Do You Use Your Smartphone or Does It Use You? Addressing Digital Addiction through Mindfulness
Where were you during the Great Facebook Outage of 2019? Thanks to a server configuration change, Facebook – and Instagram and WhatsApp – went down for much of the world one day earlier this month. While some people welcomed the 12-hour outage as “a nice short...
Teens Speak Out About Why They Don’t Speak of Their Trauma & Its Effects
Silence isn’t singular. There are lots of different kinds. There’s the positive silence you experience in mindful meditation, for instance, or defiant silence, where the withholding of information becomes a form of power. And then there’s the silence that comes from...
The Need for a More Holistic Approach to PE
Physical education is a crucial part of a child’s overall education. It presents limitless opportunities for instilling healthy habits while supporting their growth and cognitive development. Yet ask a random group of adults what they remember about PE class, and...
Toward a Trauma-Informed Mindfulness Practice
It’s easy to think that if something works for us, it will work for anyone. How could the action that brought us peace, say, or joy not bring that same good feeling to everyone who tries it? We come to each moment from our own history, our own tastes, our own habits,...
Emotions Are Central to Learning
There are those who think bringing social-emotional learning into the classroom is some sort of fad. Not so, asserts a new national commission report from the Aspen Institute. “The promotion of social, emotional, and academic learning…is the substance of education...
The Importance of Voice in Releasing Trauma
After trauma, it’s not just the brain that remembers. The body remembers, too. One thing that makes it even tougher on both is that trauma is often entwined with shame. We internalize the notion that we’re not supposed to talk about what happened to us. We believe...
The Yoga Calm Blog Year in Review, 2018
The end of year is a natural time for reflection – and for us, that includes some reflection on the life of this blog, which is now entering its 11th year. That alone is a little hard to believe. It seems just yesterday that we were creating our first post over at...
What Is Your Gift?
Think back to when you were small and grownups asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up. Your answers probably changed a lot over time. One month, you wanted to be a veterinarian, the next, an astronaut. Or teacher. Or cowboy. Or scientist. Maybe you did grow...
Classroom Yoga, Mindfulness Keep Trending Upward. Why?
It’s amazing to realize that, today, twice as many kids are doing yoga than just five years ago. According to the latest figures from the CDC, 8.4% of youth now practice yoga. Back in 2012, only 3% did. Meditation practices have increased more than five-fold. That’s...
Our Connections to Nature, Each Other, Ourselves
“Strawberries first shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer at the beginning of her amazing book Braiding Sweetgrass. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without...
The Many Ways of Mindfulness
It was a lovely, sunny, summer day, and there I was beating myself up a bit for slacking on my meditation practice. Then my 7-year old granddaughter Anna rushed up and tugged at my arm. “Come on, Grandma. Come out and play with me!” So I followed her as she ran across...
Why You Should Make Regulation & Release Practices Part of Your School Safety Drill Routine
Safety drills have long been a part of education here in the US – from the fire drills we’re all familiar with to those particular to a region, such as earthquake drills in California or tornado drills in Nebraska. And these days – for better and worse – we have...