It Starts with You…
Right Here, In the Present Moment
Mindfulness for School Leadership: 6-week Course
June 14-July 19, 2023
Live calls Wednesdays
10-11:30 am MST
Join this hybrid self-study and live, online cohort for a transformational experience in systemic healing and personal wellbeing.
These times are calling for leadership that demands our full and complete attention. And in the wake of the pandemic, so many of us are so, so tired. Yet now is when our leadership is needed most. We are being called upon to rise into the spotlight and make decisions that could impact thousands of people’s lives. This is not an easy load to carry, and the struggle is real.
If you are in a decision-making role in a school or district (Principal, Team Leader, Administration, Superintendent, Board Member, Legislator, Parent leadership role), you are probably feeling a lot right now. You may even be in a position that is taking public blame, or bearing the weight of trauma, or experiencing outburst of anger and unrest from parents and educators. You may even be shaming yourself, compromising your own mental health, or physically suffering under the weight of a system in crisis. This is really hard. And you are not alone.
This secular, evidence-based 6-week course was designed by a former classroom teacher, parent, trauma survivor, and certified mindfulness teacher, specifically for administrators under pressure interested in healing school trauma from the top-down.
Invest in your future self.
Join me this Summer for a live, interactive, and experiential, skills-based course.
Discover how you can attend to your own wellbeing, meet difficulty with compassion, and transform your relationship to leadership in challenging times.
How can we flip the script on systemic change in education?
It starts with you… right here in the present moment
About the Instructor: Cynthia Garner, MFA, CMT-P
After my own departure from the classroom after 7 years of teaching, I navigated deep grief and loss, both professionally and personally. This time included moral outrage at the harm being perpetuated within education, as well as divorce, navigating my ex-husband’s mental illness, addiction, and suicidality, a severe back injury which temporarily confined me to a wheelchair, and tremendous financial strain, all while single-parenting a toddler. From this dark night of the soul, I embarked upon a non-traditional learning pathway that included graduate counseling courses, a 2-year somatic psychotherapy program, and professional training in a wide variety of clinically-proven mindfulness-based interventions, including Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). I also participated in the year-long Mindful Schools Teacher Certification Program and their School-wide Implementation Program, and completed the Inward Bound Mindfulness Education training for teaching nature-based mindfulness to adolescents.
Over the past five years, I have taught mindfulness to students as young as two years old, parents, educators, district superintendents, and elderly hospice patients. I have delivered professional development modules in partnership with the Rio Grande Mindfulness Institute and founded a nonprofit organization to expand accessibility to mindfulness for populations in need. Along the way, I witnessed the life-changing power of inner awareness, and have seen individual lives and entire school systems transformed by this simple act of learning to pay attention in the present moment, to bring kindness and compassion to individual and community challenges, and to navigate interpersonal difficulty with care.
Course Description:
Learn practical skills for managing reactivity and calming anxiety in moments of high stress. This 6-week experiential course was created from secular, evidence-based programs such as Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy. Learn how you can have a direct impact in your community 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 students’ rights to daily mental health education.
Together, we must acknowledge our collective 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.
Session 1: Start where you are. Pausing, grounding, and sensory awareness. Mindful check-ins, and responding to what’s arising, even panic attacks. Stepping out of automatic pilot. The focus of this session is bottom-up regulation, and basic skills for crisis intervention and orienting to the present moment. Practice cultivating, shifting, and sustaining attention. Building the mindfulness muscle helps us respond to challenges rather than react and increases our capacity to tolerate stress and discomfort.
Session 2: Coming home and belonging in the body. Movement, stillness, befriending our experience, and cultivating attentional control. This week's session and practices will ask you to examine your perceptions, assumptions, and the way you view your sense of belonging in the world. Changing the way you perceive and respond to difficulties and challenges will impact the short- and long-term effects of stress on your mind and body. You'll learn about the physiological and psychological bases of stress reactivity, and experience mindful strategies for responding in positive, proactive ways to stressful situations.
