ABSTRACT
Research demonstrates that mindfulness practices have significant benefits to youths' self-regulation capacity, emotional and behavioral reactivity, and levels of psychological stress and anxiety. Research has demonstrated that group work is an effective intervention in schools and serves as a way to better meet the often varied needs of students. Group work, therefore, must be a vital part of any school social worker's repertoire, especially when working in a high school. This chapter provides a case study of first mindfulness group in a school setting, a measure that efficiently offered students valuable skills in a social context. Both "mindful" and "mindfulness" are terms that have become quite popular in recent years; however, their use often reveals a diluted misappropriation of these terms. Mindfulness practices can help adolescents to feel empowered by recognizing, via experiential learning, that they possess the internal capacities for self-control and well-being. Mindfulness practice encourages the expansion of compassion beyond the self.
