Dynamic Mindfulness in New Orleans Schools

New Orleans public school students and teachers suffer daily from chronic stress and direct/vicarious trauma.

Niroga has developed an evidence-based trauma-informed dynamic mindfulness program called Transformative Life Skills (TLS) that is designed for classroom instruction. TLS combines movement, breathing, and centering into a 5-20 min practice that is calming, healing, and fun for students. TLS has been field tested with thousands of students and we train hundreds of teachers annually to apply these practices in their classrooms.

The latest research in neuroscience, developmental science, and trauma research supports that TLS:
-Increases learning readiness
-Helps student regulate their emotions
-Enhances resilience to stress and trauma
-Increases prosocial behavior

TLS practices have also been shown to help students heal from trauma and symptoms of PTSD.

A beautiful aspect of TLS is that it is not only transformative for students, but the practice is also healing for educators that suffer from daily stress and secondary trauma. 99% of teachers trained in TLS report that the practice has helped their own professional practice and sustainability.

TLS is completely secular in language and messaging. There is no use of words like "meditation", "yoga" or anything that could be considered religious within our program. We focus on terms like breathing, movement, centering, stress-resilience, learning readiness, emotional regulation, and prosocial behavior when talking with parents and staff.

For Elementary schools, we have mapped different sequences of poses that teachers can use depending on the time of the day or the effect they want the practice to have, ei: Morning Wake Up, Focus Time, After Recess Cool Down etc. Those sequences can be as short as 2 min or as long as 10mins and used at the discretion of the classroom teacher throughout the day.

Financé par New Orleans, LA (May 2015)