BREATHE TO LEARN - Key Persons

Dr. Joanie Terrizzi is a Mindful Schools-trained educator with more than a decade of experience as a school librarian in New York City, weaving mindfulness into her library program. She has worked with students, teachers, and families with children in Pre-K through 12th grade, as well as graduate students. Joanie works to create a sustainable whole-school model for mindfulness integration. Her passions include teacher resilience training, brain science, trauma-sensitive education environments, restorative justice, and secular mindfulness. She has studied these topics extensively for years, completed her dissertation research on children's experiences using mindfulness in daily life, and received her doctorate in Mind-Body Medicine from Saybrook University. That's the professional blurb. Here's the real deal: I discovered mindfulness at a point when I felt completely burnt out from the demands of teaching in an urban environment. The increase in resilience I felt - almost immediately - had a tremendous impact on my daily life, and I knew I needed to share it with my students. I was wary at first, wondering how my students (most of whom were homeless or living in public housing) would react. The transformation in my students was palpable, and even a colleague who was skeptical at first later said, "The tone of the school is completely different - it's so much calmer!" Time and time again, I've seen these practices land really well with a teacher, a parent, and so, so many students. There was even a time when the most dysregulated student in the school ran out of the classroom… and straight to the library, where we went through a few of his favorite mindfulness exercises. I have lost track of the number of incredible stories that people (as young as 4 and as old as 83) have shared with me about how mindfulness has helped them. This work has not changed my life - my life is still as crazy as anyone's - it has changed me, and my capacity to handle what life throws at me. This is what I want to share with you.