Applied Mindfulness: Inner Life Skills for Youth is an experiential learning curriculum designed to introduce young people, ages 12 and up, to the often confusing world of their "inner lives". In a simple step-by-step manner, using a sequence of conceptual building blocks and experiential exercises, the curriculum guides youth safely into their internal experience, helps them to identify and organize this experience, and helps them to build the language and understanding to better differentiate and more fully live their experience on a moment-to-moment basis. This increased self-awareness translates into greater resilience, stronger emotion regulation, more stable concentration, greater clarity and ability to articulate what is happening internally, and greater choice and response flexibility. The curriculum is based on years of work with highly at-risk youth populations, including violent young offenders, youth with extensive identified trauma histories, and severely emotionally disturbed youth in residential care, and has been the object of both qualitative and quantitative research studies that document its effectiveness. It is unique in synthesizing mindfulness, somatic awareness, and emotional self-awareness practices within an understanding of the cultivation of human nervous system coherence. The curriculum fills an important gap in mental health treatment. Many well-intended treatment approaches attempt to intervene with youth in a way that presupposes that they have the basic skills necessary to access, explore, and express the basic experiences (thoughts, sensations, emotions, urges) that constitute their inner lives. This assumption is often far from accurate and results in approaches and interventions that can be frustrating for both the youth and those attempting to help them. Inner Life Skills for Youth closes this gap by teaching young people the language of their inner lives. The Inner Life Skills curriculum for youth is designed for use in group or classroom settings, as well as for one-on-one work with youth or as an enhancement to traditional forms of therapy. This manual includes the curriculum sequence and teaching scripts, charts that allow teachers to select specific exercises based on subject area or intended effect, comprehensive lists of all exercises, tools for assessment, deeper curriculum discussion, and advice for facilitators teaching awareness-based practices.
About the Author: GABRIEL KRAM is a student of the inner life and has taught inner life skills intensively for six years, first as a teacher for the Mind Body Awareness Project, where he worked with violent young male offenders, and later as the Program and then Executive Director of that organization, where he convened a national research advisory council and a curriculum advisory council of national experts in mindfulness, social and emotional intelligence, and youth development to develop and then study an innovative mindfulness-based intervention for incarcerated youth that is being scaled into a new national model of rehabilitation. In 2009 he founded Applied Mindfulness, Inc. with the goal of bringing these types of interventions into preventive contexts in medicine, mental health, and education. Since that time Inner Life Skills for Youth has been piloted in a medical clinic and a level 16 group home, and continues to evolve through its adoption by a growing number of clinicians, direct service workers, and organizations. Gabriel studied neurobiology at Yale University and narrative at Stanford University. He has a deep and abiding interest in and practice of mindfulness, emotional self-awareness, and somatics work. Over the past seventeen years, these modalities have transformed his life, and he is committed to training organizations and individuals in these tools to transform quality of life and organizational culture. He is the author of Transformation through Feeling: Awakening the Felt Sensibility. Applied Mindfulness is based in Northern California, and offers trainings nationally.