“This is a much needed, extremely well thought out, and beautifully constructed curriculum. It is commonsensical, user friendly, and straightforward to implement. Most importantly, it engages you, the teacher, in developing your own mindfulness practice so that you are not asking things of your students that you are not actually exploring and experiencing for yourself. This element of honing your own personal mindfulness practice can provide great benefits in terms of your well-being and sense of ease and presence in your work. Bringing this curriculum to life in a nonmechanical way can have profound effects on your students. It can catalyze the development of embodied self-awareness and, with it, the potential for greater self-understanding, self-confidence, and emotional intelligence. This process is made easier by the inclusion of extremely effective “scripts” for each lesson, offset from the rest of the text, which can support you on the steep slope of your own learning curve. Through the systematic cultivation of attention, awareness, self-compassion, and kindness toward others—all capacities that adolescents already have and that can be strengthened through training—a set of fundamental and highly beneficial life skills are developed. These skills can help teenagers navigate more effectively through a time in life that can be confusing, filled with uncertainties, and exceedingly stressful. These life skills form the basis for building successful relationships, beginning with oneself. They can also contribute to optimizing the classroom environment and learning. Even great musicians have to first tune their instruments. It is the same with learning.”

Myla Kabat-Zinn and Jon Kabat-Zinn

From foreword to 2013 edition of Learning to BREATHE. To learn more, visit New Harbinger Publications.