if that.

This brief overview of many historical aspects of mindfulness is by no means exhaustive, but we hope it serves as a useful starting point for anyone looking to learn more about mindfulness and how to practice it. Knowing the history of mindfulness is not necessary to begin practicing it, but knowing the roots of mindfulness can help you pick the tradition and practice that will be most useful for your life and your needs.

After you have found one that works for you, come back and let us know! You might just inspire someone to start a mindfulness practice in their own lives.

References

Gaiswinkler, L., Unterrainer, H.F. (2016). The relationship between yoga involvement, mindfulness and psychological well-being. Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 26(1), 123-127. doi:10.1016/j.ctim.2016.03.011

Hacker, P., Davis, Jr., D.R. (2006). Dharma in Hinduism. Journal of Indian Philosophy, 34(5), 479-496. doi:10.1007/s10781-006-9002-4

Hatcher, B.A. (2007). Bourgeois Vedanta: The colonial roots of middle-class Hinduism. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 75(2), 298-323. doi:10.1093/jaarel/lfm005

Ivtzan, I., Young, T., Martman, J., Jeffrey, A., Lomas, T., Hart, R., Eiroa-Orosa, F.J. (2016). Integrating Mindfulness into Positive Psychology: a Randomised Controlled Trial of an Online Positive Mindfulness Program. Mindfulness, 7(6), 1396-1407.

Trousselard, M., Steiler, D., Claverie, D., Canini, F. (2014). The history of Mindfulness put to the test of current scientific data: Unresolved questions. Encephale-Revue de Psychiatrie Clinique Biologique et Therapeutique, 40(6), 474-480. doi:10.1016/j.encep.2014.08.006

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History of Mindfulness: From East to West and From Religion to Science

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Sharing is caring. Here at the Positive Psychology Program, we have been discussing several different aspects of mindfulness for the past few weeks. In particular, we have explored various ways to learn about mindfulness , practice it, and even where to study the art of teaching mindfulness to others.

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W/ Richard Burnett

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Mindfulness in Schools: Richard Burnett at TEDxWhitechapel

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After growing up with Transcendental Meditation as a spiritual practice, the author visits public schools where it's being used as a simple tool for stress-reduction and well-being.

In 1974, the year before I was born, my parents had a small wedding in my aunt's living room and then spent their honeymoon becoming teachers of Transcendental Meditation. Those were the days when just about everyone seemed to be doing it. "Plainly," wrote the author Adam Smith in The Atlantic's October 1975 cover story on meditation, "TM was the greatest thing since peach ice cream." Meditation was enough of a cultural phenomenon that Woody Allen could use it as a punch line. The L.A. party scene in Annie Hall ends with Jeff Goldblum's character placing a businesslike call to his instructor: "Yeah, I forgot my mantra."

Considering how many 20-somethings learned to meditate in the 1970s, one might have predicted an explosion of meditating schools in the 1980s. Instead, Americans mostly forgot about the trend as they settled into the Reagan era. My parents were exceptions: They enrolled me in a small private school where the day began and ended with TM. It was an idyllic childhood in many ways, but my classmates and I always knew we lived in a bubble. One summer, at a resort in the Catskills, I listened as my aunt tried to explain my upbringing to a couple of her friends.

"Sure, I remember TM," one woman replied. "I guess some people got caught up in meditation, just like some people got caught up in drugs."

"And the rest of us," her husband finished, "grew up and moved on with our lives."

So I was fascinated when meditation recently started becoming mainstream again. Coworkers told me about mindfulness apps they were trying and friends mentioned yoga retreats they were planning to attend. The general idea seemed to be that meditation was not so much a technique for spiritual enlightenment as a common-sense lifestyle habit, like getting enough exercise or eating green vegetables. The insurance company Blue Shield featured a silhouette of an iconic meditator-legs crossed, hands turned upward on knees-in a recent brochure called "Ways for a balanced well-being." A July New Yorker article by Jon Lee Anderson described a Cuban-born Miami entrepreneur as "a man of earnest American discipline. He meditates and does a hundred push-ups each morning." In March, The Onion ran an article headlined "Annoying, Well-Adjusted Friend Even Fucking Meditating Now."

