The Conscious Classroom with host Amy Edelstein explores the future of education and the world of mindfulness and contemplative approaches in education. Amy is the Founder and Executive Director of the award winning nonprofit Inner Strength Education, which trained more than 35,000 students and supported 5,000 teachers in its first decade with evidence based programming. In each episode, Amy, who began her own meditation practice more than 40 years ago, leans into the edge of authentic transformative practices and makes them relevant and accessible. She shares classroom tools and activities for adolescents and young adults, articulates why teaching students about perspectives, worldviews, and context develops essential skills for long term happiness and success in work and life. Incorporating trauma sensitive approaches, systems thinking, and emotional intelligence to empower teens and uplift school communities, the Conscious Classroom is rooted in real life, field-tested approaches. Honored with a Philadelphia Social Innovation Award and a Philadelphia City Council Resolution for her work, Amy is passionate about what's possible and inspired to share that with you. More at: www.InnerStrengthEducation.org
Meditation Practice Changes How We Teach And Listen
Knowing about mindfulness is easy. Practicing it, especially when life is loud, is when everything changes. In this episode, Amy Edelstein brings an inspiring and insightful conversation about why real practice matters for educators, students, and anyone who wants more stability, clarity, and joy in daily life.
She brings illustrations from her recent 8-day training intensive for new Inner Strength Classroom instructors, why she began the training with a two-day meditation retreat before touching curriculum, classroom management, or pedagogy.
As she describes, "When we immerse in stillness, we learn to observe mind, thought, and feeling without grasping, judging, or trying to force experience to be different. That direct experience can dissolve layers of stress and return us to presence. We also explore “just this moment” as the only time we ever live, and how that changes the way we relate to memory, worry, and the stories we carry into the school day."
For all educators and really for everyone committed to living a balanced and fulfilling life, this is a great episode to start this school year with.
Subscribe, share the episode with an educator friend, and leave a review so more people can find the show.
If you enjoyed this episode please leave a review!
Your review supports our podcast to reach more educators and share the importance of creating more conscious classrooms. We are committed to sharing insights that transform outlooks and inspire with what's possible.
Subscribe so you don't miss a single episode and Review so your friends can listen too.
Visit Inner Strength Educationfor more on the great work of the Conscious Classroom. Bringing mindfulness, compassion, and systems thinking to empower young minds.
Welcome to the Conscious Classroom, where we explore the future of education and what it means to create learning environments that truly support human flourishing. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein. In each episode, we'll look at how mindful awareness and systems thinking deepen learning and well-being, why inner strength and self-regulation are essential skills for young people navigating our fast-changing world. And how do we thoughtfully integrate synthetic intelligence without devaluing the heart of our humanity? For educators, leaders, and anyone shaping the future of human development, you'll find practical tools and big picture perspectives to increase your wonder and your impact. Let's get started. Hello, welcome to this episode of the Conscious Classroom. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein. Today we're going to talk about the importance of real practice of meditation. When we're actually anytime, but when we're working with students, when we're trying to inspire them to look within and to develop their own capacities for self-knowledge, self-reflection, and self-management, self-regulation. Recently I conducted my annual eight-day intensive for our instructor training for the inner strength classroom program.
And this year I started out with a two-day meditation retreat. All we did was immerse in the practice of stillness, the exploration of stillness, the understanding of mind, thought, and feeling, the ability to observe without letting go, without grasping, the ability to let go of thought, feeling, situations, in order to be with the present as it is, in order to be with reality as it's presenting itself to us, as we're experiencing it, whether we like it or we don't like it. And in order to explore the numinous nature of awareness, of how we know what we know, of that sense of a living presence, of a lightness of being, of what one of the Upanishads calls that which shines and glows both inside and outside. That which John Cabotzin points to as just this moment. The just this moment is a little bit misleading because just this moment is a portal to infinity. It contains this moment of our experience, contains our experience of all that is. We can't experience the past in the past. We experience the past in the present. We can't experience the future in the future. It would be now. We experience the future, our sense of the future in the present. So that moment, just this moment, as John calls it, just this sitting here, is the posture where our mind, thought, and feeling can experience actually all that is. It's the only time we ever do experience it. So in that instructor training, before we got into the curriculum, before we got into classroom management, before we got into the carefully designed four pillars of the inner strength program about mind and thought, heart and compassion, brain and deep time, evolutionary development, world and culture, how culture evolves. We just rested in our experience. We let things slow down. We let we let ourselves explore how we know what we know. What is our deepest sense of knowing? How do we know ourselves? And the result was phenomenal. The result was some of our wonderful board members also attended and left a thousand pounds lighter from very busy jobs in other states that demand presence and attention and are unrelenting. And it was so amazing as it always is to see the two days of the focused practice of being with what is, without judgmentalism, without self-criticism, without manipulation, without wishing for things to be different than they are, had the extraordinary effect of removing the whole year of pressure and stress and fear and worry.
