46 • PART I: A MODEL FOR SELF-REGULATION AND ENGAGEMENT
with mindful and yoga practices (Branson & Gross, 2014; Childress & Harper, 2015;
Cook-Cottone, 2015; Frankl, 1959; Grabovac, Lau, & Willett, 2011; Herrington, 2012; Jennings,
2015; Rechtschaffen, 2014):
Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space, is your power to choose a response.
In your response, is your growth, freedom, and possibility.As beautifully summarized in this quote, the power of mindful awareness and
embodied action is in the profoundness of the moment-by-moment choices we all make.
Frankl (1959), a former Jewish prisoner of war in Nazi Germany, offers that, in every
moment, if we slow down and look, we have choice. This is the level of self-awareness that
allows students to make the best choices and to be in positive action interpersonally and
academically. In fact, perhaps the most gratifying gift of teaching mindfulness and yoga
to students is the ability to be witness to a student’s dawning awareness that he or she has
choice in how he or she might respond to a trigger, provocation, or idea. You realize, at the
moment of awareness, you have seen a student move toward a very empowered place in
his or her unfolding life.
It is to the moment-by-moment experience and the notion of choice in self-regulation
that this text now shifts the focus. This chapter serves to transition you to the following
chapters that address mindful and yoga approaches and the provision of mindfulness in
schools. In Chapters 1 and 2, you were introduced to the Mindful and Yogic Self as Effective
Learner (MY-SEL; Chapter 1) and the ways in which students can become at risk for a vari-
ety of difficulties associated with dysregulation and ineffective learning (Chapter 2). These
chapters explicated how the integrated model of self (MY-SEL) reflects an ongoing pro-
cess of attunement, integration, and construction of the self. Further, we saw in Chapter 2
that when there are challenges, obstacles, or dysfunction in either an internal or external
domain, the regulation of the self can be disrupted or complicated. We now explore how
the process of embodied self-regulation is preventive for all students and prescriptive
for both students at risk and those who are in need of intervention and support. Further,
for students who are doing well, the MY-SEL approach provides opportunities for them to
do better, experience less stress, and refine their self-regulation and interpersonal skills.
Recall that, within the MY-SEL model, our goals as educators are to (a) impart academic
knowledge and teach tools of learning, (b) teach students to be active architects of their own
learning and well-being, and (c) prepare students to be collaborative problem solvers (see
Figure 3.1).
As you can see in Figure 3.1, as the students learn they, become increasingly compe-
tent as architects in their own learning and active solvers of their own problems. It is true
for both mindful and yoga traditions that the experience of self as learner is considered
self-determined and embodied through practice (Ajaya, 1983; Herrington, 2012; Jennings, 2015;
Prabhavananda & Isherwwood, 2007). Mindful and yoga practices help create the space and
opportunity required to cultivate an experience of self that will serve the student and his
or her large learning goals. As students engage in mindful and yogic practices, they will
become increasingly aware, cultivate inquiry and understanding, and create an intentional
experience of self through choice.