A Pathway for Reckoning with the Task Ahead

Our emotional states are contagious. As humans, our nervous systems are designed for co-regulation, and both our positive and negative moods can spread in a ripple effect through our communities.

School communities across the country are reeling from the impact of the global pandemic and ever-increasing levels of depression, addiction, chronic stress, mental illness, and interpersonal violence. Leaders in education and decision-makers have the seemingly-impossible task of guiding their schools and districts through the impending collapse of a system in crisis, meanwhile the majority of them are unequipped to navigate their own anxiety, trauma, and overwhelm, much less the backlash from students, teachers, and parents and the collective trauma of an entire system that is buckling under the weight of widespread dysregulation.

In order to heal education at the whole-systems level, we must change the story we are telling ourselves. This workbook provides an evidence-based pathway for this transformation and a new narrative for leaders in education — that healing is possible.

School leaders can have a direct impact in a larger system simply by practicing basic stress reduction and mindfulness for their own regulation and wellbeing. One person at the top can rewrite the script for an entire school or district, by setting the intention to slow down enough to pay attention to what is unfolding right now, in a kind and curious way. When we practice shifting out of fear and reactivity, and speaking up for our right to individual mental health and wellbeing, we start a chain reaction that ripples into our circles of care and can ultimately change the world.

This writing comes at a time when educators are demoralized and leaving the profession in droves. Resulting staff shortages cause school closures, increased burnout, crippling overwhelm and exhaustion, and even the elimination of bus routes. Principals are in tears in their offices, emotionally depleted, anxious, battling moral outrage and depression, and considering a career change. On the news – a prediction of an increase in school shootings, staggering “learning losses”, and never enough funding, time, or support where it really matters.

As the mother of an elementary-aged daughter, a former classroom teacher, an MFA nonfiction writer, a trauma survivor, and now a somatic psychotherapist and school leadership consultant trained in clinical mindfulness-based interventions, I am unwilling to stand by quietly and do nothing. I have taken the energy and fuel from my grief and outrage at the state of modern education, and I have transformed it to create the program laid out here. The practices offered come from my training in secular, field-tested programs, such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), the Mindful Schools Curricula, Somatic Psychotherapy and Family Systems modalities, Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, and Nonviolent Communication (NVC) , and are informed by conversations and sessions with school leaders as well as my own trauma-healing journey.

If you are in a school leadership or decision-making role, you might be exhausted, feeling like you can’t get anything right, and that you are at the center of a storm, and you may be on the receiving end of a world of anger, bitterness, resentment, hurt, and hatred. You might be taking the brunt of the blame for problems that are way beyond the scope of any one person to address. There is no one size fits all solution, but  right now I’d like to invite you to pause for a moment. Take a full breath, all the way in and all the way out. Acknowledge the weight you are carrying, and that the pain and suffering you are personally experiencing is very real and deserves care and attention.

If you are reading these words right now, you are the ones we have been waiting for. If you are a leader in education, you have an influence on the people around you, and you can transform your relationship to yourself and to your community. You can have a direct impact in a larger system by practicing mindfulness for yourself, by setting the intention to shift out of fear and reactivity, by slowing down enough to pay attention to what is unfolding right now, and by speaking up for our right to individual and collective wellbeing.

Together, we must embrace our relational wounding. We must be willing to see that we cannot create safety with fear-based thinking. Connection and caring are at the heart of how we heal, and if those in decision-making positions can identify with this from a place of their own personal healing, perhaps we can together move one step closer to placing care and mental fitness at the center of educational policy.

When teachers have time to sit in a circle with their students, and listen to their breathing or the sound of a bell, or bring some curiosity and kindness to their thoughts, and then reflect on their experience with each other, their collective wellbeing skyrockets. Imagine this applied at the top levels of health administration and educational policy! What if directors and superintendents started Monday mornings with a leadership team meeting, and opened the meeting with a bell and a few minutes of mindfulness? What if they then invited some time for check-ins, appreciative inquiry, taking stock, focusing attention, making space for collaborative feedback, and some mindful movement? What if they found that taking this extra time to prioritize wellbeing, connection, and mental fitness actually created more spaciousness, ease, and productivity in their day?

