Education as Awakening | Mindfulness and Wisdom

Oct 10

Tergar Schools at Stanford’s Contemplation by Design Summit

Stanford University’s 12th Annual Contemplation by Design Summit, a free global gathering dedicated to “the power of the pause”.

From the Early Days of Mindfulness in Education

Fifteen years ago, I wrote for The Huffington Post about what was then a bold experiment: bringing mindfulness into secular classrooms. Pieces like The Role of Mindfulness in Education, A Mindful Race to the Middle?, and A Mindful Revolution in Education reflected both the optimism and the uncertainty of that early movement. We were learning how to translate ancient contemplative wisdom into language and practices that teachers, clinicians, parents, and students could use to help them navigate real-world challenges. That translation continues today—through Buddhist frameworks like the Five Aggregates, which will be part of Tergar Schools’ offerings at Stanford’s Contemplation by Design Summit—together with broader teachings on awareness, love, compassion, wisdom, and joy.

Back then, mindfulness still needed explaining. Could it belong in public schools? Would teachers use it, and families accept it? Those of us working in the field saw plenty of anecdotal evidence that the answer was yes. We believed that if children could learn to pay attention to their inner and outer worlds with clarity and kindness, they would strengthen essential life skills—seeing clearly, understanding deeply, and responding with insight and care—skills that would support them through life’s inevitable highs and lows. But in the wider educational community, the jury was still out—and in some ways, it still is.

A Foundation for Going Deeper

In those early years, bringing these ideas into secular environments wasn’t easy. Words like meditation sounded too “spiritual” or “New Age” to many educators, parents, and clinicians. Thanks largely to Jon Kabat Zinn's work and his Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program (MBSR), the word mindfulness became our bridge—a way to introduce these time-tested practices in credible, research-based language. Yet even then, mindfulness was never just about stress reduction; it already carried the seeds of balance, compassion, and insight. For those of you who have been subscribers of my website and newsletter since I published The Mindful Child in 2010, you’ll remember that while the word mindful was in the title, my first book emphasized what I called the “new ABCs”—Attention, Balance, and Compassion.

Early gatherings of educators, psychologists, and contemplatives at places like the Omega, Garrison, and Mind & Life institutes helped bring these ideas to life. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s MBSR program had opened a door, and Western contemplatives, scholars, and researchers like Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Alan Wallace, Daniel Goleman, Richie Davidson, and many others were helping to bring mindfulness off the cushion and into the real world. Because of those early, skillful efforts, we can now explore practices that were once viewed as “New Age” or religious more openly.

Education as Awakening: The Stanford Summit

This evolution is reflected in Stanford University’s 12th Annual Contemplation by Design Summit, a free global gathering dedicated to “the power of the pause.” I’m honored to be part of Tergar Schools’ (TS) contribution to the summit—four sessions that build on decades of shared work and open new territory for contemplative education.

Tergar Schools’ founder and guiding teacher, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, will open the series with a keynote, Education as Awakening: Reimagining Learning Through Basic Goodness (Tuesday, October 21, 7pm-8:15pm PT ). He’ll share his vision for education rooted in Basic Goodness—our innate awareness, love, compassion, wisdom, and joy—naturally expressed through altruism and the wish for all beings to be happy and free from suffering.

Bringing Basic Goodness to Life

On the following two evenings, Justin Kelley and I will introduce the TS Model of Learning—a practical framework that uses a life-skills approach to translate timeless insights into real world strategies for everyday life. It helps learners, teachers, and clinicians cultivate Awareness, Love, Compassion, Wisdom, and Joy (ALCWJ)—not as abstract ideals, but as trainable capacities that foster well-being and resilience.

The curriculum uses a spiral learning approach across grade levels and subject areas, allowing learners to revisit key ideas at increasing depth as they grow. Each lesson follows the classical pedagogy of View, Experience, and Application, which makes the learning process both reflective and practical:

View introduces core ideas—what the innate human qualities ALCWJ mean and why they matter.
Experience invites learners to explore these qualities directly through guided practices, stories, and shared reflection.
Application supports bringing those insights into everyday relationships and activities, turning understanding into lived experience.

Through this approach, the model cultivates three interwoven clusters of life skills:

SEE (Awareness): Learning to steady body and mind, to pause before reacting, and to listen deeply.
UNDERSTAND (Wisdom): Recognizing how our minds construct stories and perceptions—and learning to rest in direct experience before those stories take over.
RESPOND (Love & Compassion): Turning awareness and understanding into wise, empathetic action that strengthens connection and community.

Working together, Awareness, Love & Compassion, and Wisdom give rise to Joy—a natural expression of living with clarity, kindness, and purpose.

A Flexible Model for Diverse Communities

The TS Model can be presented as a Buddhist framework or as a secular educational approach, depending on the audience and context. It is designed to be responsive to the culture and values of each school and community, and its View–Experience–Application structure supports adaptable, integrative learning across diverse classrooms and community settings.

Connecting Contemplative Wisdom and Modern Education

In this way, the model connects contemplative philosophy with modern education—not as an adaptation, but as a living dialogue between traditions and classrooms. It invites teachers and learners alike to explore universal human questions: How do we perceive the world? What stories do we create about our experiences? And how might awareness and compassion transform those stories into something more liberating?

The TS Model can be applied to many traditional frameworks. In these workshops, we’ll look at one example that illustrates this approach.

Exploring One Classical Framework—the Five Aggregates

Justin and I will lead two interactive workshops—Seeing Clearly: Cultivating Awareness in Everyday Learning (Wednesday, October 22, 7pm to 8:30 pm PT) and From Understanding to Action: Life Skills for a Wise and Compassionate Response (Thursday, October 23, 7pm to 8:30pm PT))— where we’ll focus on a classical Buddhist framework—the Five Aggregates—as an example of how these life skills can deepen our understanding of ourselves.

The Five Aggregates rest on a profound insight: all experience—including thoughts and emotions—is made of interdependent, ever-changing parts: sensations, feelings, perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness.

Observing these elements shows us that identity isn’t fixed but dynamic and responsive. When we see that fluidity clearly, we find many points to interrupt habitual reactions and respond with steadiness and care.

A Shared Field of Practice

Karma Shenden will close the TS series with Resting in Awareness: A Guided Contemplation (Friday, October 24, 7pm to 8:15pm PT), offering a direct experience of the stillness and spaciousness that underlie this whole process. His session invites participants to rest in the awareness that makes seeing, understanding, and responding possible.

These four sessions are Tergar Schools’ offering within a much broader community of educators and contemplatives dedicated to this work. The Summit includes talks by friends and colleagues such as Cavalry Morgan, Amy Saltzman, Mark Bertin, and many others whose work continues to expand contemplative education in creative, impactful ways.