Mindfulness is a particular way of paying attention. It is the mental faculty of purposefully bringing awareness to one's experience.
Mindfulness can be applied to sensory experience, thoughts, and emotions by using sustained attention and noticing our experience without reacting.
Mindfulness creates space, changing impulsive reactions to thoughtful responses.
We help to grow this space, enabling new, wiser responses that improve attention, learning, emotional regulation, empathy, and conflict resolution.
First introduced into medicine thirty years ago by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, Professor of Medicine Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center,
mindfulness has become a successful mainstream influence in medicine, psychology, corporate environments, and now education.
Thirty years of
research and, more recently, brain science, offer compelling evidence to support the use of mindfulness in education.
The application of mindfulness by students has the potential to improve academic achievement, mental health, and inter- and intra-personal relationships.