This is Educating to be Human, and I'm your host, Lisa Petrides, founder of the Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education. In each episode, I sit down with ordinary people creating extraordinary impact, people who are challenging notions of how we learn, why we learn, and who controls what we learn. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you for joining us on
Educating to be Human. Today, I have the enormous pleasure of speaking with Atman Smith, the co-founder of the Holistic Life Foundation, which is a Baltimore-based nonprofit committed to the social, emotional, and educational well-being of underserved communities through the practice of yoga, mindfulness,
and meditation. And in a time when education in the U. S. is increasingly fractured, and in that process, severing our connection to body, nature, and emotion, Atman, in the work of his team, offers a powerful reminder that deep learning takes place at the level of the body,
not just the mind. And for over two decades, he and his colleagues have been helping communities and classrooms develop practices that center the breath, body, and spirit, not just as tools for individual healing, but as pathways to improve our experience and our ability to learn. And you've spent years teaching yoga and mindfulness in a variety of settings, and particularly with underserved and high-risk
youth. And I remember that many people first came to know the work of the Holistic Life Foundation through this groundbreaking approach of replacing school detention with meditation, starting in Baltimore and now expanding across the country. What were you noticing in schools early on that made you feel this kind of practice could make a real difference? First off, thanks for having me on here,
Lisa. It's great to reconnect with you. In regards to why we thought that these practices would help in a school setting, my brother, who's one of my business partners and one of the co-founders, and my buddy Andy, you know, we, in our last year of college, we were looking for, like, we knew there had to be more to life than just graduating from college, getting a job, getting married, have some kids, retire and die. You know what I mean? There had to be more to that.
And we were looking for what that more was. And in our search for what that more was, we went to the different libraries on campus, obscure libraries, studying anything from ancient history, creational theories, astrology, astronomy, philosophy. And it seemed like the more we've read, no questions were getting answered. But they would always talk about the answers are within, the answers are within.
And no one ever told you how to go within. During that time, me and Ali's godfather, who became our teacher, Uncle Will, was trying to teach us yoga and meditation. And in one of his books by this Yogi Yogi Bhajan, told you how to do like some esoteric things with the yoga and meditation. Like, you know, it was stuff like how to maintain your body without eating or if you injure yourself around where there is no hospital around, what can you do? And, you know, all this type of stuff where.
You're cultivating the energy that's within us and that's outside of us for specific purposes. So, you know, we were like, yo, yoga and meditation can help me do all this stuff. You got to teach it to us. And his thing was, alright, I'll teach you anything and everything I know. You gotta agree with two things. One, you have to show up at my house at 4:30 in the morning tomorrow. And then he was like, you all gotta promise to be teachers. I'm going to teach you all everything.
But I like my being a recluse. I like being in my house. You all are going to have to teach any and everybody that wanted to learn. And, you know, that started our journey. And during that time, we were diving deep into our practice. We ended up graduating from school and then we moved back into our old neighborhood in West Baltimore, which at the time was one of the most violent neighborhoods in all of America. You know, a lot of the scenes in The Wire, the HBO show, were featured.
My neighborhood was featured. So, of course, there was like a lot of chaos, a lot of gun violence, a lot of dilapidated housing, open-air drug markets, shootouts. And the crazy thing was, is that, you know, we were amongst that chaos, but we were still bliss-ing out because we had these practices.
We realized that we really needed to share these with other people, not only because we made the promise to our teacher, but just because we saw humanity was suffering and we had some techniques-ancient techniques that people weren't really practicing at the time. We started this like 23 years ago. So yoga, meditation, mindfulness, breath work wasn't in pop culture like it is now.
