Mindfulness from A to Z: Concepts, Practices, Resources and Tips for Health and Physical Educators

Abstract

Mindfulness is a type of contemplative practice that presents opportunity to focus one’s attention on the present moment for reasons of personal health enhancement. As a construct, mindfulness is the conscious and nonjudgmental realization of one’s moment-by-moment thoughts and experiences. Mindfulness practices could be quite useful in helping to enhance an assortment of social and emotional health outcomes for educators and their students (Meiklejohn et al., 2012; Zenner, Herrnleben-Kurz, & Walach, 2014). The purpose of this paper is to provide health and physical educators with an overview of an assortment of mindfulness practices that have been used successfully in classrooms across a range of student populations, and to describe some of the benefits that are outcomes of these practices. An additional aim of this paper is to include an array of references and tips that might be of interest to teachers who would like to pursue the use of mindfulness in the classroom further.