If you listen to podcasts about mindfulness and meditation and self-help and self-healing, I encourage you to take some of that time that you're listening and do the practice yourself. Take half a day, a Saturday afternoon, and find a local retreat at your neighborhood yoga studio. So long as you have a space that's free from complexity and all the incoming, you can do your own practice. You can go deep. You may not be able to travel to a teacher that you'd love to learn from or sit with or observe. That's okay. We want to get in the habit of responding to that impulse to be as often as we experience it, and then some. We want to get into that habit of responding to the call to drop into ourselves and let go of the ripples on the surface as often as we can. Resisting the temptation to learn more about it and responding to that call to practice, to experience, to immerse, to let go. It's so important for ourselves and for the culture around us, and it's especially important as a role model for young people, because what we spend our time doing communicates what's valuable to us. So if we spend our time acquiring more information about a practice and not exploring it through our own efforts, it's going to be communicated that understanding is sufficient. And yet we all know that it's great to understand music theory. But if you want to play with a band, you're going to have to practice and you're going to have to actually play with a band. Learning more music theory won't give you the experience of playing with others, making music with others. And it's the same with meditation. So we really want to model that. And if doing it for another is what encourages some of us to do it, fine. And ultimately, that's going to lead us to do it for our own flowering, for our own deeper joy and exuberance and love of life, and expression of gratitude for the gift of being alive, being on the planet.
If you're an educator, the foundation of good instruction and classroom management is our own stability. There is no substitute for that. Our own authenticity, our own stability, our own curiosity, our own transmission of that aliveness that comes from living at the edge of our own practice. That's what keeps students interested. It's what puts power behind the structure we impose in a classroom. And it's what gives authenticity to our request for students to do. To manage, to learn about self-management, to learn about self-knowledge, to understand the interrelationship between thought and feeling. Time spent exploring consciousness brings happiness. It leads us to this like contemplation of what's hard to define. And that which is hard to define instead of frustrating us. Exploring that leads to wonder, it leads to awe, it leads to a lightness of being, it leads to curiosity, it leads to connection, it leads to untying of knots, it leads to being having the courage to get help, to seek help when needed. It leads to a vibrancy that means that our lives are being lived to their fullest. And meditation is a beautiful
gateway. It's not the only gateway. We can certainly get it through reading poetry or for through writing or through music or through spending time with the with plants and animals and big bodies of water or small bodies of water gurgling downstream.
Speaker 1
But meditation's a wonderful gateway. And silence is a wonderful gateway. Being able to be still and explore. Learning how to be with each other without chattering and just be.
Speaker
So the practice of meditation in groups is wonderful for that because you can develop a sense of care for other people, of sensitivity, of respect, of spaciousness, generosity in silence. You know, you're just taking care in your own space, and that leads to a room filled with gentleness, with sensitivity. With your students, when you give them work to do in silence, you know, where they're just focusing on their own thing, you can add that element of inviting them to become aware of the focused and still and expansive and supportive space they're creating. That the more everyone is paying attention and curious about their own work, the more a beautiful quality comes into the room. So you can invite them to be curious about that, not just quiet and being reprimanded to be quiet over and over again, but to become sensitive to that quality of stillness, and how that stillness can have a creative quality to it, a focus quality to it, a sense of openness and respect and support and affection. So there are many ways to bring that sense of the present moment, that sense of being with what is, and that sense of being um curious about the space we create internally and together, just in any activity that's happening. Now, if you're not an educator, you can do that on your own. You can just do that in your conversations, in your being together. And you can see what arises as you put your attention on the quality of the shared space that we're creating.