And a lot of our friends would come to our neighborhood and they would see, like I was saying, the open-air drug markets, the violence, and all that stuff. And they knew we were broke as hell. And they used to come to us and they used to be like, 'man, you guys are so happy yet you're broke.'You live in this crazy neighborhood, yet you guys are happy. And then our question to them would be, 'well,
you all have a significant other. You all have a nice house, nice car, nice job, but you all are miserable.'And we were like, 'all right, well, it may be something to this. 'So we knew we wanted to start teaching these practices to other people. And the first opportunity was an afterschool yoga program at a school that my mom taught at because we knew if it was helping us bliss out. Amongst the chaos that it would do the same thing for any and everybody that we taught. And, you know,
that's what we did. We started off teaching 15 fifth graders at Windsor Hill Elementary School at an after-school yoga program. And these were the most challenging kids in the school, always getting into fights. Attendance was low. Some of them were like socially awkward. And, you know, we just started the program up with them when we first started. We would have to pick up more than half of them from detention because they would get
in trouble. As we progressed in this program, we would pick up less and less kids from detention. We started noticing the change in the kids, and so did the parents, the teachers. And that's how we first started in schools. And, you know, things have just snowballed from there. What year was that? How many years ago? That was in 2001, I think. That's amazing. That's actually incorporated in 2001. And our first program was in 2002. So,
you start off in this after-school program. If you look at your work today. You're across the country. You're working in schools, in detention centers, in drug rehab. I mean, this work has just amazingly spread. And interestingly, you know, there's much more of an emphasis today on wellness and things like that. But it really feels like what you've been doing has been so connected to, you know, how learning, I mean, particularly in schools, right?
If the mind and body isn't connected, then these kids certainly aren't learning in schools, right? There's been this huge disconnect between the mind and the body and its impact on learning, or if we learn, in fact, right? So how did you, did you start to talk about that with folks? And then you, I guess, tell me a little bit about what this looks like today. You know, in the classroom,
like what the practice looks like. And I know I've heard you tell some stories before of what happens in a school when you start working with not just the students, but the administrators and the teachers as well. Yeah, like, like you said, we started off with an after-school program for all boys. But then, you know, we developed a lot of different programs. The main program with like the most impact in schools, I think, is our Mindful Moment program.
Like you said at the beginning, the whole program that was highlighted in the Upworthy viral video talking about changing attention to meditation. And, you know, that program is like a tier one, tier two, and tier three intervention where, you know, we have a school-wide practice that's led over the loudspeaker. So everybody in the school, not just the students, but the staff, administrators, even the janitors and cafeteria workers can stop for a second. Do the practice to kind of get them
centered. Kids are dealing with so much coming into school, whether like in our neighborhoods, you know, they have like; we live in food deserts, and kids are coming to school eating sugar-filled snacks, processed food. They may be coming from a traumatic situation where, you know, they're dealing with a lot of undiagnosed trauma. So it's really hard for people to even think that kids can just sit down in a chair and learn right
away. At the beginning of the school day, we have practices, whether it's breath work or seated yoga and brief meditations that the kids do before they start their school day. The bending and stretching from the chair kind of gets that restless energy out of their body, gets that circulation flowing, makes their bodies kind of more like a safe space. The breathing practices help them still their mind. And then the meditation can kind of tap them into
that inner peace. Then we also have push-ins into classrooms where during those specific times where students are bouncing off the wall, whether it's transition times, whether it's if it's a substitute teacher, whether it's after lunch, just specific times during the course of the day where teachers need a quick breath break, a quick three or five minute practice, our staff will go in there and lead that and help.
kind of get the class grounded and present, better for the school climate, the classroom environment. You can get to that point where that's possible. You go in initially and you do some of this training with the students and then you work with the teachers. Like, what does that, you know, for those folks who are working in schools every day where this is not a practice that is, you know, embodied there, I would imagine that this seems like a strange concept.
That kids would show up and they would willingly do breath work before they started their day? I mean, it starts off in the summertime. Like we go in, like we don't go into any schools unless we talk to and present to all the staff in the school, social workers, teachers, administrators, principals, assistant principals. And, you know, during that time, we kind of sell them on the practice by either the neuroscience behind how it helps heal trauma.