We are living in some of the most trying times in the history of humanity, and the future of the planet itself depends upon how we re-imagine education and the changes we must make together. We must educate the next generation in slowing down and learning to pay attention, so that they can collaboratively engage in decisive action with calm, focused awareness. Our children, more than previous generations, will need leaders who can model resilience and mental fitness, skills for coping with immense difficulty, and with the capacity to lead with love, even in the midst of great suffering. Unfortunately, many of us in positions of school leadership were not taught these skills during our own schooling. Just like anything that really matters, we have to start this reckoning within ourselves.

Schools are Trauma-Impacted Systems

Fear-based thinking, and pervasive threat are everywhere in our modern world, but they are especially prevalent in post-pandemic era schools, where shutdowns happen out of an “abundance of caution,” active shooter drills are considered to be a prudent use of instructional time, and mental health education is an afterthought. High school girls are trembling in bathroom stalls, cutting their skin, unable to find a caring adult to talk to about rape, drug abuse, suicide. Children are cowering under desks, holding their bullet proof backpacks in front of their faces during drills, wondering how much longer the terror will last. In pre-school, kids as young as three take naps with their shoes on, just in case they “have to run away from a bad guy.” In many schools, the Safety Resource Officer (SRO) wears a police uniform, carries pepper spray and a taser, and keeps an AK-15 locked up behind the front desk, only a few feet away from where the retirement-aged secretaries record attendance.

Not only do we live in an era of mass shootings and routine lockdown drills, where the threat of violence is ever-present in our schools, but this is compounded by growing pressure to bridge achievement gaps, improve test scores, and the myriad unknown stressors of students’ home lives. Add to that the vicarious trauma, demoralization, and compassion fatigue that the majority of educators and school administrators are navigating, and you have a melting pot of traumatic stimuli, simmering rage, and relational wounding. This is an extremely toxic combination within one individual’s nervous system, and causes panic attacks, illness, burnout, and interpersonal conflict. When we zoom out and consider the impact of collective trauma at the classroom, school, and district level, we see that the effects of this societal imbalance are magnified exponentially and the result is a whole system embroiled in the turmoil of traumatic arousal, chronic reactivity, and maladaptive coping.

How many students, teachers, and school administrators have witnessed violence, experienced attachment trauma, an adverse childhood event, or are currently in an unsafe living situation? How many students have the cellular memory of a threat to their life or to their belonging that lives within their nervous systems, and a terror monster that bares its teeth when things get quiet and still? Data from the National Council for Mental Wellbeing indicates that 70% of people have experienced some type of traumatic event at least once in their lives. We must hold this information with care and acknowledge the ubiquity of trauma in our classrooms, staff meetings, board rooms, and within our ourselves.

My Story: The Alchemy of Grief and Rage

My career in education began filled with passion and energy. However, after seven years of pouring everything I had into my teaching, my cup was not only empty, it was crumbled and leaking. It was the worst year of my adult life, and I faced an endless barrage of severe life challenges. In a single semester, I divorced, slipped on the ice and ruptured a disc in my lower back, lost part of my hearing due to a prolonged sinus infection, and struggled to make ends meet as a single mother of a toddler while teaching full-time. As much as I loved teaching, the stress of the job and my home life had broken me, and I regularly experienced panic attacks and such severe pain that I was having trouble performing the basic functions of my job.

One day, I pulled into the school parking lot, and suddenly, I couldn’t breathe. My chest seized and contracted, my hands started to tremble violently, and sweat poured down my back. It wasn’t my first panic attack, but it was the worst one I’d had yet, and the timing was extremely inconvenient, because I was already late. By the time I managed to regain enough composure to walk into the school building, it was already well into homeroom. The look slung at me by the covering teacher said it all, I sucked. I couldn’t do anything right. I was too much! Didn’t I know that this was her only planning period? Why did they ever hire a loser like me? I was not good enough to deserve this corner classroom with windows.

Later, standing in front of the whiteboard during second period, trying in vain to quiet and gain the attention of 29 eighth graders, I felt my frustration build, as hot pressure pushed at my temples. Watching me sputter with anger, a few students giggled and something flew across the room. Then, like a volcanic explosion, the lava of my emotions boiled over. After a brief, non-sensical tirade, I collapsed wordlessly into my chair and buried my head in my arms, red-faced and crying. This was not the teacher I wanted to be.

It took only a few seconds for my astonished students to fall dead silent. With my head down and my body heaving, I felt completely broken and incapable of doing the job that I loved so dearly. I had let everyone down by falling apart. I had failed my students and myself.

