Creating a Healthy Community
St. Luke’s Center for Community Health Annual Fall Conference

A FREE EVENT in partnership with

Presents

Susan Kaiser Greenland
“The New ABCs - Attention, Balance & Compassion”

Saturday, November 19, 2011
Liberty Theatre
110 N. Main Street
Hailey, Idaho

St. Luke's Center for Community Health, with support from Flourish Foundation, brings renowned author and speaker Susan Kaiser Greenland to Blaine County.

The conference will feature a Keynote Presentation, followed by an In-Service Learning Session.

Click here for a schedule of events.

Keynote Address:
"The New ABCs ~ Attention, Balance and Compassion"
The techniques of mindful awareness have helped millions of adults reduce stress in their lives. Children, who also experience negative effects from stress, can now learn mindful awareness methods adapted specifically for youth. Susan Kaiser Greenland, author of the groundbreaking book The Mindful Child, and founder of the acclaimed Inner Kids program affiliated with the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, has developed an innovative program based on what she calls "The New ABCs: Attention, Balance and Compassion."

In an engaging, interactive keynote presentation, Ms. Greenland will demonstrate how mindful awareness can help children manage stress and become happier, kinder, and more compassionate.

The fun and friendly techniques presented will help build kids' inner and outer awareness and attention, and have a positive affect not only on academic performance, but on social and emotional skills that help in making friends, being compassionate and kind to others, and playing sports. Ms. Greenland's mindful awareness techniques provide tools to help kids manage stress and to overcome specific challenges such as insomnia, overeating, ADHD, hyper-perfectionism, anxiety, and chronic pain.

Participants will gain awareness and knowledge of Susan's step-by-step process of mental training presented in her book, The Mindful Child, and gather tools from which all children and all families will benefit.

Susan Kaiser Greenland has become the nationally recognized leader in teaching mindful awareness to children and teens. For more information about Susan, please visit innerkids.com.

In-Service Learning Session: Following the keynote presentation, Susan Kaiser Greenland invites participants to stay for an additional hour of in-depth learning. Susan will guide participants in hands-on applications of mindful awareness concepts.

Keynote Speaker:
Susan Kaiser Greenland is a wife, mother of two, and a former corporate attorney. When her children were very young, Susan turned to meditation to help her through a family crisis. By practicing different meditation techniques, many that focused on breathing, she learned that she could maintain an inner calm even when her world outside was not. She began using meditation as a way to feel calmer and to see life experiences more clearly.

As her children grew, Susan realized that similar practices could help them cope with stress as well. She began to work with other children too, and developed the Inner Kids Program. She integrated games, activities, and songs to help kids tap into their awareness of breathing, their physical world, and their inner lives, and to develop their attention skills.

Susan became a member of the clinical team of the Pediatric Pain Clinic at UCLA's Mattel's Children's Hospital, and a co-Investigator on a multi-year, multi-site research study at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center/Semel Institute. She studied the impact of mindfulness in education, and collaborated on an investigation of mindful eating for children and their caregivers at the University of California, San Francisco. In 2006, Susan was named a "Champion of Children" by First 5, the largest and most influential children's advocacy group in Los Angeles.

The Inner Kids program has been researched at UCLA and the University of California, San Francisco, and the early research findings are promising.

Susan has been a speaker at prestigious institutes around the United States and abroad, including UCLA, the University of Massachusetts, the Mind and Life Institute, the University of Kansas, Columbia University, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, San Diego Children's Hospital, National University of Singapore, and Mahidol University near Bangkok. She has been quoted in The Boston Globe, Time Magazine for Kids, Better Homes and Gardens, and Publico, in Guadalajara, Mexico. Her work has been covered by The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, and the CBS Morning News.

Susan lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Seth Greenland and their two children.

Flourish Foundation is dedicated to promoting contemplative based practices in communities for the purpose of achieving mental balance and compassion. The heart of their work focuses on the human potential to be morally and ethically responsible world citizens. Please visit their website at flourishfoundation.org to learn more about this new local non-profit.