It seems these days that every young professional in search of self-improvement is jumping on the meditation bandwagon.

And once they’re on it, they’re not falling off.

But it’s not just adults who can benefit from adding a little more ‘om’ to their life. One Baltimore school is gaining a lot of attention for its creative approach to discipline.

When students at Robert W. Coleman Elementary School act out, they are offered meditation over detention.

Photo: Holistic Life Foundation, via Instagram

Instead of being sent to the windowless principal’s office to “think about what they did wrong,” the misbehaving kids are sent to a Mindful Moment Room that’s complete with uplifting decorations and an overload of purple pillows. There they are asked to sit still and undergo practices like calming breathing and meditation.

They are also asked to discuss what happened (i.e. their reasoning for clocking the other kid in the head with a block).

The meditation room was created as a partnership with local nonprofit the Holistic Life Foundation.

Trailblazing the youth mental health movement, the foundation has been offering the after-school program Holistic Me for over a decade, which gives elementary school kids the opportunity to end their day with mindfulness and yoga.

Image: Holistic Life Foundation, via Upworthy

It even lets the children co-teach the yoga classes.

Taking it a step further, the program also tutors the kids and educates them on important issues like the state of the environment and lets them participate in community initiatives like cleaning up public spaces and building gardens.

According to UpWorthy, an increasing number of schools and centres are seeing huge benefits in teaching kids about holistic living.

The approach seems to be working: at Robert W. Coleman Elementary, they haven’t had a single suspension in over year.

As more research continues to emerge on the positive impacts of meditation, the practice has been linked to everything from stress reduction to an increase in attention span and focus.

We may as well start the future generation on it now (sadly, they’re going to need all the inner calm they can get to navigate our increasingly crazy world).

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