About Growing Mindful

At Growing Mindful, we teach mindfulness and resilience skills to children, parents, coaches, and educators to help navigate life’s challenges with confidence and compassion.

In our classes and workshops, we practice: normalizing emotions, emotional regulations strategies, focusing our awareness, identifying personal strengths, enhancing self-compassion and positive self-talk, triggers, making mistakes, growth mindset, resilience skills, happiness strategies, kindness, empathy, gratitude, mindful movement, and so much more!

Practicing mindfulness allows us to be present so we can savor the good moments and build greater resilience for the challenging ones.

How can we help?

The pandemic exacerbated an already growing mental health crisis. Students across the country are struggling with soaring rates of stress and anxiety, while teachers are also managing chronic stress, depression, and burnout.

Practicing mindfulness supports mental health and well-being.

- Improves Focus & Attention
- Emotional Regulation
- Greater Empathy & Self-Compassion
- Reduces Reactivity & Anxiety
- Increases Self-Awareness & Social Skills
- Improves Self-Control
- Enhances Academic Performance and Ability to Resolve Conflict
- Improves Stress Management & Overall Well-Being

Source: Walach, et al 2014

Meet the Teachers

  • Experiencing anxiety since early childhood, Ashley became committed to self-growth and finding peace and balance in her own life. When she became a teacher and later a parent, her journey deepened as she saw firsthand the stress children and parents can experience. Educating the “whole child” has been a driving force in her teaching and she considers herself an active learner in all her lessons. She feels a deep sense of responsibility to help all children and families cope with big feelings, practice mindfulness and self-compassion, develop a growth mindset, and learn techniques she wished she had growing up. Thus, her idea to start Growing Mindful.

    Ashley is a certified mindfulness and meditation teacher and a positive education educator. She has a Masters in Business Marketing and Curriculum and Instruction and over fifteen years of experience as an elementary school teacher. Currently she is becoming certified as a resilience practitioner and has social emotional training through Mindful Schools and Six Seconds. As an avid journaler herself, she loves empowering students to find their voice and express their inner thoughts through writing and art.

  • Jaclyn has been practicing mindfulness and meditation for over 15 years. She started practicing to help her cope with burnout and discovered that incorporating daily practices like gratitude journaling, breathwork, and meditation had profound effects on her well-being. She left her career in finance to study at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition, where she became an AADP certified health & wellness coach. She's also certified as a positive education educator and is currently getting certified as a mindfulness meditation teacher.

    As a parent and teacher, Jaclyn witnesses how mindfulness and resilience practices help kids build a greater sense of confidence and cope with overwhelming emotions and worries. This motivates her to teach the skills she wishes she had learned as a child. Jaclyn joined Ashley to launch Growing Mindful, with the goal to support children, parents, coaches, and educators in practicing mindful living.

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness

Mindfulness is focusing our attention on the present moment with curiosity, kindness, and non-judgment. Being mindful is taking a pause to notice our breath, thoughts, feelings, bodies, or surroundings.

Our attention is often distracted with past and future thoughts, which can cause anxiety and unhappiness.

Practicing mindfulness can help reduce reactivity in our daily lives and can help us find more peace, ease, and balance.

Positive Psychology

Positive psychology is the science of what makes people thrive. Dr. Christopher Peterson, further describes it as the scientific approach to studying human thoughts, feelings, and behavior with a focus on character strengths and building on the good in life: well-being, joy, inspiration, love, meaning, purpose, achievement, belonging, gratitude, resilience, self-compassion, etc. These topics are studied in order to help people flourish and live their best lives.

Teaching positive psychology focuses on skills that assist students to build positive emotions, enhance resilience, strengthen relationships, and promote mindfulness.

Why Teach Mindfulness to Children?

- Teaching mindfulness to children gives them tools they need to regulate big emotions, cope with stress and anxiety, and build confidence.

- Mindfulness promotes skills that are controlled in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, like the ability to focus and control impulses, which are especially beneficial to children. 

- Practicing mindfulness as a child can help build resilience and establish habits that set the stage for mental health as an adult.