How it helps kids have access to executive function. And then we also take them through the practice. So they actually experience with their students and, you know, the teachers during our self-care sessions get to experience during the school day. And then, you know, after we get them on board, we will go into the school and do a residency to get the kids bought into the practice where we'll go into every single classroom. So every single student will know why we're there.
what the purpose of the room is. I didn't even get to the room yet. Tell us about what the room is. It's the Michael Moment Room. It's like the alternative to suspension room. Kids call it the oasis in the school. It's basically, you know, it has like aromatherapy. It has oil diffusers. Himalayan salt crystals. So it's actually a room that's set up at the school that kids can go to. Do they get sent there or do they take themselves there? How does that work?
Like a detention room, you get sent there, right? Yeah, it's a combination that either they can self-refer when they're in high school or when they're in elementary and middle school, they have to get referred to by a teacher or administrator. And they have like a certain duration of time that they can be in there because, you know, some people try to be slick and, you know, try to get out of class and try to stay.
In the room the entire day, but they only have a 15-minute time limit to stay in the room. And while they're in there, they have to do a practice or be practicing the entire duration of time that they're in there. When they come in there, we aren't counselors. So all we do is actively listen and mirror to empower the kids because people always talk at kids and they never listen. So that right there kind of helps the kids kind of drop in.
Achieve a little bit or lean more towards homeostasis than before they were in the room then we'll talk to them about stress, stresses how the stress plays out in their body and then we'll do like a breathing practice meditation and then you know we'll talk to them about like you know next time you see that classmate that usually gets under your skin or if you're about to go into that class where the teacher uh kind of picks on you, Try to do these practices so you can self-regulate
so you won't have to come into the room. We have a tea machine in the room. Kids love tea. So at the end of the session, we give them some tea and send them back out, we track when they come into the room. So, you know, if the kid comes into the room the exact same time during the course of a school day, we'll realize, all right, well, they're trying to avoid something.
Let's try to have a sit-down with either a teacher, administrator or a couple of students that might that might be triggering the student. And, you know, try to resolve the conflict. And the beautiful part about that program is like the numbers start off really high at the beginning of the year, but they don't go down next to nothing because kids do learn how to self-regulate.
And I think that's why we signed a commitment with the Clinton Foundation through their Clinton Global Initiative to help us expand this program, because it does help out with school-based outcomes. Test scores go up, detention and referral numbers go down, attendance goes up. And then, you know, it does a lot.
We're partnering with the Trauma Research Foundation, Dr. Russell Vander Kolk's foundation to kind of study what it's doing to help heal trauma of not only the students but the secondary trauma that the teachers get in working in those environments. So there's really a lot of science behind this. And it sounds like you're gathering evidence that's really supporting that. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, I mean.
Like I said, you know, it's easy to gather school-based outcomes just because, you know, you can get the test scores, attendance, referral rates and stuff like that. But, you know, with us partnering with the Trauma Research Foundation, they're studying things as far as anxiety. You know, before COVID, a lot of the reasons why we were going into schools was because of violence.
You know, kids were getting into fights, but now kids are more anxious and more alone and they have that lack of connection. So we're trying to show how these programs kind of help kids deal with anxiety, help them have a higher self-worth. We've gotten anecdotal evidence for years, but we haven't gotten any empirical evidence. So that's what we're looking for now.
And, you know, how it heals trauma, like I said, helps heal the trauma with the students and then also helps with the secondary trauma. Another element of the program is our self-care sessions with the teachers where we teach them practices that kind of help them can get centered, help release that secondary trauma that they are going to pick up during the course of a day working with all those students.
Right now, we're just working on getting the empirical evidence to show what the anecdotal evidence has been telling us for years. Yeah, it's just so important with the work that you're doing. You know, when I think about such an overemphasis on school-based outcomes, you know, the test scores, and we're not looking at what's happening with trauma, with kids'sense of self-worth, the kind of healing that they need to do themselves or to empower themselves in that way with these tools.
Why don't we do this in all schools? Like what's preventing, you know, maybe what I'm asking you is, you know, where do you see resistance to these kinds of practices as you're talking to people about it? I mean, the fact that you can replace a detention room with a meditation room is so profound. I mean, it's philosophical in a sense that you don't believe that when a child misbehaves, it should be punitive, right? It's exactly the opposite of that. Like, why aren't we doing that?