After a few moments, I looked up through my blur of tears, and saw the wide, concerned eyes of my students. The scene in front of me startled me to attention. I realized, suddenly, that I was contagious. My own emotional and mental state had created the chaotic climate in the classroom, and we were all experiencing the effects of my dysregulation together. I had been working so hard to hide my inner turmoil, to suppress my pain, and to ignore my feelings in order to keep my job, and to be the good teacher they all deserved, that I had unknowingly cultivated an environment that was alienating, anxious, unstable, and volatile, just like my shattered nervous system.

“I’m so sorry you guys,” I said.

“What’s wrong, Ms. Cindy?” a student asked, softly.

I took a deep breath, and then, I began to tell them about my divorce, my broken heart, my back pain, my fear of losing my job, how anxious and scared I was, and how I worried about my ex’s mental health all the time. I told them about my panic attacks in the morning, how I was always scrambling, and struggling to show up as their teacher. “I am so sorry I have let you all down.”

I glanced around the room and saw multiple students whose eyes were red and filled with tears, and I passed out tissues. One student, a feisty boy with whom I was always at odds, stood up and said, “We love you, Ms. Cindy. This is my favorite class, and you’re the best teacher I’ve ever had.” Then he walked towards the front of the classroom and wrapped his arms around me. Other students joined him and I was smothered by a giggly, awkward group hug.

“Can we watch a movie now?” one student said, and everyone laughed. (They knew that this was no longer allowed in my class without prior parent approval as per a recent decree from administration).

“Let’s play vocab bingo,” I said, laughing and wiping the tears from my face.

A collective cheer erupted from the group.

For the rest of the week, they showered me with praise and words of encouragement. Behavior and grades improved, and students even started to turn in their homework without being badgered about it. One by one, they also started to approach me during lunch and after class, and to share with me their struggles with eating disorders, sexual identity, addiction, stories about their parents who divorced or were about to, asking for advice about situations in which they were being bullied, and seeking help with navigating violent home situations. When I came back from lunch, my desk was often covered in hand-written notes, gifts of candy, cute drawings, and anonymous reports of concern for students who needed support but wouldn’t or couldn’t ask for it.

By giving myself permission to have the experience I was already having, and to name my emotions and welcome them, a ripple of healing and connection pulsed through our classroom community. Prior to my emotional breakdown, I would have characterized my classroom environment as overwhelming, unmanageable, impossible to handle, and full of behavior problems and “at risk” students. After my public reckoning, and because I finally gave myself permission to be authentic with my students, the entire atmosphere shifted to one of care, connection, and growing together in a classroom community.

This is not to say that if you are having behavioral problems or classroom management challenges that you should break down and have a panic attack in front of your students. However, the more we suppress and ignore our authentic human experience and exile our emotions in the interest of plowing through content or “being professional,” the more our students learn to disregard their own humanness, and the less opportunities they have to learn how to be with difficulty, increase their resilience, and develop skills for navigating real world challenges. When we model healthy coping, allowing ourselves to have the experience we are having, and place process and relationship over content and achievement, then we are being the leaders the world needs in these times of widespread societal illness.

Moving forward, I stopped trying to be super-human, and start letting myself just be the messy, disorganized, last-minute-lesson-planning, imperfect, human full of feelings that I was. Ironically, students were more engaged, performed better, and behaved differently, with a new sense of care and mutual respect at the heart of most of our interactions.

Mindfulness in the Classroom

In order to treat myself for the continuing anxiety, stress, and pain, I downloaded a mindfulness app on my phone with a handful of guided practices that were just a few minutes long, making a commitment to squeeze these in between classes so that I could get better at regulating myself. As soon as the bell rang at the end of class, I shuffled my students out and locked the door. I had a luxurious seven minutes, which was just enough time to listen to a 3-minute recording and for a trip to the bathroom. For a few stolen moments at a time, I practiced focusing on my breath, or sounds, or an object, while students yanked on the door handle and peered through the window, saying “she’s in there, I can see her… but the door’s locked.” Hello, Captain Obvious.

Soon, I developed strategies to protect these precious minutes of tending to my own wellbeing. I made a sign for the door that said “do not disturb,” and acclimated the students to the new routine of waiting outside the classroom quietly until I opened the door and let them in.

