About the Awake Youth Project

The Awake Youth Project is an expression of Brooklyn Zen Center’s broader commitment to social engagement and taking the practice of meditation and mindfulness to young people who might not normally have access to them. More specifically, the Initiative focuses on introducing these tools for effectively engaging difficult emotions and life circumstances to youth through mindfulness in education programs in an effort to alleviate the suffering and harm they frequently experience.

The Mindfulness and Meditation Training program is a community-based collaboration with the Brooklyn College Community Partnership’s Project Peace. Together we work with at-risk high school students from underserved communities throughout Brooklyn. The program teaches students – many of whom are struggling with shame, stress, anger and violence – to follow the thoughts and emotions that lead them away from their essentially equanimous minds. By seeing their thinking clearly and learning meditational tools to tolerate emotional pain, the students gain freedom to make healthier choices in their lives.

As a key component of this training, Awake Youth Project has developed a peer-to-peer transmission model whereby high school students will be trained to lead mindfulness groups for their peers. Awake Youth Project instructors lead two-hour, weekly, on-site workshops at two high schools and the Brooklyn College Arts Lab. A select group of peer-to-peer trainers study mindfulness techniques more deeply with staff at BZC and eventually co-lead on-site groups so that they will be able to lead discussion groups on their own at their respective high schools. Our goal is to support a culture of mindfulness throughout the student community in which these young people pass on mindful life practices to their peers.

Our workshops in the schools resulted in students encouraging us to create times during which they could meet together weekly to sit in meditation and discuss mindfulness practices. We have designated Tuesday afternoons as student time at Brooklyn Zen Center.

From 3:30pm to 4:30 pm on Tuesdays, Brooklyn Zen Center hosts a regular meditation group for teens. The group is led by teen mindfulness leaders who have been trained in our mindfulness leadership program. The group is teen-led and teen-only so that there is an opportunity to openly discuss mindfulness practices and how they affect the lives of young people.

We also serve teens through our Jazz Mindfulness Program. The Jazz Mindfulness Program provides an opportunity for young people to not only learn musical expression, but also meditation and mindfulness practices. The students, ages 12-18, explore quieting their minds through sitting, walking and music meditation. The program consists of weekly, two-hour classes over the course of 28 weeks, including two concerts per year. In the nine months since this program began, students have regularly reported profound changes in their confidence levels, musical abilities, and peace of mind in their broader lives.