There are a lot of people who claim to be like trauma-informed, trauma-responsive. And it's just more like a buzzword and that they're not really authentically teaching from that space. That's not really the foundation of what they're doing. A lot of people teach from like curriculums. And, you know, what we do is, you know, we teach people how to have a toolbox and meet their students where they are. So I think it's all about like the programs and what exactly.
What practices people are implementing. Our practices have been shown to help heal high ACEs scores. Baltimore has some of the highest adverse childhood experience scores in the nation. Can you explain just for the listener who doesn't really know what those ACEs scores are and how we use them and what they mean? Yeah, ACEs scores are like adverse childhood experiences.
If you've gone through some type of violence and other things that may have caused trauma in your life, whether it's trauma that you've been through on a personal level, secondary trauma, all types of trauma that you have been through in your life impact you. If you have high ACEs scores, it leads to a lot of heart-centered diseases, pulmonary issues, and high blood pressure, and a lot of stuff like that.
So if your viewers or listeners out there want to hear a great TED Talk, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris does a great TED Talk on high ACE scores and the impact on health of people with high ACE scores. Yeah, when we think about the classroom place, right, the consequences of sort of ignoring this, you know, the mind and the body connection, the emotional with the intellectual, right? If you're not able to self-regulate in this way and heal in this way, you know, what happens with learning? Right.
I mean, it just seems again, it seems so obvious, but it's not something that we see or that we don't see enough of. Definitely. I mean, people with high ACEs scores and deal with a lot of trauma, their vagus nerve isn't firing properly. And that's that threat perception or that connection with your mind and your body. And there's definitely techniques and breathing practices that we teach that help people heal their vagus nerve up.
So, you know, they can have that connection with their mind and your body. They say that like whatever trauma that you've been through, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk talked about this, that you can heal it, except like blunt force trauma to the head. But, you know, every other trauma that people have been through, you can heal it with love and other practices. Kennedy Krieger did a study on different programs that help heal people's high ACE scores.
Our programs and our techniques, not ours, the ones that we teach, because, you know, this stuff is timeless, way older than the Holistic Life Foundation, but our evidence-based practices that we teach. I think that that's one of the reasons why our stuff is so successful, and the reason why a lot of people are hesitant because they have had people come in and say that they are going to be trauma-informed and give people practices to help do exactly what we are doing.
And, you know, they failed miserably. There's been time and time again, all across the nation and the world, that people have bought us in because, you know, the program that they invested in wasn't really delivering what they said they were going to deliver.
So they get us to kind of see where they're at and help the people that are implementing the program with the techniques and philosophies that when our programs run with high fidelity is the reason why our numbers are so promising, to teachers, administrators, funders alike.
That's the reason why seeing the fidelity not being high across the board is the reason why we created our year-long certification program to where teachers, administrators, even nurses, social workers, psychiatrists, all of those demographics are part of our year-long certification program so they can learn how to teach like we teach. Where it's like 11 online modules, reading assignments, homework assignments, in-person intensive at the beginning.
And at the end, you know, like a celebration to culminate the year-long certification program. And then it's once a month online live sessions with one of the co-founders. That way we're able to kind of impart the knowledge and the successes and failures that we've gone through in our 23 years of experience.
If the graduates want to, they can join Holistic Life Foundation's workforce and we can kind of use our resources, our administrative team to help them set up programs in their cities, schools, and stuff like that. How long have you been doing the certifications? We have been asked to do it for years, but we finally took the time to put it together and we had our first cohort maybe three months ago. Doing them all across the nation.
We're doing a couple in Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and, you know, all over the nation. So your work and the work of the foundation has, it seems to me, really been restoring something very powerful. And I know that you've done it now, not just in schools, but across communities in different contexts at every stage of life. I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about, I know you've gone from classrooms to, as we said, to rehab centers, correctional facilities, senior centers.
