Supporting Teachers in the Classroom
As an instructor of “Cultivating Emotional Balance” (CEB, see Box II) and developer and instructor
of “Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance” (MBEB), I have had the privilege of working with
educators in private and public schools, from pre-school through 12th grade, and ranging from
classroom assistants to principals. Since 2002, I have taught groups of educators in cities around
the United States and Canada and have been moved, again and again, by the suffering created by
unreasonable demands on teachers. Already grossly underpaid, nearly all the teachers in my
classes were engaged in teaching as a vocation. Motivated by their idealism and the wish to be of
service, they were often beleaguered by the double whammy of diminishing funds and increasing
mandates to focus on standardized measures of performance. Both CEB and MBEB were
designed to focus on the well-being of the teacher, with no hidden agenda to bring the work back
into the classroom. As such, it was often the first time that teachers had ever felt that their personal
happiness and emotional balance mattered. It was also an opportunity to reconnect with their own
sense of agency and purpose, as well as with one another. One teacher shared the following
during an exit interview:
“You know, I really appreciated being able to just focus on ourselves. As teachers we go to a lot of
meetings that give us strategies for working with kids …but no one tells us to work on ourselves!
For me, and it seemed for everyone in the class, this made it so organic in the classroom. It’s
coming from your heart. It’s not a formula or a technique. And you don’t have to be happy, or feel
any particular way. You can model emotional balance to the kids even when you are feeling angry
or confused. What a relief!”
Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) [see
is an eight-week secular program that combines
training in attentional skills (shamatha) with emotional skills training. In CEB, there is an emphasis
on the cultivation and balancing of the four immeasurables (compassion, loving-kindness,
empathetic joy and equanimity, see also
for more detail) as well as instruction and
practice in the four applications of mindfulness (body, feeling tones, mental events and
phenomena, see
. These skills are combined with theoretical and experiential training in
emotion theory, with particular emphasis on the functions, triggers, sensations and cognitions
associated with the “primary” emotions of fear, anger, contempt, disgust, sadness, happiness and
surprise. For the original research, educators were chosen as subjects both because of their
ongoing stress and also due to their potential to significantly impact the lives of our youth. The
CEB pilot, clinical intervention, and post-intervention follow-ups were offered exclusively to
educators.
is an adaptation of CEB that was sponsored by the Impact
Foundation. This program adds emotion and forgiveness training to the basic framework of
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and has been offered to educators across the US and
Canada. Eight different cohorts have been studied by researchers in both of these countries and
preliminary results can be accessed
The following stories from participants in these programs illuminate the potential for cultivating
compassion and emotional balance among those who play a critical role in the development of our
youth. The two teachers highlighted below were able to extend compassion to their most
challenging students with surprising and dramatic results. They were also representative of the
kind of transformation that occurred regularly in these classes. The stories have been changed
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