Pausing to listen to these recordings, and the mini-moments of stabilizing my attention with an anchor, instantly made a difference. With just three minutes of guidance and focused attention that supported me in slowing down, calming my nervous system, and bringing awareness into the sensations in my body, my attitude and mood shifted and everything about my classroom and emotional wellbeing changed. These resets gave me the opportunity to find a resting place and begin again, even if only for a few minutes. I even started being able to apply these skills during class, and to pause and ground myself automatically, whenever I noticed anxiety returning. Informal moments of mindfulness were little resting places that helped me to stay centered during the more behaviorally-challenging classes that came later in the day. These pauses became a lifeboat for me. I was less reactive, less emotionally exhausted, more resourced, and one breath at a time, the students started to get their devoted teacher back.

A few years earlier, at a different school, I had been introduced to “mindfulness” when a presenter, Anne Marie Rossi from the organization Be Mindful,  came into our classroom and led the eighth grade in three mindfulness sessions. This was before mindfulness became a buzz-word, or appeared on magazine covers in the checkout line, so it was pretty new to all of us. I watched in awe as she instructed the group of 82 teenagers to “put their mindful bodies on”. With no complaint, every single student in the room found a seat, planted their feet on the floor, sat up straight and tall, and got quiet. The shift in the room was instantaneous, the energy changing suddenly from rowdy and energetic to calm and peaceful. After another moment, you could hear the sounds of breathing, the humming mini-fridge and HVAC system, and even the buzzing of the lights. Soon, students started yawning, sighing, and relaxing their shoulders. Standing in the back of the room, I could feel my own body relaxing, the muscles in my face softening, and my heart rate slowing. A feeling of deep peacefulness washed over me, and I wanted to stay in that quiet place for the rest of the day.

The students raved about these sessions. Even those who were initially resistant or reluctant would light up when Anne Marie appeared. “Ooh, yay. That mindfulness lady is here again,” they’d say. By the completion of the third session, they had learned a handful of coping skills, planned a meaningful community service project, decorated the walls with inspirational slogans, and covered the lockers with affirmations and self-care phrases on sticky notes. I was moved by the apparent impact only three short sessions had had with this group of rambunctious and often dysregulated kids. Just like me, they were still hungry for more of that peaceful, calm feeling they got when they practiced mindfulness with Ms. Rossi.

Now, two years later, I had rediscovered the nourishment and rest that was available in those mini-moments of mindfulness and guided practices. I began seeking out mindfulness lessons and curricula for students and building mindful pauses and attentional activities into my lesson plans. Even though not all students were interested, and some just giggled and whispered in the back of the room while the recording played, these stopping points provided a sense of relief for all of us. Pulling together in these moments of reset and reconnection allowed my relationship with the students to blossom into something truly magical. Soon, they began requesting mindfulness practices, especially before tests or on days when they were stressing about big assignments, conflicts at home, or drama with peers. Day by day, my classroom became a landing place for all of us, and we all started to ride the tumultuous waves with a bit more skill and connection.

Building pauses and the attitudes of mindfulness into my workday renewed my energy, and modeling and teaching these skills to students made my heavy load a bit more sustainable, but it didn’t magically make all of my stress and anxiety go away. I still recognized the signs of burnout in my role as an educator, and the more students came to me with their personal struggles, the more I began to consider a change of career into counseling and teaching mindfulness. As the stability of my home life continued to deteriorate, my back injury confined me to a wheelchair, and I started to acknowledge the cellular memory of attachment and relational trauma in my body. During the course of my therapy, it became clear that it was time to shift gears, professionally, that classroom teaching was unsustainable for me, and to make space in my life for teaching mindfulness and mental health in a different capacity.

The Cellular Memory of Trauma

Over the summer, I recovered from a successful micro-discectomy and slowly regained mobility in my leg. During this process, I undertook the study of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), an eight-week, evidence-based program that offers secular mindfulness training to help people with chronic pain, stress, anxiety, and depression. My healing was so profoundly impacted by the body awareness practices, gentle yoga, and cognitive exercises in exploring patterns of behavior, thinking, and reactivity, that as soon as I completed the program, I enrolled in an MBSR teacher training. With these longer periods of guided mindfulness meditation, and a clearer understanding of how my nervous system and attention worked, my body and my mind began to recover. I learned that befriending my experience, managing where I placed my attention, and identifying my triggers, habits, and automatic thoughts dramatically improved my wellbeing and my capacity to ride the waves of relational turmoil, reactivity, and big emotions.

I also dove into my graduate counseling classes at Regis University, and was astonished to see how every diagnosis seemed to come back to trauma, and how nearly every treatment protocol in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) seemed to recommend mindfulness and attentional training. In fact, everything I learned seemed to point back to practices that were so simple in their application, and so relevant to everyone, everywhere.

