Mindfulness is the ongoing cultivation of kind, deliberate presence in one’s thoughts and actions. Try this simple mindfulness practice: Take three slow, focused breaths and let any thoughts drift by. How did that feel?
For over 15 years, Ryan Redman has taught mindfulness in schools across the Wood River Valley. He co-founded Flourish Foundation, a local nonprofit whose mission is to support “mental health and personal growth in K-12 students and adults through mindfulness, compassionate action, and environmental stewardship.”
One of Flourish’s main initiatives is the Mindful Awareness Program, which offers in-classroom facilitation of a K-12 mindfulness curriculum based in social-emotional learning. Redman, along with his wife Paige Redman, the organization’s educational program director, and Flourish facilitators have expanded the program from its origins in a single fifth-grade classroom at Bellevue Elementary School to over 60 classrooms in Blaine County. Flourish also supports classes in Twin Falls, Emmett, Teton County, and Makhanda, South Africa. The Mindful Awareness Program offers students tools to contribute to Flourish Foundation’s vision of creating “a kinder and wiser world.”
Recent research at the intersection of neuroscience and mindfulness has borne out what was previously considered ancient wisdom: Our brains change depending on how we use them. Ryan marvels at the implications: “As humans, we are empowered to shape the quality of our lived experience. Kindness, compassion, and happiness are skills we can cultivate, not traits we were born with.” Individuals can change their inner world, and those shifts impact the outer world.
Students in the Mindful Awareness Program meet with Flourish facilitators once a week for 25 weeks of the school year to “cultivate attention, compassion, and social-emotional intelligence.” The curriculum is tailored to the specific developmental opportunities of each grade and builds on skills learned previously.
When working with elementary school students, Paige explains mindfulness in simple terms, describing it as “paying attention to ourselves, each other and the world around us with kindness” or “growing peace in our minds and kindness in our hearts.” To help children understand, she uses accompanying gestures, holding thumbs and forefingers in a heart shape over her center. Teaching mindfulness to students involves a full-bodied exploration of concepts like generosity, introspection, and interdependence.
Discussion and games accompany practices of “following the breath” or reflecting on the fundamental goodness of others. In one mindfulness challenge, students are given two chocolates with the instructions that they can eat one and give one away or give both away. Students make their choice, then reflect on the experience. They realize that though the chocolate tasted good in the moment, their enjoyment was fleeting. The joy they felt from sharing the chocolate was more lasting; it lights up their faces when they recall being the source of someone else’s delight. This practice reinforces the distinction between inner and outer happiness that Flourish teaches. Students learn not only to repeat this rhyme but to live it: “Outer happiness comes and goes. Inner happiness comes and grows!”
Though building resilience and well-being is important to many parents and teachers, it can be challenging to schedule mindfulness lessons in an overfilled school day. Yet, once schools create the time to integrate these essential skills, teachers quickly see the benefits. The program provides students with tangible actions that can help them through difficult moments, whether academic or social.
In an end-of-school-year anonymous survey, one educator reflected that participation in the program gave students “an intentional space to be vulnerable” and “to see each other as human beings and … learn they are not alone.” A kindergarten participant noted, “When I’m feeling super angry, I just do the ‘flower breaths,’” and educators advancing social emotional learning, a high schooler reported “sending compassionate thoughts to people.” The mindfulness skills lay a foundation for all the learning in a student’s day.
The Mindful Awareness Program is for grades K-12, but schools are rarely able to offer the program for consecutive school years. As part of the Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative, the Spur Foundation and St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation have partnered with Flourish to pilot a program for students in kindergarten through fifth grade to participate in Mindful Awareness every year. The Social Emotional Learning Consulting Collaborative, a national consortium of researchers and educators advancing social emotional learning, will develop an evidence-based model to better study the efficacy of the program and measure how engaging in regular mindfulness practice during grade school years contributes to students’ internal infrastructure of well-being, individually and collectively. The pilot program will launch in the 2025-2026 school year.
The Bellevue fifth graders, who were the first Mindful Awareness Program students, are now in their mid-20s. Some of these students participated in the Compassionate Leader Program (Flourish’s second main initiative), and many may still be sharing their chocolate. Mindfulness is a lifelong skill and Flourish Foundation offers a web of practices for people at all stages of life, including Mindful Based Childbirth and Parenting classes, “Rest and Renewal” teacher cohorts, retreats, breathwork classes, senior groups, and online offerings. With Flourish Foundation’s community of support, anyone can change their mind.