I kinda looked at him and I took a deep breath, and just calmed down, sat down, and I was like, ‘damn man, it’s good to see you.’ But at the same time I was really thinkin’ about the blunt. I ain’t gonna lie, once I seen him in the wheelchair, I already knew I was gonna do something drink, or something. ‘Cause my boy, when we got back to the house, he was out there rolling a blunt.
I was supposed to not come back to camp, and I was supposed to hit the blunt, when I was in the house. I’ll never forget one youth who, living at a detention camp in which he was allowed to go home on the weekends (in exchange for good behavior) said this when asked if any of the mindfulness strategies were helpful: “I aint gonna lie. Then, time and again we’d hear something along the lines of: “You know that STIC acronym you taught us? I didn’t think it was gonna work, but I tried it last night and it worked!”Īs we tweaked and polished the curriculum we conducted a process research study and interviewed a number of youth about the their experiences with mindfulness and meditation.
At first youth didn’t seem engaged and almost scoffed at the idea. We discussed how cognitive acronyms (which have been around much longer than the recent onslaught of mindfulness-based acronyms) may or may not help the youth we worked with and piloted a number of them with our groups. He was more open to cognitive techniques given some of his previous training in cognitive and behavioral therapies (CBT) and I was more reserved given my training existential, humanistic, and somatic methods. When my colleague Steven Saul and I were developing the Mindfulness-Based Substance Abuse Treatment (MBSAT) 12-Session Curriculum at a juvenile detention camp, we had a number of conversations about the pros and cons of using cognitive acronyms as strategies to promote mindfulness and general self-awareness.