So, why weren’t kids being taught these basic and practical coping skills and strategies for taking care of their mental health? Why was the system set up for teachers and administrators to be so overwhelmed that they didn’t have time for therapy, to take an MBSR class, or exercise, or to make meaningful connections with students? I frequently thought of Anne Marie Rossi, and had seen in her what I wanted to become — not just to experience peace and calm in my daily job, but also to make a real difference by teaching these valuable skills to kids and other educators. The idea that I could gain the language and skillset to have a meaningful impact for students in the schools within my own community and beyond, before my daughter reached school-age, was what kept me going.

I enrolled in every secular mindfulness training program I could find, including the MBSR advanced training, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), Hakomi (Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy), the Mindful Schools teacher certification program, and the Inward Bound teacher training program. Undertaking multiple approaches simultaneously, I embarked upon a five-year period of my own inner work, deepening mindfulness practice, relational and trauma healing, and depth psychotherapy.

Over the next few years, my nonprofit, the Rocky Mountain Mindfulness Center, grew into a community hub for Mindfulness-based Interventions (MBI’s). I taught public classes at the library and with the city’s mental health and suicide prevention programs. I rented spaces in yoga studios and meditation centers to teach MBSR and MBCT, and eventually had robust class sizes and powerful data around the efficacy of those programs for supporting overall wellbeing, reduction in anxiety, and decreased suicidality and depressive relapse. Though there were many areas of need in different parts of the community where I lived, I remained dedicated to finding my way back into the district and schools I had left behind, in a role that could more effectively shift the conversation towards the mindfulness and mental fitness practices that were so desperately needed.

As I deepened my inquiry into my own attachment trauma (I was adopted at the age of 14 months), and continued to experiment with different forms of meditation, I was surprised to find that sitting in silence was near impossible. Every time I placed myself on the cushion, I felt the rush of relief from adopting a posture that supported paying attention. But, as I sat for longer periods of time in silence, attempting to anchor myself with the sensations of breathing, I consistently felt a rising sense of panic. Time after time, six or seven minutes in to what should have been a 20-minute practice, I got overwhelmed by images of violence, accompanied by a feeling of paralysis, terror, and confinement in my body, and the simultaneous boiling over of explosive rage. It was like the gas pedal and the brake were on at the same time, and left me feeling as if a silent meditation practice was yet another thing I had failed to master.

Fortunately, my therapist and my counseling training offered me language and tools to understand that the experience of witnessing early violence was stored in my body’s cellular memory and to access and alchemize this undischarged traumatic energy. Despite these interventions, I still found that when I got quiet and still in meditation, the feeling of terror in my system grew louder.

Then, in the Summer of 2019, I attended an experiential talk by David Treleaven (the author of a book called Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness) during a training with Inward Bound. He put language to what I had struggled with in my practice and offered a handful of simple and practical modifications that finally made it possible for me to meditate without over-attending to traumatic stimuli. Not only that, I could immediately see the benefit of incorporating trauma-sensitive instruction into my work with educators and students. Inward Bound is an organization that runs meditation retreats for teens, and therefore the way they teach mindfulness is designed to be equitable, inclusive, accessible, trauma-informed, and deeply relational. These modifications, and the permission to have the experience I was having, turned out to be the missing ingredients. Simple changes, such as opening my eyes, staying in choice, or allowing myself some movement during meditation, made all the difference in my personal practice and in my capacity to support others in being with what was arising.

Slowly, I began to find tools that made regulation, managing triggers, and even extended periods of sitting possible and deeply nourishing. It was a new beginning for me, and for my family, and offered a doorway back into education, where I could now support teachers, parents, and whole communities with mindfulness trainings and with integrity.

School Mindfulness Needs Embodied, Trauma-Sensitive Leaders

Embodiment of mindfulness means teaching by example, and being a visible representation of the practice. This is not about whether or not someone has a formal meditation routine, goes to yoga classes, joins a Sangha, or uses a special cushion or a certain kind of bell. Rather, embodiment of the attitudes of mindfulness shows up in the applied ways a leader interacts with students and peers, brings authentic presence and non-judgment to their relationships, and how they navigate difficulty and setbacks from moment-to-moment.