Session 3: Resourcing/Marinating in the “Green Zone”. Establishing anchors for stabilizing and shifting attention with intention. Staying with the good. Bringing awareness to habitual thinking patterns. In this session, we cultivate curiosity and openness to the full range of our experience, and through this process our ability to pay attention becomes more flexible. This week, your practice will focus on the development of your ability to concentrate and systematically expand your field of awareness and to start to retrain the brain to identify and savor moments of pleasure and enoughness.
Session 4: Working with difficult thoughts and feelings. Awareness of thoughts, being with difficult emotions, and tending to the felt experience of difficulty in the body. This week you will begin to pay attention to the places where you might be stuck in repeating, unhealthy patterns that you can disarm through mindful awareness. You will also learn how to apply mindfulness at the critical moment when you experience a physical sensation, intense emotion, or condition, with special attention to exploring the effect of reactivity in health and illness.
Session 5: In-the-moment interventions and bringing mindfulness to our daily interactions. Attunement, tracking, and inviting others into present moment awareness and appreciative inquiry. This week, you will focus on the practice of attunement, being the conductor of attention, tracking and using personal and group check-ins to respond effectively to what is arising. We’ll continue to cultivate positive coping strategies to broaden your inner resources and enhance your resilience in moments of difficulty through informal mindfulness practice. You’ll also start to experiment with offering brief guided practices to your students, and building small moments of awareness and self-care into your day.
Session 6: Stressful Communications and Relational Practice. Setting boundaries, cultivating belonging, interpersonal mindfulness, meeting systemic difficulty with compassion. Through role plays, discussion, and reflection, you'll learn the fundamentals of interpersonal mindfulness and embody the practice of setting fierce and compassionate boundaries—applying awareness and presence at times when communication becomes difficult or fraught with strong emotions.
This course has been created by an educator and parent, as a targeted, therapeutic, secular, evidence-based and accessible mindfulness training program, with elements derived from Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction, Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Mindful Self Compassion, Non-violent Communication, Mindful Somatic Psychotherapy, and Trauma-Healing Counseling Modalities. This is a unique opportunity to participate in the course as part of an inaugural, live cohort. Our live sessions will be recorded and made available to future participants as part of a self-paced program.
Full Program Cost: $576, or 3 monthly payments of $192
Title 1 Schools: take $99 off for a total of $477
Early Registration discount of 25% if you sign up before May 25: Use code EARLY25 at checkout.
Healing of generational and systemic trauma cannot happen in isolation.
We are designed to heal in connection with each other and the time has come to meet the present moment together, as a human community, and with exquisite care and utmost attention. Our children are worth it.
Frequently asked questions:
Who is this course for?/Who qualifies as school leadership?
This 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.
Will this course teach me how to teach mindfulness to students?
No. This is a program designed to offer you tools for managing your own stress and reactivity and for navigating uncertainty and the ever-changing complexities of your leadership role in education. The course will provide you with practical skills for managing challenging emotions and approaching difficult communications with care and compassion. These skills will certainly be applicable if you are in a classroom teaching role, and your own improved wellbeing and capacity to cope with challenges will have an impact on your students, even without you having to teach mindfulness. This course does, however, fulfill the pre-requisite requirement for the many trainings that are available through various organizations, such as Mindful Schools, that train educators in delivering mindfulness instruction to students.
Can I get Continuing Education credit or professional development hours for this course?
Yes! Graduate level credits are available for an additional fee upon course completion through our affiliate Courses4Teachers via University of the Pacific. This course is evidence-based and taught by a certified mindfulness instructor who is fully-qualified to teach graduate-level and professional development programs. Dependent upon the requirements of your institution, this course may also qualify for professional development hours issued from within your school system. Inquire with your district’s professional development crediting body regarding this process.
What is the commitment to daily practice and how much time will the course take?
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. Each module also includes videos and readings that should occupy no more than an hour weekly. The recommendation for daily practice is to build in 15-20 minutes per day of dedicated time for slowing down and tending to your own nervous system and wellbeing. Numerous short practice recordings are provided, from 3 to 20 minutes, as well as many informal/applied opportunities to practice without interrupting your work schedule. You will get out of this course what you put into it, and with our educational system in crisis, you might remind yourself that we don’t have time not to make time for mental health and wellbeing. The need is extremely urgent. Plan to model taking the time to tend to your own wellbeing as a way of flipping the script on systemic change in education. 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.
