45CHAPTER 3
THE MINDFUL AND YOGIC LEARNER:
12 EMBODIED PRACTICES FOR SCHOOLS
Man is not fully conditioned and determined but rather determines himself
whether he gives into conditions or stands up to them.
In other words, man is ultimately self determining.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be,
what he will become in the next moment.Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1959, p. 131)BETWEEN STIMULUS AND RESPONSE
“The way that you confront a challenging yoga pose is maybe the way you do the rest of
your life. The way you read a book, or the way you solve a math problem, or the way you
talk to your brother or sister,” explains Kellie Love in a recent piece for Healthline (Radcliffe,
2016). Kellie Love is a yoga teacher at Girls Preparatory School in the Bronx, New York.
I first met Kellie at the inaugural Yoga in the School Symposium at Kripalu Center for Yoga
in Health. She is passionate about bringing mindfulness and yoga to schools. Over the
years of her work, she has witnessed the shift that occurs within students as they become
increasingly competent in managing themselves and their stress. What happens for these
students is beyond an increase in self-esteem. It is competence, assuredness, self-trust, self-
compassion, and strength. When practicing mindfulness and yoga in school, students learn
more than how to manage themselves on their yoga mats and when meditating. They learn
powerful self-regulation skills that they can generalize in their lives off the mat, in the world
that exists outside of yoga and mindfulness sessions.
Mindfulness and yoga techniques embrace the tenet that we, as humans, are self-
determining (Cook-Cottone, 2015). In my own work in both school- and community-based
yoga, one of my central organizing quotes comes from Dr. Viktor Frankl (1959). A summary
of his thinking, this quote gives us the essence of his book, Man’s Search for Meaning
(Frankl, 1959), as well as speaks to the embodied self-regulation that can be developed