Over the past 10 years, small meditation programs have started cropping up at public schools around the country, in major cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. They're most often found in low-income areas, where stresses have a way of compounding. When you spend time in these schools, as I recently did, you meet a staggering number of students who have been abandoned by at least one parent and left with relatives who are either overworked or unemployed. The kids themselves frequently take on after-school jobs and a lot of responsibility at home. One principal told me his students rush to and from school to avoid getting jumped or shot. All of this stress can put kids' minds and bodies on high alert, making them fidgety and uneasy. A 2014 paper from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child compared the overload to "revving a car engine for hours every day. This wear and tear increases the risk of stress-related physical and mental illness later in life."

It's hard to change the circumstances that create this kind of stress, though plenty of people are trying. But if you teach kids to meditate in the meantime, the thinking goes, you can help them reduce the stress itself. That reasoning always made sense to me, as someone who has been practicing TM since childhood and seen the research on adults, especially for stress-related problems like heart disease. Struggling schools need lots of things: better food, stronger math programs, and higher-quality teachers, to name just a few. One of those needs seems to be a way to reduce stress so kids can absorb information and go into the world as well-balanced, successful people.

Still, I had a hard time envisioning how meditation programs actually worked when they were dropped suddenly into public schools. Who were the principals who brought them in-did they have hidden mystical streaks, or were their motivations purely practical? Were the teachers enthusiastic or did they see meditation as yet another gimmick imposed on them from the outside? And how did the students really feel about it? Did they roll their eyes when the meditation bell rang or did they actually enjoy it? What was it like to grow up with just meditation-and no spiritual trappings surrounding it?

Visitacion Valley Middle School sits at the top of one of San Francisco's dramatic roller-coaster hills. It's a deceptively pretty location: The surrounding neighborhoods, Visitacion Valley and the Bayview, are home to housing projects and the highest rates of violent crime in the city. Eighty-two percent of students at the middle school take part in the government's free- or reduced-lunch program. "This is a neighborhood that's had a lot of murders," said Jim Dierke, the former Visitacion Valley principal, when I first visited a few years ago. "A lot of death, a lot of incarceration, and a lot of poverty and unhappiness." In 2004, two of Dierke's eighth graders found the decomposing body of a 19-year-old stabbing victim lying along the school fence. A few months after that, a gunman burst into the main office, threatening to shoot everybody in sight. Dierke vowed to make his school "an island of safety in a sea of trouble." As he saw it, that meant not only improving their physical security but improving their ability to cope with the violence and tensions around them. That's when he decided his school should try meditation.

Here, it's worth noting that "meditation" is an extremely broad term. In schools, it can be used to describe a breathing exercise, a visualization, a positive affirmation, or even a mindful minute paying attention to the taste of a raisin. Transcendental Meditation is somewhat distinct among meditations because it's a well-defined, trademarked program: Everyone who learns TM gets a mantra (a specific meaningless sound) and the same instructions for using it. Unlike mindfulness, TM doesn't involve actively trying to change your mindset or be in the moment. All you do is mentally repeat your mantra, and it gets subtler and subtler, dissolving into an expansive silence. People describe the after-effects in different ways: In a recent BuzzFeed video, new meditators said they felt more "chipper," less prone to tension headaches, and better equipped to deal with problems. But TM doesn't involve a conscious effort to achieve any of these things. There's something very automatic about it: You just start your mantra and transcend.

In public schools, TM is offered through a program called Quiet Time. The meditation itself isn't mandatory: When kids don't want to meditate, or their parents won't sign their permission forms, they can just sit quietly, reading a book or staring out the window. In Northern California, Quiet Time is run by a local nonprofit called the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education, which licenses the TM technique from a central organization and covers the cost of the program. (The fee for learning TM typically ranges from $360 to $960. In schools, it's around $150 per student, including follow-up for the year.)

Dierke first heard about Quiet Time at a 2005 education conference. One of the speakers was George Rutherford, the African American principal who pioneered the Quiet Time program at his school in southeast Washington, D.C. "If you'd asked me 10 years ago if this was a good program to have, I would've looked at you silly," said Dierke, a rotund man with a gray mustache and ruddy cheeks. "But Dr. Rutherford had the same sort of phenomenon going on his neighborhood that I had in my neighborhood. So I had the Quiet Time folks come over to meet my faculty, and the teachers wanted to do it. It's been a very good partnership, assisting all of us in dealing with stress-not only the kids but the adults. My blood pressure got lower. I became less prone to yelling at people. And I see it in the kids. Meditation is kind of like the glue that holds everything together."