How does this practice adapt across these different worlds? What are the threads that kind of run through it? The practices are pretty much the same that we teach across the board. It's just speaking to people's struggles. In schools, you might talk about test anxiety, like people are anxious about achieving high on a test, so they get anxious, or they might have anxiety over a presentation they have to do, or a performance they have to do, or a sporting event.
In the drug rehab community, you might be speaking on a memory that might get you depressed, which will lead you to using or abusing drugs. You know what I mean? So it's about speaking to those communities about how if you don't control your mind, your mind will control you and giving them techniques to get them to be able to, first off, see what thoughts are going through their mind, see what emotional state they're in.
And then using these specific breathing practices and techniques to kind of release those ruminating thoughts and get them back to the present moment so they can kind of go about their day and change those negative habits into positive ones. And neuroplasticity is a real thing. We talk to all our communities that we teach about that, where they can rewire their brain with either good or bad things. And the good thing about what we do is we teach people practices.
When they do find themselves going down that dark part of their life, a way to be able to reel themselves back in and kind of take themselves back into their light, you know? Is there anything else about the science of this, you know, the benefits of meditation and science and the work around it that you think needs to be talked about to kind of convince people of it? Or do you feel like Or do you feel like the evidence is there in the numbers, right?
The lowering or the complete dissipating of detention in certain schools or, you know, I know you're working in rehab centers and some of these other places. You know, are you seeing the same kind of evidence that would support that? In the mental illness facilities that we work in, we've seen with these techniques, because you have to lead like groups and stuff.
In those mental illness facilities and in those groups, you know, we'll teach them the same stuff, packaging it differently, where they can kind of help self-regulate and manage their own stress and anxiety. Where, you know, before they might rely on going to the front office and asking for a med, they call them PRNs. And, you know, in those mental illness facilities where we do run our programs. They notice that the PRNs go down as we work with them.
So, you know, it's all about teaching people how to self-regulate no matter who the demographic is. Self-regulation. That's something we could use a lot more today in our society, I think. I know that you've done work with senior centers as well. That's fascinating, applying it in that context. What is that like? So we roll out the mats and we get them to bend themselves up like pretzels. It's like, no, I'm just joking.
The way we teach is very similar to every demographic, but it may look a little different. I was just joking about rolling out the mat and bending yourself up like a pretzel. I thought so. With kids, you definitely want to roll out the mat and kind of get that circulation flowing, get rid of that restless energy first, then breathing practices, then meditation. And it's the same thing in the senior centers, but instead of rolling out a mat.
We'll do a chair-based practice where, you know, they're still getting their circulation flowing in their body, but all from the chair. Then we'll do like some breathing practices, meditations and discussion topics. You know, people get a lot out of that because when people get older in the senior centers, they really aren't moving that much.
So if they can learn techniques that they can do from their chair or even from their bed, like some people-you know, like when they're sitting in the bed, they may just do some breathing practices and meditations to help them fall asleep at night. Or they have a-we have specific practices that help with like headaches or tension headaches and stuff like that. They'll do these practices to kind of help them alleviate some of the pain and suffering that they're going through.
So yeah, we love working with the seniors just because they light up because they don't think that they can actually get a physical workout in if they can't really move as well as they once did. But, you know, if you can kind of empower them with these practices from the chair, they gravitate to it and excel. The work that you're doing is really profound and it's having quite an impact.
It's so obvious that, you know, the consequences of an education system that's ignoring, you know, the impact of the body and the emotions on how we learn is problematic. And I'm just wondering, what you're seeing is the consequences of an education system that does ignore these versus an education system or an institution that is really addressing this connection. When kids are in elementary, middle, high school, their mental health and self-regulation techniques aren't addressed.
That leads to high suspension numbers, referral numbers, lack of engagement in classes, more fights in school and stuff like that. But outside, once they graduate from high school, it becomes more life and death where having a split second to be able to breathe and respond instead of react to something may help you save your life.
Or if you're dealing with a police officer or something like that, it can help you kind of once again respond to be able to get yourself out of that situation instead of react and make things worse. So, you know, I think that the schools that I've seen use these techniques, not only does that set the kids up for success in the future, but it helps them kind of see the world through a bigger scope and see that they're not just limited.