What if I can’t attend the live calls?
While the live calls will be recorded and available on the course website within 24 hours, you are strongly encouraged to prioritize live attendance, whenever possible. Your participation and in-the-moment reflection, our group process, and the interpersonal connection have tremendous value for personal and systemic healing. Much of the wisdom and learning that is revealed during this course will come from the participants and from deepening our inquiry together in real time.
Will this program help me manage my anxiety?
Yes. The skills taught are explicitly chosen to support you in managing anxiety, 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.
Why was this program developed in this particular format?
Informed by the vastness of my training and experience, I have brought together the core components of psychotherapy, trauma-healing, crisis intervention, and clinical psychoeducation programs to bring you a pathway that is manageable, restorative, and accessible, even on the busiest of days and in the most challenging of times. This program offers an evidence-based framework for healing trauma and building mental fitness with a whole-systems approach, and a group psychoeducation format that supports connection and collaboration with a top-down meets bottom-up framework. 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 narrative around schooling, and adopt new language around wellness, connection, and repair, I believe a transformational renaissance in education is possible.
Why is the cost of the program so high?
Research has shown that participants will get out of this program what they put into it. When courses such as MBSR and MBCT are offered through scholarships or at low cost, recidivism is very high and participants often struggle to complete the course. Consider the cost as an investment in your future self. You will be more likely to show up for yourself, push through periods of difficulty, and complete the coursework if you have invested more in the process up front. Additionally, the instructor has expertise unique to this learning model and has undergone significant educational training. There are substantial business-related expenses for program development, web hosting, and accessibility services. I am deeply committed to accessibility, equity, and inclusion, so If the financial cost is prohibitive, please feel free to reach out to the instructor via email (info@cynthiagarner.com), and/or to investigate institutional funding options and grant opportunities for mental health education, professional development, diversity and inclusion, and social-emotional learning training.
In prioritizing the wellbeing and awareness of those at the top, we can join with the many courageous educators already teaching compassion, empathy, and mindfulness in the classroom, and together we can heal our schools and communities from generations of trauma and injustice.
What participants from previous workshops and school programs are saying…
“Cynthia’s course offered a means for me to reflect upon my challenges centering and controlling my thoughts. It offered tools to grant greater agency to myself and develop a greater sense of personal offering and wellbeing.” - Nick S., Assistant to the President
“You have given me such a beautiful toolbox to help me be a better person, leader — and gave me tools to lean into a whole approach of cultivating compassionate leadership and leveraging for my team. Also to help me be more confident and take better care of myself.” - Colleen S., Psychology Department Chair
“The program was an inviting time to attend to my mental and physical wellness needs. Joining in with my colleagues made the moments inclusive and fun as we tried new skills together. The program has put me on a path to continue the practice as a way to maintain my health and wellbeing.” - Angel A., Director of Systems Support
"I had never participated in mindfulness, my first experience blew me away, I could not believe that something as simple as allowing your body to relax down to controlling your breathing would affect me so drastically. I have enjoyed participating in the sessions and have been able to use the strategies I have learned multiple times at home." -Erika Jones, District Family and Community Engagement Specialist
"I loved being able to attend! It was refreshing and validating for taking time to do some self-care and reflection. Cindy was always responsive and warm and helpful." -Amy Packard, Elementary School Counselor
"I thought the presentation was just about perfect. Cindy's background as a teacher and her understanding of the pressure and stress that teachers go through was evident and provided validity to her presentation. The staff participated, they were engaged and many are still talking about the presentation. We want more mindfulness at [our] high school!" -Greg Stephens, High School Assistant Principal
"I appreciated it very much. It helped me to sit with my emotions and release them. I am grateful that our staff were exposed to this. We all need skills to care for ourselves, to model them for our students so they can also develop these skills." -Martha Woodward, High School Counselor
"I thought the presentation was perfect for the morning and gave all of our teachers a chance to experience a bit of mindfulness that can help them and that they can take back to their classroom. I know there were several staff members mentioning how they want to do this with their students! The goals were clearly communicated and without question, the goals addressed throughout the session." -Heidi Ringer, High School Principal