Dierke retired a few years ago, but the Quiet Time program he started has carried on. On last year's California Healthy Kids Survey, Visitacion Valley scored higher for happiness than any other school in San Francisco, including much more affluent ones. "A prime source of happiness at Visitation Valley is Quiet Time, a stress reduction program used at several Bay Area middle and high schools," reported the research agency WestEd, which develops and administers the survey for the California Department of Education. In an article for The San Francisco Chronicle, a UC Berkeley public policy professor wrote about the happiness survey and other changes at Visitacion Valley: "In the first year of Quiet Time, the number of suspensions fell by 45 percent. Within four years, the suspension rate was among the lowest in the city. Daily attendance rates climbed to 98 percent, well above the citywide average. Grade point averages improved markedly."

As a result of all this publicity, Visitacion Valley has earned a unique reputation among San Francisco educators. A few weeks ago, I watched the current principal, Joe Truss, lead a seventh-grade assembly. "When I meet people out in the community sometimes, they tell me, 'I hear really good things about this school!'" Truss boasted to the students. "And the first thing they always talk about is Quiet Time. A lot of other principals are trying to copy our style."

One of the first principals to adopt the program after Dierke was Bill Kappenhagen, the principal of Phillip and Sala Burton Academic High School, just down the street from Visitacion Valley. Kappenhagen told me that after he became Burton's principal, he started turning to Dierke for regular advice. "He was the president of the principals' union, an older guy who was revered in the community, revered by the board of education." During one of their phone check-ins, Dierke invited Kappenhagen to an eighth-grade assembly.

Kappenhagen welcomed the chance to sell the students on the virtues of Burton. But before he began his pitch, Dierke said he had something to show him. "He turns to me and says, 'Watch this, Kappenhagen!' Then he rings a little bell- ding, ding, ding!-and all of a sudden, all these eighth graders, who are squirrely as all get-out, become really centered and a hush falls over the auditorium. I was floored. I was like, 'What is this?'"

At first, Kappenhagen wasn't sure he wanted to bring Quiet Time to his own school. He'd just taken the helm there and he didn't want to change the daily class schedule. But he was reluctant to say no to Dierke right away. So he put the program to a vote, telling his teachers it would extend the school day by 30 minutes. "I never expected them to go for it. But they were so interested! I think they were exhausted because they'd been trying all kinds of strategies and nothing yet had stuck. They were like, 'We'll try anything to get these kids to stop fighting and swearing at each other.'" That was in 2009. Since then, Kappenhagen said, "It's a calmer school. And it's not like I have more deans or security guards or teachers. It's the same staffing structure. The school community has been given space to decompress."

Another principal, Miguel Rodriguez at Redwood High School in nearby Redwood City, told me he heard about TM from the previous San Francisco superintendent, Carlos Garcia. "I asked him, 'How do you do good work in this job-but not at the cost of your life or your family, not at the price of a divorce or health issues?'" recalled Rodriguez. "TM was one of the tools he recommended to me."

Last year, Rodriguez brought Quiet Time to Redwood, an alternative public school for kids who are behind in credits at traditional high schools. Most of the students come from high-poverty backgrounds-they share homes with numerous families and work after school to help their parents pay the bills. All of that makes it hard for them to do their homework or stay focused in class. Their fatigue was obvious during the Quiet Time session I observed there: At least two students fell into a sleep deep enough that the teacher had to wake them afterwards.

"The meditation is not just for students, to be honest with you," Rodriguez told me. "It's also for staff. Because this work can be daunting." Rodriguez said he originally went into education instead of going to law school because it seemed like a more powerful form of social-justice work. "It has the power to eradicate the cycle of poverty forever." But at Redwood, he said, "We don't get the kind of gratification that you might get at a lot of other schools: 'Look, Johnny got into UC Berkeley! Woo-hoo!' We don't see a lot of letters of acceptance."

Unlike his students, who get dedicated periods for Quiet Time, Rodriguez has to find creative ways to fit his meditation in. On his way to work each morning, he charges his electric car for 20 minutes and meditates inside. In the evenings, he takes Ed.D. courses at Mills College and squeezes in a meditation during the dinner break. "When I stick to that routine, I'm able to come home and be present for my wife and our little daughter," he said. "I'm able to process the burdens of this lifestyle much, much better."