A lot of kids are limited to what they see in their one block radius of where they live. A lot of people don't get out of that radius of what is in their neighborhood. And sometimes if that's all they see, it's a very depressing reality that this is all you're capable of. But all the kids that we have worked with achieve at a lot higher level than their peers that don't have these practices in their life.
We've had kids in our programs shoot documentaries in China or win lacrosse championships, graduate from Emory, countless success stories. And I account that to them being able to have these practices and being able to navigate the highs and lows of the human experience. Because no matter where you're from, what demographic you're a part of, what socioeconomic status you're in, the human experience is highs and lows.
And if you have skills or techniques and tools to be able to navigate them, that is kind of setting you up for success. Yeah, you need a lot more support in other ways, but that's a great foundation to help set you up for success mentally, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. We're living in some pretty tumultuous times right now. So what gives you hope right now?
I mean, what gives me hope is the fact that from where we started off 23 years ago, where we were talking to people about bringing yoga to schools and they were like, 'yoga'or 'Yoda'? You know, now this stuff is like pop culture. You know, everybody knows what this is. And, you know, even if people aren't presenting it in the highest of fidelity, at least they're trying, you know what I mean?
So I think what gives me hope is the fact that there are programs popping up all around the nation, all around the world to help kids empower them with, you know, these self-regulation techniques. And the fact that our program is growing nationwide, you know, we have like three schools in Milwaukee, a school in Denver, a school in Chicago. We have a whole satellite program at Aguasazne, a Mohawk reservation in upstate New York and Canada. So the demand for our programs is giving me hope.
You know, our whole thing is reciprocal teaching. And like our teacher, he was like, 'Man, I'm not teaching.'I'm teaching teachers. That's how we do in all of our programs. If we have direct services with, you know, 100 kids, but if we turn those 100 kids into teachers, then imagine the impact of that. I think that the reverberation of these practices is leaking into communities and it's help helping people change, you know, help them not evolve, but involve.
You know, we call it involution where they start changing from the inside out. And then once they start changing from the inside, they can start changing their outward environment. And what that looks like, it may vary to different people depending on what their reach is, but you are going to make a change when you can. And also the fact that we are helping shift systems.
Like, you know, if you look at the educational system, now everybody is trying to change attention to meditation; changing what it means to deal with a kid that is quote unquote 'a problem'kid or acting out on some of the trauma that they're dealing with in their life and giving them, instead of making it punitive, making it empowering. And I think that's very hopeful in regards to where society is going.
No matter what, things are going to look chaotic and you're going to have to adjust to what's going on, whether it's whoever's in office or you know, whatever, like that's, you know, the net, the highs and lows of the human experience that's been since the beginning of time. And it's going to be until the end of time. So I think it's just all about being the hope or being the change that you want to see in the world. And I think that's what everybody has to be able to do.
Just change, first change yourself and then see what you can change outside of you. Before we finish, I always like to leave space for one final question, something I ask all my guests. Can you make up the title of the book that you wish more people would read? A title of a book that I wish people would read, I think it would be 'Let Your Light Shine'. And funny enough, that is our book.
If you check out your local bookstore, it shows techniques, talks about our experience in the educational field and, you know, in our community. Thank you for joining us today, Atman. I have been inspired by the work you and your team do at the Holistic Life Foundation and in the many communities you have impacted through yoga, meditation, and breathwork training.
And in a time when education often distances us from our bodies, our emotions, and the natural world, your work challenges us to return to what we already know, which is that learning isn't just a cognitive process, but something that is felt, practiced, and lived through the body. Thank you, everybody, for listening to the show this week. This has been Lisa Petrides with Educating to be Human.
If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can access our show notes for links and information on our guests. And don't forget to follow us on Instagram, Blue Sky, at edu2behuman. That is E-D-U to be human. This podcast was created by Lisa Petrides and produced by Eleni Theros. Educating to Be Human is recorded by Nathan Sherman and edited by Ty Mayer, with music by Orestes Caletzos.