Now I've talked about this many times on the conscious classroom, but emergent dialogue, conscious group discussion among young people is a really good skill for them to have. And boy, don't we wish that many more of our media airwaves were filled with more discovery in dialogue rather than a combatant form of dialogue, which isn't really dialogue? So this discussion we're having right now about deep listen about deep listening to silence can also be brought to the quality of our discussions together. Are we listening deeply with our whole being? Are we truly paying attention to the other person when we're when they're with us and we're with them? Whether you're in the classroom or not, but in the classroom, are you paying, are you listening to what that student's communicating to you behind the words? Are you taking pause before you add your opinion or solution? Maybe they're going on and on about something or they're upset about something, and that's not really what they're upset about. Maybe they're angry about something not going the way they wanted it to go. Maybe instead of explaining why and sharing the rationale, the question is what are you afraid of happening? Is there something that's causing you to be afraid? And that's why you're annoyed about this, or you're not understanding this, or you think it should go another way. Now, this goes for conversations with adults all the time. You know, I'm sure you can think of one that happened this week of somebody going on and on and on about something, and you keep giving them a solution, and you walk away, and you know that they didn't take that solution, and they're just going to go to the next person, have the same conversation over and over again. And you know that conversation's already happened four times. And you go, Oh, I wish I hadn't said anything. I wish I had just asked. What are you afraid of happening? And stopped that circular train of thought. So we can do that with our students, and our practice helps us become more sensitive to when somebody has a real question, or they're avoiding what their real question is. Or they're using a question to cover up something that they don't want to say. Or maybe any other reason.
So as we move into a new school year, I think focusing on that deep and powerful reflection of stillness is really going to help us listen, communicate, sense, intuit, open to deeper dimensions, and fill our space with a kind of exuberant vibrancy that is a celebration of openness, of learning, of love, a celebration of happiness, a celebration of discovery and unfolding and maturation, and all of those aspects of education that aren't just about test scores or essays or absences or not absences. It's really about that whole process of going through the transmutation to become who we could be at our highest resonance, our highest capacity. And that really comes from being present, from being still, from listening deeply, from opening to what is, from letting go again and again and again to our fixed ideas, to the things we're frustrated. About to pain, both physical, mental, emotional. It's having love at the deepest level. Not for anything, just la love itself, experiencing that love, experiencing that freshness, experiencing that wonder at everything that's occurring. Not waiting for irritation or tragedy to pass before we're willing to be filled with love. Not waiting for ourselves to be sure how things work, to open up to the wonder of being alive, even with all of the difficulty in our world. So letting ourselves really pay attention and give time to that paying attention is the heart of a conscious life. It's the heart of a conscious classroom. And it's the heart of creativity that will help lead us into a new year, a new school year, a new year of discovery, a new year of living life fully, so that we are so present to all things, so present to all people in our world, so present to our youth, so present to our educational community, so present to the dangers of a harsh environment or of addictive technology, whatever it is, so present to our students' creativity and possibilities, so present to their potentials, so present to the obstacles in their lives, without drawing anything near, pushing anything away, and having such a wide aperture of our lens that we can be still and sit with it all and allow ourselves, allow the goodness to come forward, allow the right next step to come forward, allow our passion for the possible to lead the way. So I invite all of you to commit to yourselves to be present, be available, let yourself love this exploration of the present moment. Let yourself steep in the deep well of being. Let yourself make room for the luminous nature of your being to shine forward and start this next school year with this great mission to bring that kind of creativity and love into the world. Thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you next time.
Thanks for joining me on the Conscious Classroom. If this resonated with you, please like, subscribe, and leave a review. It really helps other people like you find the show. And thank you so much for caring about the inner lives of young people and the future of education. I'm your host, Amy Edelstein, and I look forward to seeing you next time.