One of the first things I noticed, after speaking to several Quiet Time students and site leaders, is that inspiring kids to meditate regularly is hard work. The meditation part is opt-in, and students need to bring back signed permission slips if they want to learn. I was told that 95 percent of Burton's freshman class learned it this year. But that doesn't mean they necessarily do it. Unlike school mindfulness programs, TM isn't guided through verbal cues. The technique itself isn't difficult; it's not one of those meditations where you're supposed to sit rigidly upright and push away thoughts. But for high school kids, just taking the first step-sitting down and closing their eyes-doesn't always come naturally.

"Whenever Quiet Time actually came around, I was always like, 'Yeah, but there's this really great book I want to read,'" said Samantha Rae Hall, who graduated from Burton in May. "Or I just wanted to stare off into space and contemplate my life. That's something I really like to do."

Other kids told me they often felt too jittery to meditate, or they were nervous about closing their eyes. Middle schoolers wondered if someone would stick a pencil in their ear or give them a wet willy. Peer pressure is a big issue: If the person in the next seat doesn't think meditating is cool, that can be a major deterrent. One girl told me she had an unsettling vision of opening her eyes and seeing another student staring at her, the way someone might look at you if you were wearing headphones on a bus and started accidentally singing along. "It's like, what if I was so into it and they were watching me the whole time? What if I had a really weird face on?"

Matt Nguy, one of Hall's former classmates, told me, "I didn't exactly like it at first. It added another 30 minutes to our day. I didn't get into it until sophomore year."

A number of kids told me the same thing: It took them a while to get into meditation. At my school, if anything, it was the opposite: We were especially excited about meditation right at the beginning, when we learned at the age of 10. By then, we'd already spent years immersed in a meditation-centered worldview. We'd seen our parents go off to meditate twice each day, and we were curious to find out what they did when they closed their eyes. I still remember the first time I used my new mantra. I felt like I was riding a bicycle-like I'd turned the pedals a few times and then suddenly taken off with a frictionless momentum, turning deep inside myself.

When kids learn TM at a public school, there's very little build-up. And of course, when they do their twice-daily meditations on weekends or vacations, their parents don't encourage them the way my parents did. "Sometimes my mom would be like, 'Open the door!'" said Hall. "I'd be like, 'I'm meditating.' She'd be like, 'It doesn't matter.' I'd be like, 'Yes it does! It absolutely does matter to me.' So it's a little more difficult to meditate in a place where no one else understands why you do it."

This is one reason the Quiet Time program has full-time site managers, embedded there like guidance counselors or wellness providers. Their salaries come from grants, donations, and private foundations, including the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, the 1440 Foundation, and the David Lynch Foundation. Lynch, the avant-garde filmmaker, is one of Quiet Time's biggest supporters nationwide; on November 4, he hosted a Carnegie Hall benefit for the program featuring Katy Perry, Sting, and Jerry Seinfeld. His co-host for the evening was George Stephanopoulos. (When I interviewed Lynch in 2008 for an Atlantic video, I asked him to reconcile his interest in meditation with his dark, surreal films. "A lot of artists think suffering is necessary," Lynch told me. "But in reality, the artist doesn't have to suffer to show suffering. You just have to understand the suffering. Any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity.")

Laura Osborne and Jamie Bowers, a couple in their late 30s who run the program at Burton, told me they became TM teachers after seeing some David Lynch Foundation videos. "You watch these kids talk and you think, 'Wow, I'm going to do that work,'" said Osborne, who learned to meditate with Bowers in Orange County five years ago.

"The results are real," added Bowers. "But you don't know till you get here what's happening behind the scenes."

Osborne said they spend a lot of time focusing on the most disruptive students, the few kids in the class who make it difficult for the others to meditate during Quiet Time. "We have to redirect them," she said. "We have to say, 'I can see that you're not comfortable. How can we support you?'" They regularly take kids aside in small groups to answer questions about their experiences with meditation. When a class needs extra motivation, they often host challenges: Students who choose to meditate for three weeks celebrate with a party at the end. "We want them to be intrinsically motivated," said Osborne. "But sometimes we use extrinsic motivators so they'll do it just long enough to see the benefits."

