Teens: A Guide To Mindfulness

In this session, we’ll learn a mindfulness meditation I call “coming to our senses.” Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment with kindness and curiosity. Since our body is always in the present moment, awareness of sensations in our body and from our five senses helps create a strong foundation for mindfulness practice. During our next session, we’ll build on this foundation by focusing on how to keep our attention in the present moment with greater stability and ease.

In this session, we’ll learn how to “pay attention” and explore what it feels like when we focus our awareness in different ways. Building off what we practiced in the first session, we’ll use the present moment sensations of breathing, sitting and hearing to anchor our attention to the present moment. This practice will be helpful for our next session, where we will be exploring the sensations in our bodies more closely and learn a practice for deep relaxation.

In this session, we’ll learn how to explore body sensations more closely through a “body scan” meditation. Our bodies have a lot of information that we sometimes ignore - information about how we are feeling in a situation, what we want or don’t want and what we need. This practice helps us tune into this information, and will support us in the next session when we learn a mindful practice for working with the uncomfortable sensations that sometimes show up in our bodies.

In this session, we will learn how mindfulness can help us to be curious about discomfort, rather than instinctively or reactively running away whenever we start to feel uncomfortable in life. Even though it might sound strange, we can use mindfulness to explore different sensations of discomfort and the ways our thoughts can actually increase or decrease them. This awareness will be useful during the next session, when we bring our growing mindfulness skills to the practice of exploring emotions.

In this session, we’ll learn how emotions show up in our bodies and in our lives. By exploring what an emotion is we can learn how to connect with and respect them without being overwhelmed by them. Emotions provide powerful information that helps us make better decisions and know what we need to increase our well being and communicate skillfully with others. This practice supports our next session, where we work more directly with, and create some space around, difficult emotions.

In this session, we’ll learn how to practice with difficult emotions. We all feel difficult emotions sometimes; sadness, anxiety, fear, anger- these are part of being human. Fortunately, there are practices which help us care for, learn from, and ease difficult emotions. We’ll work with the “RAIN” practice: Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Non-identify. This practice prepares us for our next session, where we use our experience practicing with the body and senses to begin learning how to be mindful of thinking itself.

In this session, we’ll learn about our thoughts and how we can shift our relationship with them. Do you ever feel controlled by your thoughts? Where do they come from? Where do they go? Mindfulness helps us explore the thinking process and our own thought patterns. We’ll explore how our relationship to thoughts influences how we live. This prepares us for our next session, where we actively cultivate thoughts of appreciation, well-wishing, and kindness for ourselves and others.

In this session, we’ll learn how to generate kindness towards others and ourselves. We can be pretty hard on ourselves- thinking this will us help improve. As it turns out, cultivating kindness is a much stronger foundation for growth, because when we make mistakes or don’t do as well as we might have hoped, a kind and caring attitude helps us rebound more quickly and learn for the future. In our next session, we’ll develop another foundation for wisdom and growth- gratitude.

In this session we’ll learn how to train our minds to notice what’s going well in our lives and in the world as well as what’s good about ourselves and others. Science is discovering tremendous psychological and physical benefits to the practice of gratitude. Mindfulness can help us attune to the goodness and joy we sometimes take for granted. This practice sets the stage for our final session of the course, where we’ll review the mindful toolkit we’ve built together.

In this session, we’ll learn a guided meditation that you can use as a daily practice to strengthen the fundamental mindfulness skills we’ve explored together throughout the journey of this course. We’ve learned nine different mindfulness practices to connect with our bodies, minds and hearts. All these practices are like different tools that we can sharpen and refine with practice. You now have a toolkit to bring more awareness, joy, and authentic connection into your daily life. Congratulations!