Introduction
My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance and in inverse proportion to my expectations.
actor Michael J. Fox (2007)
Being a teenager can be really stressful. Maybe even at this moment you are dealing with stress at school, in the form of pressure to get better grades and to do more extracurricular activities, filling up every moment of every day. Maybe you are dealing with stress at home, in the form of financial problems, arguments, or separations. Maybe your relationships with your friends are stressful. Maybe dating or your involvement in sports is stressful. Perhaps you are dealing with issues having to do with bullying, discrimination, poverty, or violence in your community. Maybe you are dealing with chronic pain or some other chronic health condition, like diabetes. On top of all that, you are probably trying to figure out answers to big questions like Who am I? Where do I fit in? How can I become independent and make my own decisions? It’s no wonder if you feel overwhelmed sometimes.
Any time you are experiencing a lot of stress, you may get “stuck” in your thoughts, whether you are worrying about the future or feeling bad about the past. You may get caught up in judgments about and emotional reactions to whatever is happening. If you don’t know how to handle stress, you may do things that end up hurting yourself or the people around you. For this reason, learning how to handle stress effectively—in a healthy way—might just be the most important thing you can do to truly thrive, and reach your full potential.
Mindfulness is a simple but powerful tool for awakening the wisdom that is already inside of you. It can help you handle stressful situations and transform difficult relationships. With mindfulness, you can free yourself from those troublesome thoughts about the past or the future, becoming more present in the “here and now.” Mindfulness also fosters the sort of kindness and compassion that can help you become your own best friend, as well as a better friend to others.
Resilience is your ability to thrive despite being faced with stressful situations. It’s your power to rise above stress, to cope with challenges and bounce back. Imagine a suspension bridge, like the Golden Gate Bridge. In a storm, resilience is what allows the bridge to continue to stand strong, without collapsing. Resilience includes both outside supports and inner strengths. Outside supports are like the towers and cables holding up the bridge. Inner strengths are the things that are inside the bridge, helping it to be strong—its materials and construction.
Your own resilience helps you survive storms of stress and adversity. Your outside supports include things like having a caring adult in your life who really cares about you and is there for you, no matter what. That adult might be a parent, an aunt, a teacher, a coach, a counselor, or a doctor. Other really important outside supports are friends and peers who can help you make positive choices. Your inner strengths are your tools for coping with stress, such as your optimism, your perseverance, your creativity, and your coping skills.
Mindfulness can be another inner strength. Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn, who has helped thousands of people at hospitals and clinics around the world learn and practice mindfulness as a way of dealing with pain and stress, defined mindfulness as “Paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (1994, 4). It sounds simple, doesn’t it? But it’s not always easy. Infusing your life with mindfulness takes some training and practice. That’s what this book is all about.
I’m a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine. Basically, that means I try to help teenagers be healthy, stay safe, and have a positive future. In my job at a children’s hospital, I meet teens who experience intense stress. Some of them suffer health consequences like depression, anxiety, chronic pain, difficulty sleeping, and problems functioning at home and at school.
Fifteen years ago, I began learning the “art of mindful living” from the Vietnamese Zen Master, poet, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Thich Nhat Hanh. Since then, I’ve practiced mindfulness every day. It has really changed my life and helped me through some very stressful times.
Several years ago, I began to wonder, If mindfulness has helped me so much, and it has helped so many other adults with stress, could it be useful for the teens I work with? So I worked with my colleague Dr. Jake Locke to develop an eight-week mindfulness course for teens at our hospital. The course is called Mindful Awareness and Resilience Skills for Adolescents (MARS-A). Most of what you will learn in this book comes from my own experience and the experiences of teens taking MARS-A.