Hall, the recent Burton graduate, started meditating regularly after one of the three-week challenges. "I don't remember anything spectacular happening," said Hall, who now works part-time with the Quiet Time program. "Honestly, it just became a normal routine. And when you do normal routines, it doesn't feel like you're having some kind of change within yourself. But at some point, I realized I had so much more energy than I used to. I felt happier, a lot happier. I had way more self-confidence. And I used to be somebody who holds grudges: 'If you messed up, you messed up!" Suddenly I was like, 'You know what? It's okay.' And if I messed up personally, I wasn't down on myself for the entire day. I was like, 'Okay, I messed up on this one thing, but I'm going to be fine now.'"

At a time when school hallways are lined with positive affirmations-"You can be anything you want to be!"-it might seem odd that transcending thought altogether would help improve a student's self-confidence. "We don't tell them anything specific about why they shouldn't get into fights, how to feel better about themselves, or why it is good to be kind to each other," said Laurent Valosek, a former technology entrepreneur who is now the executive director of the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education. "Those changes just start happening naturally when their brains function in a more integrated way." He cited a 10-week study at American University, in which a group of students randomly assigned to practice TM developed more coherence between their left and right hemispheres than students just sitting with their eyes closed. The study, published in 2010, linked this increased brain coherence to a more fully developed sense of self.

Upperclassmen who are particularly enthusiastic about meditation can join a club called the Advanced Meditators Crew. They play an active leadership role in the day-to-day program, supervising Quiet Time in the various classrooms and giving introductory talks to new students. "I actually feel that they're almost running the program more than we are because the kids respect them so much," said Bowers. "When they go into a classroom, the kids just choose to meditate. It's like a no-brainer."

Ivan Garcia, a recent graduate of John O'Connell High School in the Mission district, helped establish the Advanced Meditators' Crew during his senior year. He told me he was suspicious at first when the Quiet Time site leaders came to his freshman class. "We thought, 'These people are just coming here to feel better about themselves. They don't care about us. They don't know our problems. They don't know the challenges we're going through. They don't know that when we go home, sometimes we don't even have a home to go to. Now they want us to close our eyes and pretend everything's fine?'" That changed with the arrival of Matthew August, a 27-year-old site leader. (August is now 31 and still leading the program at O'Connell.) "He liked to have fun and joke around," said Garcia. "He was honest, not coming from a script. He shared part of himself-that was the biggest thing. After I met him was when I finally started to experience all these beautiful things."

At the end of one meditation, not long before he graduated, Garcia found himself thinking about the abusive father he'd left behind in Mexico City at age 13. "It felt like a huge bag fell off my shoulders. I realized at that moment that my father had done the best he could. He didn't get an education like I was getting. He didn't have the opportunity to talk to anyone who could really listen to him. He definitely didn't have meditation."

As I spoke to dozens of kids about Quiet Time, I found myself wondering whether the program could ever scale up in a big way. San Francisco's superintendent, Richard Carranza, spoke about the Quiet Time program to the San Francisco Chronicle last year, saying, "I'd like to see it expand well beyond a handful of schools." The Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education has a testimonial on its website from the previous superintendent, Carlos Garcia: "Quite simply, Quiet Time should be in every school."

Still, it's hard for any new education idea to enter the mainstream-as evidenced by the fierce debate over the Common Core curriculum-and all the more so when it's something as novel as meditation. Kappenhagen, who was a principal in D.C. before coming to Burton, told me Quiet Time could work at any school in the nation "as long as there's a community that embraces the idea that students should be calmer and more centered and this is one way to get them there." But it's not clear how many school communities currently fit that description.

Quiet Time is also limited by funding: At Burton, one of the more cost-effective schools, the program adds up to $185,000 a year between site-managers' salaries, the TM licensing fees, and occasional off-site retreats for faculty and students. In contrast, most mindfulness programs are run by classroom teachers, with occasional visits from outside experts. August said he couldn't imagine a program succeeding that way at O'Connell. "Consistency is really important for these kids," August told me. "Seeing you in the hallway, just being cool with them-that's how you earn their trust." He added that struggling schools often lack the stable leadership to keep programs going year after year. Visitacion Valley has been through three principals in four years. Kappenhagen was reassigned to another, more troubled school the week after I met him at Burton. And when August described the turnover at O'Connell during his time there, it sounded like he was listing the wives of Henry VIII: "The first principal got reassigned. The second one went back to L.A. for personal reasons. The third one has stayed so far."

