I haven’t invented anything new in The Mindful Teen. This book is a distillation of the experience and wisdom of leaders and teachers in the fields of mindfulness, mental health, and positive youth development. I have tried to share the fruits of my own personal mindfulness practice, as well as my clinical experience with teens as a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine. All trees have roots, and my root teacher in mindfulness for many years has been the Vietnamese Zen Master, poet, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh. Many of the mindfulness verses, guided meditations, practices, and concepts I share—including sitting meditation, belly breathing, the body scan, informal mindfulness, mindful eating, walking meditation, loving-kindness meditation, mindful communication, and mindful peacemaking—have been inspired by Thich Nhat Hanh and by the practices of Plum Village, the meditation center that he founded in 1982 in the south of France.
That said, you certainly do not need to be Buddhist to benefit from mindfulness. Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of the pioneers of mindfulness in the West, is fond of saying that even the Buddha himself wasn’t “Buddhist.” In that spirit, I have done my best to present the practices in a secular, universal way—one that might appeal to diverse teens and families of any culture or religion (or no religion at all) and is appropriate for use in health care and educational settings.
In addition, The Mindful Teen is based on the MARS-A (Mindful Awareness and Resilience Skills for Adolescents) course that I developed with my friend and colleague Dr. Jake Locke and that is currently offered at the British Columbia Children’s Hospital. MARS-A is a teen-friendly, developmentally appropriate, eight-week (nine-session) outpatient mindfulness-based intervention for adolescents (ages fifteen to nineteen) who are experiencing psychological distress (depressive symptoms, anxiety symptoms, or both), with or without co-occurring chronic pain or another chronic health condition. We modeled the basic structure and content of MARS-A on Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) (Kabat-Zinn 2013), as well as on two subsequent adaptations of MBSR: Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT; Segal, Williams, and Teasdale 2013), and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction for Teens (MBSR-T; Biegel et al. 2009). Some of the core mindfulness practices in both MBSR and MBCT (including mindful eating, sitting meditation, mindful movement, walking meditation, the body scan, mindfulness of thinking, and informal mindfulness), as well as loving-kindness meditation (which comes from MBSR), are practiced in a modified form in MARS-A and presented in The Mindful Teen in a style that is heavily informed by both the teachings of Plum Village and my own personal mindfulness practice. The section on mindfulness of the body and handling pain (chapter 6) draws heavily from MBSR, and the sections on mindfulness of thinking (chapter 9) and self-care (chapter 17) draw heavily from MBCT.
MARS-A also draws heavily from the work on positive youth development by Kenneth Ginsburg—in particular, the sections on stress and coping (chapter 1) and perfectionism (chapter 11). MARS-A also draws from the work on interpersonal neurobiology by Daniel Siegel—in particular, the sections on the neurobiology of stress (chapter 1) and building connectedness (chapter 12).
I also owe a profound debt of gratitude to the many mentors, teachers, and colleagues who have supported me in this work, including but not limited to Kenneth Ginsburg, Colette (Coco) Auerswald, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Richard Kreipe, Ronald Epstein, Kim Schonert-Reichl, Adrianne Ross, Jeanie Seward-Magee, Thay Phap Hai, Sister Chan Khong, Curren Warf, Sabrina Gill, Amy Saltzman, Gina Biegel, Mark Bertin, Christopher Willard, Sheila Marshall, Andrea Johnson, Jane Garland, Deborah Christie, Margaret Callahan, Brian Callahan, Zindel Segal, Sarah Bowen, Steve Hickman, Catherine Phillips, Chris McKenna, Sam Himelstein, Larissa Duncan, Kevin Barrows, Mark Unno, Shimi Kang, and Nimi Singh. Thank you also to British Columbia Children’s Hospital and to the Kelty Mental Health Resource Centre for supporting our mindfulness programs with teens. I thank those who have given so generously of their time and talents to review versions of the manuscript and make it better, including Mark Bertin, Jeanie Seward-Magee, Ly Hoang, Ly Nguyen, the publications team at Plum Village, and my editors—Tesilya Hanauer, Jess Beebe, and Will DeRooy.
To my loving partner in mindfulness and in life, Ly Hoang, thank you for your generous support and patience during the birthing of this book. To my mother, Ngoc Do, my deceased father, Han Vo (who was my first mindfulness teacher), and my sister, Ylan—thank you for your inspiration and guidance. I hope that my work in mindfulness can continue what you’ve shown me.
Most importantly, my heartfelt thanks to the teens who have shared their wisdom with me. May their wisdom and resilience inspire you, too.