Siddhartha Will Be Featured in a Presentation to the Dalai Lama

Siddhartha School’s Social and Emotional Learning Program Will Be Featured in a Presentation to the Dalai Lama This Month at the Mind and Life Institute Dialogue in Dharamsala.

On Tuesday, March 13, Siddhartha School’s social and emotional learning (SEL) teacher, Sophie Langri, will be presenting her work to the Dalai Lama at the Mind and Life conference. Her presentation includes Siddhartha School’s progress report and contains media that show children at the school using tools His Holiness helped design.

The event in Dharamsala, India, will be attended by select scientists and scholars and holds a prestigious place in the Western world’s contemplative science movement. You can WATCH THE WEBCAST of Sophie Langri’s presentation to the Dalai Lama.

As the first school in all of India to have a social and emotional learning curriculum, Siddhartha has led the pack in early adoption. As our founder, Khen Rinpoche, wholly believes, “an educated mind needs an educated heart to run it.”

The emotional and ethical prongs of the SEL program are threefold. First, students are taught to name their inner emotions and identify the temperature of their emotional landscape. Second, solution-based tools give students visual prompts and function to reduce “destructive” emotions such as anger, fear, stress, and jealousy. Finally, the third prong focuses on leading by example and emphasizes that a teacher’s mirroring these practices back to the students plays a vital role in facilitation. At its core, the SEL program teaches the interconnectedness of all people, and that to truly be a happy person, you must be concerned with the well-being of not only yourself but others.

We would like to thank Sophie Langri for traveling to Ladakh for the last two years to train our teachers and students. We are happy to announce she will resume teacher training in August 2018 during a third trip.

Photo: (two above) Sophie Langrie trains teachers and students with tools the Dalai Lama helped design.

We would also like to thank our stateside and international donors who have fully supported our SEL initiative, and who have been paramount in helping carry out the the Dalai Lama’s wishes for ethics integration into modern educational curricula.

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