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I’m often asked what distinguishes mindful awareness from the strong academic, social and emotional learning programs that are already in place. Here’s my short answer.

I visited Walden Pond just once. It was in April, 2005, the year of the first contemplation and education meeting at the Garrison Institute and my first mindfulness road trip. Sue Smalley and I were presenting at the Garrison meeting and, sharing an interest in Henry David Thoreau and MBSR, we extended our East Coast trip to attend the annual MBSR conference at the University of Massachusetts. While we were in Worcester we carved out some time to visit Walden Pond.

Last Spring I took a fun trip to Minneapolis to visit the Tergar Meditation Community and the Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota.    Below is a video that the Center for Spirituality and Healing posted recently together with their table of contents.

When Susan made the difficult decision to end the Mindfulness Together online community, many of you responded with thoughtful - and thought-provoking - emails. Although similar online forums and communities exist, the MT website was clearly a special place for mindfulness practitioners around the globe to share ideas and seek information.  

Our youngest child graduated from high-school this past week and one of the commencement speakers was a Chumash elder who, as you might expect, did not offer the usual platitudes.  Emotions ran high for me during that ceremony and, to be fair, I don’t remember much about the speeches.  But something this Native American elder said has stayed with me and it went something like this: “When you find yourself struggling look inside and see what you can let go of.”  There are similarities between what his wisdom tradition teaches and the mindfulness tradition that I teach so it’s not surprising that his teaching about ‘letting-go’ resonates with me, but it may be surprising that it also feels somewhat incomplete. One of my favorite classical stories on letting go as a way to ease suffering is about a monkey that gets caught in a bamboo trap: A hunter set a monkey trap by putting a banana inside of a bamboo cage.  The bars on the cage were set apart at a distance just wide enough for a monkey to reach inside with a flat hand, but not wide enough to pull that hand out again holding the banana.  This trap was remarkably effective because the monkey wouldn’t drop the banana once he had gotten hold of it so he remained trapped even though freedom was as simple as releasing his grip.  Is the moral of this story to drop the banana? Sometimes.

When I say the word mindfulness to a group of educators and ask what the word signifies I get several definitions.  The term is ancient and not surprisingly has taken on many definitions over time.   This is a paradox of language:   As a word becomes popular, its original meaning can become vague.   Although the movement of mindfulness into mainstream secular society is relatively recent, we already see some instances where its meaning has become blurred.  That is why I’ll begin this introduction to mindfulness for teachers and their students by describing what I mean when I talk about mindful awareness.

This month my husband, Seth Greenland, whose new book, The Angry Buddhist, just came out, pitched in and wrote this guest-post about how mindfulness ended up playing a large part in his life. One evening, in my single days, I found myself having dinner with an attractive woman who had been the singer of a band I had seen playing at a friend’s wedding. We were exchanging the usual palaver one does on a first date when she informed me she was a Buddhist. This was early in the Reagan years and back then American Buddhists were like bald eagles – you knew they existed, but you rarely saw one. It was as if the wedding singer had identified herself as a Zoroastrian or one of the Theosophical followers of Madame Blavatsky. Sure, I knew about the dharma from reading the Beat writers, but those guys were all drug addicts or alcoholics or alumni of mental institutions. It was a deal-breaker for me and, needless to say, our last date. If you are a Zoroastrian or a partisan of Madame Blavatsky’s, I apologize. No angry emails, please. It was a different time and I was not as open-minded as I am today. A Catholic, a Protestant or a Jew would have been fine, but a Buddhist was a bridge too far for this provincial New York City boy. Why do I tell a story that makes me look like such a biased simpleton? Because I love irony! Years later, I co-founded Inner Kids with my wife Susan and the mindfulness principles IK teaches are based on age-old Buddhist precepts.

Dr. Seuss has demonstrated time and time again that, when it comes to teaching abstract concepts to children, it’s okay to set the bar high.  Tomorrow marks his 108th birthday and his books have informed my work in ways that I doubt he could have imagined. In his unique and playful style, Dr. Seuss translated big ideas, ones that adults often struggle to grasp, into language that even young children can understand.   For instance, in one of his most famous books Oh . . . the Places You Will Go, Dr. Seuss articulated two key, universal concepts quite simply:  That suffering is part of life with “I'm sorry to say so / but, sadly, it's true / that Bang-ups / and Hang-ups / can happen to you;” and that a moderate or middle approach is usually a good idea with“Be sure when you step. / Step with care and great tact / and remember that Life's / a Great Balancing Act.” And, when it comes to big ideas that can be hard to grasp, in On Beyond Zebra, Dr. Seuss teaches kids that not everything that’s meaningful can be understood conceptually when he writes:  “There are things that I see / That I never could spell if I stopped with the [letter] Z.” Dr. Seuss’ mindfulness teachings are likely accidental, yet they speak not only to the genius and universality of his children’s books but also to the genius and universality of the principles themselves.

What do mindful awareness, Velveeta cheese, and saltines have in common? Other than the fact that I like both meditating and eating Velveeta cheese on saltine crackers, the three don't have much in common. At least not yet.