“Mindfulness practices help the bully, victim, and any witnesses involved develop a deeper awareness of themselves, resilience, compassion, and a greater ability to regulate their emotional responses,” Houlihan says in a recent column from the University of Massachusetts at Boston. Houlihan, along with Laura Bakosh, are cofounders Inner Explorer, a non-profit organization that offers mindfulness programs for schools. In classrooms that implemented the Inner Explorer’s mindfulness programs, early results show an estimated 50% reduction in reactive behavior—as reported in “Why Do Bullies Bully?” in the February issue of Mindful magazine. Bakosh attended this year’s Wisdom 2.0 conference and talked about her research on the efficacy of the Inner Explorer program and its cumulative effect on academic achievement. You can watch some of the talk below:
Bakosh and Houlihan hope that the Inner Explorer programs will be implemented in schools in all 50 states within the next year. To date, there are instructors in 111 preschool and elementary classrooms in 12 schools in California, Illinois, Ohio, Massachusetts, and New York. To learn more about Inner Explorer, you can visit their website.
