Teach, Breathe, Learn by Meena Srinivasan is a guide for educators seeking to integrate mindfulness and social-emotional learning into their teaching practices. The book offers practical strategies and exercises that teachers can use to create a more mindful and compassionate classroom environment. Srinivasan emphasizes the importance of self-care for teachers, providing tools for managing stress and promoting overall well-being. The book also explores how mindfulness can positively impact students' emotional regulation, attention, and academic performance. Overall, Teach, Breathe, Learn provides a holistic approach to teaching that incorporates mindfulness to benefit both educators and students.
The book emphasizes the importance of love in the classroom, and the impact it has on creating a positive learning environment for both teachers and students. It highlights the significance of emotional connections, and challenges the traditional norms and practices of teaching. According to Srinivasan (2014), “Mindfulness enables us to connect deeply with ourselves so in turn we can authentically connect with others” (p. 24). Srinivasan also writes, “If I woke up grumpy, I'd pass that grumpiness on to my students, which really only made me more grumpy! But without any strategies to manage stress and work with my emotions in a skillful way, the climate of my classroom suffered” (p. 19). As the quotations state, teachers need to be focused and emotionally stable if they are to expect the same from their students. For this reason, without peace of mind and self-awareness, teaching effectively is more difficult. So as a starting point, teachers require strategies to help them become grounded and mindful, and Teach, Breathe, Learn offers the reader exactly that, strategies and resources that build connections with the self as well as others. Srinivasan even addresses one such strategy: “Before you begin teaching mindfulness, present your students with a stressful situation and have them describe how they’d handle it. Revisit the same scenario at the end of the unit and see if students now approach the stressful situation differently” (pp. 97-98).
One negative aspect of the book is that the author cites Thich Nhat Hanh often and even perhaps excessively. Hanh was Srinivasan’s mentor, a Vietnamese Zen Master and Buddhist monk who was a peace activist, author, and teacher. Also called the "father of mindfulness", he is recognized globally for his teachings on mindfulness, ethics, and efforts toward world peace. Srinivasan cites the Buddhist monk so often throughout the pages of her book that the reader gets a sense they should stop reading Teach, Breathe, Learn and go straight to the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh. To use a Buddhist analogy, reading this book is like the finger pointing at the moon. Instead of looking at the finger, which in this case is Teach, Breathe, Learn, one would do better to gaze directly at the moon, which would mean reading one of Thich Nhat Hanh’s books on mindfulness and what it looks like in the classroom.
Mindful teaching and learning is presented as the point of entry for students to achieve self-awareness as well as academic success. In this way, the equity dimensions of access and achievement are addressed. In addition, the book encourages self-awareness, which in turn leads to developing and discovering a sense of identity. The book is full of resources and strategies that encourage students to seek to understand and come to terms with their feelings and emotions, to use breathing techniques that help them understand themselves and others, and to practice mindfulness with the intention of empowering oneself and others.
Moreover, the book moves beyond academics and traditional education by insisting issues such as self-awareness, loving kindness, and empathy form the foundation to accessing and achieving identity and power in elementary and middle school classrooms.
This book is an educational innovation in that few books on the market, and also historically, address mindfulness as a learned skill curriculum. In fact, the book’s appendix includes 30 pages of lessons, handouts, and homework, making its message and contents easily accessible and immediately practical. Also, Srinivasan takes a fresh approach to education, insisting that love is the primary component lacking in schools. She writes, “For me, teaching is driven entirely by love. Leading with love is revolutionary, but it was certainly not something talked about in any of my academic preparation to become a teacher. Yet, without love we feel disconnected and alone, and this causes so much suffering. Love is essential to the classroom” (Srinivasan, 2014, p. 54). This quotation emphasizes the importance of love in education, and the impact it has on creating a positive learning environment for both teachers and students. As well, this book highlights the importance of emotional connection, and challenges the traditional norms and practices of teaching. Finally, as Srinivasan states: “There is no end goal in mindfulness; it is a continual journey towards greater awareness and understanding” (p. 18). Thus, the process is ongoing, a sort of polishing of a pearl in order to achieve a greater and greater glow that leads to a deeper sense of self and understanding of the world.
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