After I left the classroom and started teaching mindfulness in schools as an outside provider, I took whatever I could get because I was determined to bring mental fitness and coping skills to the youth in my community. I knew one thing for sure — mentally healthy people don’t shoot up grocery stores and bowling alleys. Motivated by the high levels of mental illness and gun violence in the Front Range of Colorado, I cold-called principals and health teachers, emailed school guidance counselors, advertised on Facebook, and evangelized to anyone I knew who had a connection to an educator or a classroom. I knew schools had little money for extra programming and even less time, so I took whatever I could get, even if it was 20 minutes, once a week, for no pay, an hour away from my home. My two conditions for bringing a program into a classroom were (1.) that I needed to meet with the principal prior to working with students, and (2.) that the classroom teacher had to participate in the sessions.

My experience in my own teaching job informed this first condition, as I needed the leadership of the school to understand, before they received a concerned email from a parent, both the secularity and the importance of the mental fitness practices I would be offering. I needed them to have my back if things went sideways, and to have confidence in the offering because they knew from their own experience that these practices had value and were completely secular and research-based.

The second condition, that the teacher participate in the lessons rather than using the time as a break or an opportunity to catch up on grading or emails, was informed by my training with the Mindful Schools organization and their robust research base. One of their most important studies, early in the implementation of their curriculum, revealed that in order for mindfulness instruction to be most effective in the classroom, the teacher needed to have an experiential understanding of the practice, and willingness to model the skills and strategies being taught.

In their experiment, one classroom of students were taught mindfulness and the teacher did not have a mindfulness practice or participate in the lessons, and in another classroom, the teacher had a mindfulness practice and the students were not explicitly taught mindfulness. The classroom where the teacher practiced showed better outcomes than the classroom where the students were taught mindfulness without a practicing teacher.

Despite embracing these two conditions, I continued to bump up against situations where a lack of understanding and training undermined my efforts. Sometimes, students would leave the class with new skills and options for stabilizing their attention with grounding practices, only to be reprimanded by their next teacher for closing their eyes, taking too long to answer a question, or standing to stretch. Calm students moving slowly in the hallway were yelled at to “wake up, hustle-up, and get to class!” During my lessons, counselors would pull high-needs students (often those who needed mindfulness time the most). In one classroom, I was greeted with student complaints like “I hate mindfulness,” and “are you going to make us lay down on the floor like Ms. S— ?” In exploring this a bit more, I learned that their regular teacher frequently turned off the lights and played a recording of a body scan meditation, and “makes everyone do it, or else she will yell at us.”

This showed me how critical it was for everyone who was working with these students, from the top-down, to have an understanding of the practice and a common language around trauma and regulation. So, I began to push for opportunities to work more deeply with leadership early on in the program. A series of at least three professional development modules for all staff became a third condition and a core component of offering mindfulness lessons to students in the classroom. Within these sessions, I taught the language, benefits, and attitudinal foundations of classroom mindfulness, offered introductory practices in body awareness and anchoring attention with sound and the breath, and gave an overview of the neurobiology of threat in the nervous system and the impact of trauma on our ability to regulate and attend to what is arising. I highlighted the importance of giving students agency and how mindfulness should never be used as a disciplinary or classroom management strategy. Most importantly, I made sure to explain that we never know what a student’s relationship is to their inner experience, and because of the ubiquity of trauma, it may not feel safe for students to turn their attention inwards. They needed to always be in choice, and to be given the option not to participate.

When we ask people, young and old, to turn their attention inward and bring awareness to their bodies, hearts, and minds, we must do so with utmost care. The potential for re-traumatization and nervous system activation is why we cannot simply throw a canned mindfulness or SEL curriculum at a classroom, and expect it to fix everything. This is also why, if we try to implement mindfulness from the bottom-up, after a handful of classroom teachers have attended a weekend training, or without a deeper understanding of the practice for ourselves, and what it means to turn attention inward in a world filled with trauma, we may actually be causing harm. We need leaders who care enough about healing to do their own work, so that they can be embodied representatives of what is possible, and offer their own nervous systems as the intervention.

Administrators Are People, Too

Being in a school leadership role can be devastatingly lonely. Not only are you responsible for the wellbeing and safety of an entire community, but you are also a middle-man, confined by district and state policies, budget shortfalls, learning losses, and limited resources. You can never please everyone, and more often it might feel like you can’t please anyone. Your home life and family come second to the demands of the job and the needs of the students, and you rarely have time to sit down and eat lunch. God forbid you want to get a workout in, you’d better set your alarm for 3:45 or 4 am at the latest and get it done before school starts. You are like a forgotten older sibling, who always seems to have everything together, so no one fusses over you, or asks if you are ok. Everyone expects so much from you, but when things go wrong, guess who gets the blame?

