with Daniel Rechtschaffen
Mindfulness can support attention, emotional regulation, and compassion in our students and in our selves. What teacher wouldn’t want to feel more relaxed and happy and to have their students being more balanced and present? But the true power of mindfulness goes far beyond these first benefits. In the beginning, we may just be practicing mindfulness for our own health and wellbeing but eventually, we want to open our hearts and eyes to bring our mindful attention into the world. We begin by being compassionate to ourselves and once we do this we expand our hearts to all people and to the earth that sustains us.
In this session, we will explore mindfulness practices that are being used with kids to support social, systemic, and ecological change. Mindfulness can help students to be aware of the ways their minds create assumptions and biases, leading to a greater capacity to work with systemic inequality from the inside out. There is also a growing movement around ecological intelligence utilizing mindfulness practices to be aware of our interconnectedness to nature and learning how to support our planet.
Daniel Rechtschaffen, Marriage and Family Therapist, is the author of The Way of Mindful Education and The Mindful Education Workbook. He organizes the annual Mindfulness in Education Conference and Teacher Training at the Omega Institute. Daniel offers keynote speeches and mindfulness trainings at conferences, schools, communities, and businesses, such as University of Wisconsin Madison, Google, Esalen Institute, and schools around the globe. Daniel teaches mindfulness through music, sports, storytelling, games and other creative and engaging ways. He is inspired to utilize mindfulness to help us become more conscious, compassionate, and committed to taking care of this miraculous world we live in. He is the founding director of Mindful Education, a mindfulness and social-emotional learning platform for educators