Joshua Aronson, a longtime professor of applied psychology at NYU, uses the word "artisanal" to describe school programs that are carefully cultivated by highly trained experts. Aronson helped develop the wildly popular ideas of stereotype threat and growth mindset, but he's been dismayed to watch them reduced to superficial gimmicks: "I go to my kids' school and have the surreal experience of having them telling me about my own work, in a way that is sure to not work." He worries something similar could happen with a program like Quiet Time, which he admires. "When things contain a human element," he told me, "you can scale them up, but if you're not really meticulous about it, you're going to lose a lot of the magic that made them work so well in the initial demonstrations. Even if we write really compelling recipe books, it takes a chef to pull it off. That's the fundamental problem."

I asked Jan Link, a silver-haired accountability supervisor at the San Francisco Unified School District, whether she thought Quiet Time could ever scale up in a big way. Link, who has been working in the district since the 1980s, got involved with Quiet Time a few years ago after the previous superintendent asked her to evaluate the program. She learned TM herself and was so enthusiastic that she arranged for 96 central-office administrators to learn it as part of a randomized controlled study.

"That's a very, very interesting question," she responded when I asked about the program's expansion. She swiveled in her chair and carefully pulled a book called Learning to Improve out of the middle of a tall stack. Then she turned to a graph that plotted improvement against time. On the graph, the programs that grew quickly flatlined more quickly; the programs that grew slowly reached a higher level of improvement.

"This is the way I see it," she said. "From my experience, having done portfolio work in the district, a program grows differently when you let schools approach it from their side-'I'm interested!' When it grows that way, it becomes part of each school's culture. That's what I think is happening now with Quiet Time. There's already a waiting list of schools. Once a school wants to go, the teachers learn first, and then all the students who choose to do it. It's all volunteer. That's a little different than saying, 'We have a professional development called Quiet Time and we want everyone to participate.'"

One reason there's been so much interest is that San Francisco is one of eight major California districts that got a 2013 group waiver from No Child Left Behind. These districts are now allowed to create new evaluations: Only 60 percent of their achievement needs to be academic. The other 40 percent will be based on social-and-emotional skills and school climate. So far, though, there's been no agreement on how to develop and measure that last 40 percent. Link is working on an evaluation program for San Francisco, using tools like the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory and the DESA Behavior Index. She sees Quiet Time as a good way to develop the skills she's measuring, and when schools inquire about the program, she wants to be able to show that it works.

In April, Link's office and the Center for Wellness and Achievement in Education put together a white paper summarizing 17 studies on San Francisco's Quiet Time programs. The studies showed reduced fights and suspensions in the schools that had adopted Quiet Time, along with improved attendance, GPAs, and test scores. The research has certain limitations, as the white paper itself notes. Schools are tricky settings, since they're full of constantly changing variables: new faculty, changing curricula, events in the neighborhood, or other wellness efforts going on at the same time. Some of the studies are more descriptive-that is, they summarize the data rather than digging deeply into what's causing it. Others are more rigorous, with randomized or matched controls. So far, two of the studies have been published in peer-reviewed journals. (One of those was led by WestEd, the independent research firm.) "In aggregate," said Valosek, "this white paper is one of the strongest bodies of research on any meditation in school. The next step is to do studies with thousands of students and see if we find these results again at that level."

Link sees the paper as a meaningful start. "Now you have a superintendent or a board of education who can say, 'Look, you think this is ridiculous? That's fine. Let me show you the data.' You have to honestly say, 'These are the strongest studies, and these are weaker ones.' But it's a good first step. It's a body of work."

Early on a Thursday morning, I sat in on Burton's elective on social-and-emotional intelligence. The class is taught by Burton's vice-principal, with help from Bowers, who was a classroom teacher before she became a meditation teacher. It's popular enough to have a waiting list. The curriculum focuses on familiar skills like self-discipline, grit, and teamwork. But it's based on the idea that students need to "develop the internal capacity of a calm and alert readiness," as its curriculum states-which is where Quiet Time comes in.