Administrators may look like the captain of the ship, but most are governed by a system and policies that are beyond their control. More often than not, they are actually more like the ship’s figurehead, poised out front with dignity, but vulnerable and exposed to all of the enemy fire. Their positions of power and influence are often an illusion, and many administrators feel helpless, caught between policy and integrity, systemic oppression and the needs of their students, their own wellbeing and the greater good. In order to walk this tightrope, they must maintain a very delicate balance. They are always running on empty, and experience heartache, moral outrage, and utter exhaustion, just like classroom educators do. Because of their forward-facing role, school leaders need care and time to prioritize their own wellbeing just as much as kids and teachers do, and they cannot do it alone.

This need for school leadership to learn healthy coping, stress reduction, and to understand the impact of trauma on their own systems became even more apparent after I made an attempt to return to the classroom five years after leaving my beloved job. I had relocated, and now lived in a rural district experiencing a severe teacher shortage, and one week before the start of the Fall semester of 2021, I reluctantly agreed to teach first grade at my daughter’s new school. I hoped that with my consistent mindfulness practice, my vast toolbox of skills and resources, and the support of my administration, I could successfully return to my teaching career. In my interview, the committee responded with excitement and enthusiasm as I shared the details of my training and plans to incorporate mindfulness into my teaching. “We need this,” they said, and welcomed me aboard. As I decorated my classroom, used my own money to buy supplies, and planned my lessons, I imagined my practice rippling outward, touching the lives of students, parents, and other teachers in the building. I was ready to be the change!

It was less than a month before my nervous system fell apart. Covid-19 had changed everything about how school communities connected and operated. There was little sense of belonging or relational safety amongst the staff in this building, and the impossible demands of my job quickly piled up. The front office was rife with conflict and interpersonal drama, and checking my mailbox was often tense and uncomfortable. Being a small, rural district, many of the staff members were related to each other, and unintegrated relational turmoil seethed under the surface at all times.

My anxiety and back pain soon returned, and because of the intensity of three different required literacy training programs that occupied all of my prep time and some weekends, I fell behind in my lesson planning. I was heartbroken to be told that there was not time for me to lead students in an opening circle in the mornings because they were required to do 127 minutes of literacy, and that had to start immediately after the morning bell. Instead of teaching mindfulness, I was asked to deliver a canned social emotional learning curriculum, consisting of worksheets, videos, and puppy and snail puppets (because the district had gotten a grant). The assistant principal was often angry and distant, and the principal was forever unavailable, locked away behind the closed door of her office, and disconnected from the needs of the students and teachers. Despite my commitment to the practice and my training, my mindfulness and daily meditation weren’t enough to keep me regulated in the midst of so much pain and suffering. When the panic attacks returned, I put in my notice and resigned. Another teacher filled my position within a few days.

Over the following months, I came to terms with the fact that classroom teaching was still unsustainable for me in a landscape where there was no foundational sense of belonging, and where leaders were in so much inner turmoil that they were visibly struggling to hold it together, just like I had in my own role. Now that I had a better understanding of the human condition and the impact of trauma, I could not blame them. Instead, I recognized their pain and wounding, and how shutting down and desensitizing was the best they could do with the tools they had available to them. I understood now the larger impact of collective trauma, and that my experience had been informed by the cellular memory of trauma in my own body as well as the collective trauma within the larger body of education. In returning to the classroom, my nervous system had quickly returned to its habituated pattern of anxiety, bracing, and tensing, and the physical manifestation of systemic stress showed up for me as the return of my panic attacks and debilitating back pain. I was heartbroken and picking up the pieces all over again. I could see that school leaders were too.

Remarkably, a few months later, the same school leaders hired me as a therapeutic consultant to support the administration and teaching staff with mindfulness. They had come to the ends of their ropes with bullying in the middle school and the interpersonal conflict among staff, and were desperate for solutions. They invited me to teach the Mindful Schools curriculum in a few classrooms and to run a professional development session for staff focusing on self-care. Additionally, I led a handful of mindfulness coaching sessions for the school leadership team.

As I sat and breathed with these administrators and helped them reconnect with themselves and each other, I realized that they were just like me — caught in their own exhausting and never-ending cycles of shame, blame, anxiety, and never-enoughness. They expressed feeling like they could never get anything right, and that they were bitter and resentful because they were too overwhelmed and over-scheduled to be present with their children and grandkids. They were so depleted from putting out fires amongst students and staff that they did not have any tools or energy left at the end of the day to go upstream and stop the fires from starting. When I asked them whether they saw themselves in the same professional role in five years, their tears and slumped shoulders gave me the answer.

