Mindfulness for Trauma-Impacted Systems

The skills taught are evidence-based and specifically chosen to support you in regulating your nervous system, changing your relationship to stress, and building your toolkit for responding to challenges and managing reactivity. The core skills we will practice are those of placing attention on an anchor in the present moment, shifting attention with attention, and sustaining attention with curiosity and care. You’ll develop the ability to be the conductor of your own attention, reclaim your power through taking agency, and gain valuable information through inquiry of your own experience.

Harvard and other leading research universities have done multiple studies and have concluded that our emotional states, such as happiness and anxiety are contagious, rippling outward up to three times removed. This ripple effect means that in teaching mental fitness and focused attention in trauma-impacted systems, there is an opportunity to not only provide tools for calming the nervous system and cultivating present-moment awareness, but also to investigate social justice and foster the capacities for discernment, attunement, right speech, and wise action in the collective. Our nervous systems are built for co-regulation. And even though we are living in a world and in a society that so often drives us away from each other, connecting with our shared human experience can bring us back to each other and home to ourselves.

Informal practice has a tremendous amount of benefit, so even without formal periods of sitting meditation you will likely see a change, simply by shifting your attention and healing your relationship to yourself. However, you will get out of this course what you put into it. Think of carving out time for practice as an investment in your future self. The invitation is to build this time in as a non-negotiable, rather than try to “fit it in”, and see if you can look at it as an opportunity to give yourself and your community the gift of steadiness, responsivity, and the capacity to stabilize your attention in the midst of high stress.

The Mindfulness for School Leadership course is for anyone who works in education who has a leadership role or a sphere of influence. This includes but is not limited to administrators, counselors, board members, superintendents, department heads, helping professionals, instructional designers, outside providers, parent organizers, facilities and custodial staff, building managers, and classroom educators.

Plan to build in 5-15 minutes pauses throughout your work week. This isn't designed to be a quick fix, rather it is a lifestyle change and an opportunity to rewire your brain through regular practice. This program isn't a race to completion, and it's not one more thing to add to your to-do list. Each module may take you 6 weeks or more, and this workbook may guide you through the entire school year. Pick it up when you need resourcing or a new layer of rest and regulation. Resist the temptation to rush through the material to check it off your list, or because you are just so very busy and limited on time. The time you spend with this course is time spent tending to yourself. It makes sense to want to complete the material and gain the knowledge as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, mindfulness does not work that way. This program was created specifically with the busy administrator in mind, and is built to be manageable and practical within the fast pace and high demands of your daily job.

Beyond simply bringing attention to an anchor, or engaging in intentional self-care practices, mindfulness invites us into relationship, not just with our own experiences, but the experiences of others around us, and the opportunity to investigate with kindness and curiosity how we wish to BE in the world, in our smallest moments and in those that are larger in life. Mindfulness also encourages us to consider what it means to be just, and how systems of oppression work to divide us and isolate us from our shared human experience and from the possibility of human connection. It is in bringing attention to areas of systemic inequality in a compassionate and safe way that we can then begin coming together across our differences in community to support mutual respect, care for each other and for the planet, and access to our shared and authentic human experiences.