I am delighted to be sharing mindfulness with you. Some adults have said that teens can’t learn mindfulness: that teens are either too immature or don’t have the patience and attention span to be truly mindful. My experience has been the exact opposite. The teens I have worked with have proven to me that they really “get it,” even more than many adults. I’ve witnessed some amazing and inspiring transformation and healing among these teens. They have told me that mindfulness practice helps them do the following:
Mindfulness meditation has been practiced for thousands of years in Buddhist cultures, and many of the practices in this book are inspired by Buddhist meditation. But mindfulness is also found in other wisdom traditions throughout the world, even if it’s not always called “mindfulness.” For example, the thirteenth-century Persian poet Jalal ad-Din ar-Rumi, the nineteenth-century American transcendentalist poet Henry David Thoreau, and the twentieth-century Catholic nun and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa all wrote movingly about the practice of dwelling deeply in the present moment, with a fully open heart. Mindfulness can be beneficial for everybody, no matter who you are or where you come from. In other words, you don’t need to be a Buddhist to meditate. You can be any religion, or you can be no religion at all. Mindfulness doesn’t ask you to believe anything, and it doesn’t ask you not to believe anything. It’s all about paying attention, cultivating your compassion, and learning from your own observations and experience.
The best way to read this book is with an open mind and an open heart. For now, try to let go of any expectations or ideas you have about mindfulness. This includes negative expectations, like This whole meditation thing is stupid and would never work for me. It also includes any positive expectations, like Mindfulness is going to solve all my problems. Instead, approach the practice of mindfulness in the spirit of playful experimentation—I’m going to try this out and see whether anything interesting happens.
Part 1 of this book (chapters 1 to 9) is like a how-to manual that will teach you core mindfulness practices. Some examples are mindful breathing, sitting meditation, the body scan, and practices for handling difficult thoughts, feelings, and emotions with mindfulness. You’ll also learn “informal mindfulness,” which involves bringing that same mindful awareness into your everyday activities, like eating lunch and walking to school. You’ll see the words “mindfulness” and “meditation” used interchangeably. For the purposes of this book, you can consider those two words to mean the same thing.
In part 2 (chapters 10 to 16), we will explore how to use mindfulness practices to handle stress in specific situations. For example, you’ll learn how to use mindfulness to handle stress at school, at home, and when you are experiencing conflict with your peers or classmates. In part 3 (chapters 17 and 18), we will explore how to sustain a mindfulness practice, which will help you make your life path a mindful journey.
In the “Try This!” sections, I’ll walk you through specific mindfulness practices. Some of these you can practice with the help of audio recordings available at http://www.newharbinger.com/30802. These recordings, called guided meditations, will allow you to close your eyes while you follow the instructions or narration. I hope that you try each practice at least once, in the spirit of open-minded experimentation, just to see what you notice. If you find a particular practice beneficial, maybe it can become part of your everyday life.
I have been teaching mindfulness to teens for over four years now at the children’s hospital where I work. The ways in which teens have said that their mindfulness practice has touched their lives continue to inspire me. In this book are stories (like “Lisa’s Story” in chapter 1) about how some of those teens learned to practice mindfulness, featuring things they shared in class. In the “Teen Voices” sections are other things that teens have said about mindfulness. I hope that their words and mine inspire you to discover your own powers of mindfulness and resilience, which will support you on the sometimes difficult journey to adulthood and beyond.
Teen Voices: Nicole R.
“Before learning about mindfulness and practicing it, I had not realized how much of my life I was living outside of the present moment. I am a very anxious person, and I’m often worrying about the future or the past. Mindfulness has allowed me to live more in the now. I feel a sense of self-awareness that I didn’t have before, and it has been incredibly useful for managing my anxiety.
“As youth we get so caught up in trying to do as much as we can, as well as we can, to please as many people as we can, that we don’t take time to enjoy anything. We don’t take enough time to love ourselves or really listen to ourselves. Mindfulness helps you do that.
“One of the best things about mindfulness is that…[t]here are so many ways to live a more mindful life. Mindfulness is beyond just sitting meditations or yoga practices.
“I think that mindfulness can benefit everyone. In the beginning, you may feel silly or find it hard, but it will get easier. You just have to approach it with an open mind and no expectations. Don’t be afraid to have fun with your mindfulness practice or to be creative. Don’t be afraid to tell people about it or encourage others to do it with you.
“The hardest part is getting yourself to do it. The next hardest part is getting yourself to stick with it. Everything else is much easier.”