Hello and welcome to Living In The Lehigh Valley, where our focus is your health and wellness.

I'm your host, Brittany Sweeney.

Finding the time and space to chill out, collect your thoughts and get in the right frame of mind is more important than ever.

Mindfulness was the goal behind a special place at one elementary school, a space they call the Zen Zone.

A tranquil space with dim lighting is tucked away in an unlikely place, a Bethlehem elementary school.

- We were teaching students self-awareness and self-regulation, and we knew that not only the students needed that, but the teachers as well.

Welcome to the Zen Zone and Donegan Elementary.

- Rose Carides-Hof is the community school coordinator at Donegan Elementary and one of the driving forces behind the Zen Zone.

- So this room was a collaboration between Air Products, Shanthi, the Foundation, and GraceWay Church, and this room offers an opportunity for teachers to practice self-awareness and self-regulation through four different areas.

This is the refresh area, where you get either some water... You can also have some tea, coffee or a snack.

We also have our relaxation area with our massage chairs and our blankets.

We also have the aromatherapy here.

Here we are in the restore area - this is where we do meditation.

We have a comfy chair.

- After opening about a year ago, teachers and staff in the building now incorporate a stop in the Zen Zone into their work routines.

- The intention behind this space is to teach our ourselves, our staff, how to take a pause, what we can do when we take that pause between, like, the stimulus and the response, and to really just work on our own wellness that we can then take that and replicate that within our classrooms for our students, and then ultimately replicate that out in the community - that our students are taking that with them into their homes and out into the community for full total transformation.

- Principal Erin Medina is proud of the space.

She says it wouldn't be possible without the help of the Shanthi Project.

- We made sure that teachers, every single staff member, from our custodial staff to cafeteria staff to our teachers and instructional aides and secretaries, actually had time to come into this space using a tap-out strategy.

And Shanthi was here then to kind of walk them through the space and show them how each space is used, and they had the opportunity to kind of learn it within that week.

- That was just the start of a partnership with the Shanthi Project, which is an education nonprofit offering mindfulness services.

- Hello, my friends.

- Hello.

- Hi.

We're going to get started the way we always do with the sound of the chime.

- The project's director of programs now practices its techniques with the students in the classroom.

- So when I first come in, some of them are a little skeptical.

"What is this?

What are you doing here?

"What are we going to be doing?"

And very quickly they get used to the routine, and I think they love it.

Raise your hand if you've ever been walking somewhere and you've bumped into something or you tripped over something.

Raise your hand if you've ever done that.

- Throughout the school year, Sarah Dennehy will visit every classroom twice a week for eight weeks, with different ways for the kids to calm down and become more focused.

- We start off with a brief mindfulness practice.

We call it a mindful minute, so we ring the chime and we just choose something to focus on for 60 seconds.

With the kindergartners, that's much shorter.

We just listen to the sound of the chime, raise our hand when the sound is gone, and then we'll come into whatever the lesson of the day is.

We're mindful of something different each time I'm here.

We have a different mindfulness practice each time I'm here.

We get distracted a lot, right?

So, mindfulness can help us practice paying attention.

- I've walked into a classroom when Sarah's having students come up and show their own new creations and they get to name their new creation, and then we've used those at assemblies and had the student come up and share them during assemblies.

Next step is, we want to have a student Zen Zone outside of the classroom, where small groups of students can go to, or individual students can go to, and learn different techniques, whether it be mindfulness or other calming strategies.

- The class sessions, along with the Zen Zone, are all part of a greater goal within the Bethlehem Area School District to become a more trauma-informed district.

- Bye, everyone.

Thank you.

- The nonprofit Shanthi Project serves more than 4,000 students across the Lehigh Valley and New Jersey.

Families can find mindfulness resources on their website.

That will do it for this edition of Living In The Lehigh Valley.

I'm Brittany Sweeney, hoping you stay happy and healthy.