This book is what I wish I could have handed those exhausted administrators on my way out the door. It is both a therapeutic trail guide for personal development, and a dream for reimagining education with wellbeing at its center, and for building a culture of care and belonging that radiates outward into the community. My hope in creating this program is to change the story we are telling ourselves in service of healing education at the decision-making level. If we can rewrite our own personal stories around schooling, and adopt new language around wellness, connection, and repair, I believe a transformational renaissance in education is possible.

Rippling Outwards

Through continued local outreach efforts and with a focus on administration, I was able to form stronger relationships with a handful of regional school leaders and to work with them more thoroughly. This included the piloting of a 6-week in-person program at Adams State University for a small group of department heads, professors, and advisors to the president. The data collected from this program was definitive. While it was challenging for participants to commit to daily practice and to carve out time for the 2-hour sessions, their feedback was positive and reflected an overall spirit of improved relationship to themselves and capacity to navigate difficulty. The clinical pre- and post-assessment measures showed:

• An overall reduction of stress

• Increased confidence and ability to cope with challenges

• Reduced irritability

• Decreased overwhelm, worry, and fear

• Improved sense of wellbeing (calm, happiness, restfulness, and interest)

Shortly after the course completion, one of these participants referred me to the principal of an elementary school, who hired me for 1-1 coaching and a series of 12 sessions to help build connection and positive communication amongst her staff. Another local school director caught wind of the program and brought me in to work individually with him as well as with his whole staff for a series of 8 sessions. I also had the opportunity at this school to facilitate some very difficult conversations and offer staff new tools for mindful communication and conflict resolution. Staff meetings went from being laborious and tense to warm, playful, and connective.

A Harvard study in 2008 showed that happiness is contagious up to three times removed. ⁠1The sphere of influence for school leadership is quite vast. In the case of the principal at the Alamosa K-2 school, this includes her 65 staff members, 30 district leaders, 5 immediate family members, school board members and close friends, 437 students, over 1000 parents, and even the teachers and students in other district schools. This is over 2000 people who might be impacted by the practice of just one school leader.   

It was happening! Word had spread, and the practice of mindfulness was rippling through the community in a meaningful way. Because my daughter was a student in one of these schools, I also got to experience first-hand how the embodiment of leadership and the willingness to support mindfulness instruction has trickled down to parents and kids. With a handful of well-positioned cheerleaders in my corner, who were practicing and supporting mental fitness, change happened quickly in our community. One breath at a time, we began to recover from the disruption of the global pandemic, and to find a way to move forward into uncertain times with more balance and care.

I know that the hard work of these local school leaders in the San Luis Valley will continue to ripple outwards, and hope that the accessibility of this program will open a few more doors in other corners of the world. Knowing how busy and overwhelmed school leaders are, my goal is to offer these practices from as many angles as possible, so that you might find an effective approach or a pathway towards healing that works for you — even if it is just for three minutes, or for the length of a single breath, we all deserve to rest and tend to ourselves.

Now, every time I enter a classroom or administrator’s office, I still see the trauma that is in the room, and how it is perpetuated by the stress and oppressive nature of the larger system. I also see how quickly everything can shift and ripple outwards when leaders are willing to pause, observe what is happening in the present moment, and feel their feelings. Together, we must acknowledge the systemic trauma that many of us have experienced, and recognize how conditioned we are to seek quick fixes, slap Band-Aids on gaping wounds, and compromise our integrity and our relationship to ourselves to get through the school year.

The enormity of collective trauma shows up for many of us as personal physical, emotional, and mental challenges, and the gaps in our system have left us on our own to manage the unmanageable. What we need now, is a practical, collective trauma healing approach — one that starts inside of each one of us, acknowledges our wounding, ends our isolation and connects us around our shared challenges, and offers us applicable system-wide coping skills and group processes for healing.

The good news is that this healing is possible, but only if we are willing to embark upon a new journey and change the story we are telling about our leadership roles and the state of modern education. Start by giving yourself the gift of your attention, because you are worthy of care. In recommitting to and prioritizing your own wellbeing you can rewrite your own story and flip the script on individual, collective, and systemic suffering. You can be the change that ripples outward into the world.