Breathe - you are alive. Mindfulness and compassion in the university

Abstract

The introduction describes my own personal experience with the practice of mindfulness, mainly in the Zen-Tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh. Subsequently I report about my experiences with the integration of the practice of mindfulness into courses of social work education at the Protestant University of Applied Sciences in Freiburg / Germany. With this article I want to encourage colleagues from other universities to integrate elements of mindfulness into their courses. Personal reports of the students about their learning experiences illustrate the positive results of the project. I summarize the results on the personal level of the student’s experiences, the didactic level and the level of the learning climate in the group.