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What are schools doing to bring mindfulness to the community? To students? To faculty? To social events? To administrative dealings?

@ Spence, 4th grade teacher has a mindfulness program focusing on senses, noticing, etc; 6th grade teacher uses a bell to begin the class with focused breathing @ Emma Willard, lead on a nascent Mindfulness program is working with advisors to bring activities into the advisory periods/homerooms @ Saint Ann's, small meditation group meets one day a week for stressed out HS students (boys only thus far) to decompress @ Friends schools, the meetings and the comfort with silence is greatly beneficial to students in their ability to deal with silence, slow down, etc. @ MKA, the opening of the new Academic Center (w/new Library) initiated a conversation about policies and procedures with statements such as "explore beautiful questions, connect with community, choose your path, leave no trace."

The use of Mindful is dangerously overused, like eco- or green- or i- things. How do we get this to be authentic? How do we move to have practices adopted instead of terms that would be more superficial and easily ignored?

Use of prompts, practices, etc can help people stop and notice: questions, items to recall, sensory experiences, etc.

The distraction that we are looking to combat can not even be about the distraction, but the //anticipation// of the next distraction can be enough to take our attention off of the present.

A good book to get started on understanding the practices and definitions and research on mindfulness: Search Inside Yourself by Chade Meng-Tan