Toward the beginning of the class, Bowers put on a video-the scene from Kindergarten Cop where Arnold Schwarzenegger's character walks into his chaotic classroom for the first time. He sees the children painting on the walls, dancing on the piano, and crashing around in a wagon, and he yells "Shut up!" over and over again. But then he races to his car and comes back with a ferret. Suddenly the kids are quiet and attentive, crowding around him and taking turns petting the animal. "Good," Arnold says. "Now we are having fun."

"So, wait," one of the Burton students asked when the clip ended, "like, in any situation-if we have a ferret, we'll be cool?"

"Of course!" Bowers joked back. Then she explained what the ferret scene represented: Instead of giving in to the chaos, Arnold had taken hold of himself, removed himself from the situation, and come back with an inventive solution. "What we're going to talk about now is how to learn self-control," she continued. "You cannot get things in your life if you don't have self-control. You can't be successful. You're probably going to make some people mad and they're not going to want to give you a chance. If you're someone who just loses their cool, emotions can completely overwhelm you. Completely! So taking care of yourself, getting rid of your stress, it's really important."

Before my visits to the Quiet Time schools, I'd asked Joseph Durlak, an expert on social-and-emotional learning from Loyola University Chicago, whether he thought getting rid of stress could make it easier for kids to master skills like empathy, conflict resolution, and willpower. Durlak wasn't familiar with Quiet Time, but he told me he'd learned TM himself decades ago. "The Transcendental Meditation should put kids at ease," he said. "It should help them relax. It should help them be calmer. And then, hopefully, going beyond that, it should help them just become more reflective people, to be sensitive without overreacting. Once you get into that dimension, then you're probably affecting classroom interactions, relationships with teachers. You're probably helping the child be more open to learning. Still, they have to actually learn," he added. "And part of that is learning how to modulate their own behavior. You still have to develop work groups. You still have to help them with cooperation."

At Burton, the students spent several minutes talking about things they couldn't control (the weather, racism, other people's bad moods) and things they could (their attitudes, their lifestyles). Then they broke into pairs and talked about areas of their lives where they could have better self-control (doing homework, avoiding drugs, communicating more tactfully). At the end of the class, I asked the students why they'd signed up for the elective. A lot of teenagers, I pointed out, wouldn't voluntarily sit in a classroom and have an adult teach them how to behave.

"School is basically to teach you for life after school," said a boy named Leo. (I've withheld the last names of students under 18.) "In this class, we're learning how to become who we want to be. I think it also helps that most of us here meditate."

"Just to build on what Leo said," a girl named Nikki added, "with Quiet Time, I feel like it makes you more self-aware. So it kind of goes hand in hand with learning about ourselves."

What struck me about this discussion, and the class that preceded it, was how pragmatic it all was. When I was growing up, the adults around me shared a certain streak of 1960s and '70s idealism. They actually had a lot in common with the Transcendentalists who'd lived 100 years earlier: They'd done their own version of going off to the woods to live deeply, and they'd found a lot of what they were looking for in Eastern philosophy. Even before my father discovered TM in medical school, he'd studied the Upanishads at Columbia and backpacked around Eastern Europe with a copy of the Bhagavad-Gita. I was raised with the idea that human consciousness is part of something immense and universal. As Ralph Waldo Emerson, an avid reader of Indian philosophy, put it in his essay "The Over-Soul": "Within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE." It was a lovely way to grow up, and it shaped me in profound ways. But the Eastern spiritual bent would be entirely out of place at a public school.

I'd gone to the Quiet Time schools wondering whether it was really possible to teach kids to meditate without indoctrinating them, even subtly, in a certain worldview. Candy Gunther Brown, a professor of religious studies at Indiana University, doesn't believe it's possible. She was an expert witness in a recent court case, in which two parents sued the Encinitas, California, school district for bringing in a yoga program. The district argued that it was offering yoga as a simple tool for health and well-being. But Brown, supporting the plaintiffs, pointed out that the program was sponsored by the K.P. Jois Foundation, named for an Indian guru who explicitly taught yoga as a way to achieve union with God.

