Building Mindfulness Into Schools From the Inside Out | Featuring: Ben Painter & Sid Babla

Ben Painter and Sid Babla of Whole School Mindfulness join Jenn Turner for a conversation about what it actually looks like to build a mindfulness program in a school — not as an add-on intervention, not airdropped from the outside, but grown from whoever is already there, already practicing, already a little bit doing it off the side of their desk.

Sid opens with the Three Doorways to the Present Moment: a practice moving through sound, breath, and interoceptive sensation that sets the tone for a conversation full of genuine curiosity about how and where these practices actually land. From there, Ben and Sid share their own paths to this work — Ben through a high school in Concord, Massachusetts with a full-time mindfulness director on staff; Sid through growing up in India, working in finance, going to graduate school in Belgium, and arriving at Dartmouth during a pandemic — before walking through how Whole School's model has evolved over seven years of learning from what didn't work.

They get into the principle of proximity, the shift away from prescriptive programming toward community-led experimentation, what the two-year mindfulness director cohort actually looks like week to week, and why the biggest thing Whole School does is often just getting out of the way so directors can learn from each other. Jenn shares her own story — training as an opera singer in rural Maine, being told she wasn't in her body, and following that thread into yoga, therapy, and everything that came after.

Available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.