A Solution for Teacher Burnout: Yoga & Mindfulness
By Lynea Gillen If you work in the schools, you may already be counting down the days until winter break is finally here. It’s a welcome opportunity to catch your breath, relax, recharge – well, after all the holiday shopping and baking and everything else is done,...
Seeing Our Strengths, Transforming Childhood Trauma
When you’re in pain, support is essential. So is releasing sorrow and anger. But we can get trapped in these emotions, too – ruminate and recreate them in our lives, over and over and again. One way I know that the kids I counsel are getting healthier emotionally is...
Cultivating More Positive Emotions
When I worked as a counselor in a behavior classroom I would meet with the students every morning. Often the students would often come in with sad or frightening things on their mind. It was difficult for them to focus on school when their minds and bodies were full...
Investing in Your Emotional Bank Account
The run-up to Thanksgiving can be a frantic, stressful time – preparing for guests or preparing to travel, trying to get everything done that needs doing. But once the holiday comes, it’s a welcome opportunity to relax for a few days, connect with family and friends,...
You Don’t Have to Agree with Someone to See the Goodness in Them
Several years ago, the children in the 6th grade classroom I was visiting as a school counselor started to talk about the dangers in the world and how many “bad” people there were “out there.” I asked them to tell me more. They told me about stories from the news,...
Plugging into Family Relationships, Not Just Devices
"Grandpa, this is much more fun than playing on the tablet!" My 6-year old granddaughter's observation seemed so obvious and true. We had spent the afternoon together, building a ladder for her new treehouse. We used a tape measure and her budding math skills to...
Transforming Teachers, Revitalizing Teachers
One of the most gratifying things we hear from teachers who bring Yoga Calm into their classrooms is how it changes their own lives – personally and professionally – as well as their students’. They say they find it revitalizing their teaching and rekindling the fire...
The Gift of Reading Aloud to Your Kids
Storytelling, as we saw a couple weeks back, can fire the imagination and open up new worlds to children. It does this whether you make up stories on the fly, as you might with a guided relaxation, or simply read to children from books. It’s the exchange between...
How to Bring Yoga & Mindfulness to Your Classroom
Bringing Mindfulness to the K-5 Classroom “Imagine that your mind is a television,” I told the small group of students I was visiting at the rural Oregon school where I worked as a counselor. “And you have a remote.” I then asked them to change to a sad channel and...
Imagination: A Gateway to Literacy
Stories can do a lot of things – soothe, entertain, enchant, even teach. And it’s not just the content of the story itself that teaches. It’s what stories require of us: the use of our imagination. Imagination lays the groundwork for critical social skills such as...
How Mindfulness Can Help Your Kids Thrive
This post was originally published on Parent Herald. It’s a big developmental step when a child begins to realize that they can control their thoughts and feelings. They begin to understand how what we think affects how we feel and what we do. This is a skill I’ve...
Body-Based Therapies for Stress, Trauma and PTSD
Since the New York Times Magazine’s feature on noted trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk a couple years ago, somatic (body-based) approaches to stress and trauma have continued to move to the fore. In a world where exposure and cognitive therapies are still thought...