"If you look at Jois's own words, he said, for example, that sun salutations are a form of prayer to the sun god, Surya," Brown told me. Even when the sun god is never mentioned, Brown believes sun salutations will always remain an inherently religious practice. She offered this thought-provoking argument: "In the American cultural context today, people tend to work with a pretty Protestant definition of religion, just given how common Protestantism is. And in Protestant Christianity, there's such a privileging of what you believe." In other words, most Americans think there's nothing religious about a practice if no one mentions God. "The issue is that this isn't the case in many traditions, including Hinduism," she continued. "It doesn't really matter if you mention God. The meditation or the yoga posture is meant to give you a direct experience of the divine."

Brown also pointed out that the founders of yoga and meditation programs often use different language when they're talking to different audiences. For example, in a 2011 article for the journal Contemporary Buddhism, Jon Kabat-Zinn-the physician who founded Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)-openly described his efforts to secularize a Buddhist practice :

Why not try to make meditation so commonsensical that anyone would be drawn to it? Why not develop an American vocabulary that spoke to the heart of the matter, and didn't focus on the cultural aspects of the traditions out of which the dharma emerged, however beautiful they might be, or on centuries-old scholarly debates concerning fine distinctions in the Abhidharma? This was not because they weren't ultimately important, but because they would likely cause unnecessary impediments for people who were basically dealing with suffering and seeking some kind of release from it. And, why not do it in the hospital of the medical center where I happened to be working at the time?

The question is really this: Can meditation and other practices from the East be spiritual in one context and totally secular in others? Can one person do sun salutations as a form of devotion and another do them as a form of exercise? Brown says no. The courts that heard the Encinitas case said yes. "To be sure," stated the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, upholding the decision in April, "if the District's program instructed children that through yoga they would become one with God and that yoga could help end the karmic cycle of reincarnation ... we have little doubt that the program would violate the establishment clause. However ... there is no evidence of any religious indoctrination."

Based on everything I observed, I would say the same about the Quiet Time schools. There are people who avoid bacon because they're religious Jews or Muslims. There are other people who avoid bacon for health reasons. In much the same way, there are people who learn meditation in order to develop higher states of consciousness (I've known many of them). But in the United States, at least, there are far more people who meditate for very practical reasons. This is the way TM is taught at Quiet Time schools: as a tool for getting rid of stress, gaining mental clarity, and developing the resources to rise above adversity.

At Burton, I spent an especially long time talking to Tony, an ebullient 16-year-old who sat in the front row of Bowers's class. Tony is the president of the Advanced Meditators Crew. He's also the vice president of the student body and a member of the California YMCA Youth and Government, a mock legislature program for kids from all over the state. He's actively involved in the Black Lives Matter movement. On top of all that, he plays basketball and has a job outside of school.

At home, Tony takes care of a sick father. "It's always been just my dad and me," he said. Sometimes he sees his mother wandering around with other drug users in the neighborhood, but he said he hasn't spoken to her in 13 years. Before his dad got sick, he worked two jobs, as a Muni bus driver and a bouncer. So starting from the age of 7, Tony came home each night to an empty house. "I was scared of the dark, so I'd sit up all night and really just do nothing," he said. In middle school, that lifelong feeling of abandonment started to take its toll. He got into fights and was suspended twice.

Once he started to meditate, he said, "the problems were still there, but I was more calm about it. The world outside might seem crazy and violent. But once you start your mantra, you feel great-you feel all the energy you have inside of you. And afterwards, you can see the bigger picture of things."

As I was talking to Tony, I could almost see the grown-up he was about to become, just under his youthful skin. He seemed extraordinarily well-equipped for the challenges adults face: navigating relationships, juggling responsibilities, weathering successes and disappointments. "I know that as a young African American male, I'm going to be judged about a lot of stuff. But the meditation helps me filter that out and focus on my own goals," he said. Right now, he's in the running for a Posse Scholarship, a prestigious program for college-bound kids from low-income backgrounds. "I want to do all these great things, not for my own personal gain, but so I can help other people going through the same struggles I went through," he told me. "And someday people will say, 'Tony, he was this kid in high school who grew up to inspire a lot of people and really make a difference.'" I can believe it.

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How Meditation Sheds Its Mysticism at Public Schools

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After growing up with Transcendental Meditation as a spiritual practice, the author visits public schools where it's being used as a simple tool for stress-reduction and well-being. In 1974, the year before I was born, my parents had a small wedding in my aunt's living room and then spent their honeymoon becoming teachers of Transcendental Meditation.