Mindfulness Meditation with Ms. Ellen

2025-26 meditation training options

  • Mindfulness Meditation Private Lessons

    This 1:1 mindfulness meditation training with Ms. Ellen is custom designed for students from upper elementary school through adulthood who may have a range of challenges or who are just new to meditation training and prefer a secular environment. Rooted in the Vipassana tradition, this training incorporates aspects of Mahayana and Zen practice as well as compassion mindset. We cannot be fully compassionate to others until we are fully compassionate to ourselves. The ongoing individualized training is part of the menu of services offered by Ms. Ellen that require an initial screening appointment.

  • Annual Fall Meditation Program for Tweens

    Due to Zoom’s new customer contract (below) using human remote lessons for AI development, this Zoom program will be discontinued until Congress passes legislation protecting human work. This lesson type is a $10 weekly sitting group on remote video that will resume for tweens who wish to sample mindfulness meditation in a group format for beginners. Taught by Ms. Ellen each Fall Semester, it is an inclusive GenEd-SPED program. Students who have developed the ability to practice sitting meditation for 20 minutes with Ms. Ellen and who have self-reported greater well-being as a result have had a range of eligibilities including ASD, ADHD and ED. We learn how to catch our mind when it is wandering and return home to the present moment. Students can book the 10-part series for $100 directly on the appointments page each August when available.

  • Free Family Mindfulness Channel

    This YouTube channel is a free introduction to basic mindfulness meditation practice for families from my iOS app "Mindful Youth." Content and images © 2015. Copyright by Ellen McCarty. All rights reserved. Choose the “Mindfulness Instruction” playlist and click “Play All” to listen to the lessons in order.

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Mindfulness Intervention Programs

Support for students.

My mindfulness intervention programs are designed for youth with mild/moderate disabilities whose emotional challenges and maladaptive behaviors impede their ability to participate in classroom instruction and healthy friendships.

Make a Commitment to Wholesome Media

For best results in social development, closely monitor and restrict media access and allow your child to watch only wholesome media and non-violent videogames for a short period of time each day. While there is no way to scientifically prove a direct connection between playing violent videogames, watching violent shows and classroom behavior challenges, teachers have often empirically observed this pattern of cause and effect. For students with special needs, it is critically important to protect their brain development from exposure to violence- and horror-based entertainment that they may act out in the future. It’s also important to support healthy development by limiting screen time and encouraging play with concrete objects. Research informs us that playing with blocks and Legos can make children smarter. From a moral development perspective, our thoughts shape our actions. For children with brain challenges, that may be more true because they may have less ability to self-regulate and reflect on the consequences of their actions. As a family, contemplate the value of wholesomeness. Purity in thought, word and action is one of the greatest protections a parent can offer a child. Common Sense Media is a great resource for parents who want to choose wholesome and appropriate entertainment for K-12 youth: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/

Hawaiian wisdom:

Pono: effectiveness is the measure of truth.

Ms. Ellen’s mindfulness meditation training began in 1997 and 1998 in the Mahayana Zen and Theravada Vipassana traditions of Southeast Asia. She teaches a secular practice rooted in universal paramis and inclusive of all faiths and backgrounds. For families interested in learning the origin dogma of mindfulness meditation, Vipassana Hawai’i offers an authentic American access point and an international community.

Paramis (Perfections)

Morality/virtue/integrity (sila), Generosity (dana), Renunciation (nekkhamma), Wisdom (pañña), Energy/physical strength (viriya), Patience (khanti), Truthfulness (sacca), Resolve/determination (adhitthana), Loving kindness/compassion (metta), Equanimity (upekkha).

The most important universal perfection is sila: morality, virtue and integrity, and a commitment to living a life of causing no deliberate harm. This is the foundation for the development of all other universal perfections.

Taking only what is given is a Buddhist vow.

Zoom’s Extreme Contract Claiming Ownership of Human Work for AI Development (below) is an example of taking what is not given, which nourishes seeds of greed and harms global human working classes.

10.4 Customer License Grant. You agree to grant and hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to redistribute, publish, import, access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract, modify, reproduce, share, use, display, copy, distribute, translate, transcribe, create derivative works, and process Customer Content and to perform all acts with respect to the Customer Content: (i) as may be necessary for Zoom to provide the Services to you, including to support the Services; (ii) for the purpose of product and service development, marketing, analytics, quality assurance, machine learning, artificial intelligence, training, testing, improvement of the Services, Software, or Zoom’s other products, services, and software, or any combination thereof; and (iii) for any other purpose relating to any use or other act permitted in accordance with Section 10.3. If you have any Proprietary Rights in or to Service Generated Data or Aggregated Anonymous Data, you hereby grant Zoom a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license and all other rights required or necessary to enable Zoom to exercise its rights pertaining to Service Generated Data and Aggregated Anonymous Data, as the case may be, in accordance with this Agreement.

MARKETING You grant Zoom permission and the right to (i) identify you as a customer and to use your logo across Zoom marketing materials (e.g., the Zoom Website, emails, presentations, brochures), and (ii) develop content around your experience as a Zoom customer (e.g., a written case study or video case study).

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For the record, Ms. Ellen McCarty and Mindful Youth LLC will never grant Zoom or any predatory tech company permission for any of the above. If used in such a way, assume it is Ms. Ellen’s unauthorized bot, not her. A video conferencing company should be limited to providing video conferencing and not have the right to rob the people in the video conference of their livelihoods. Ms. Ellen thanks President Biden for issuing an executive order to pause such predatory practices. She encourages the US Congress to act immediately to make these predatory contracts illegal. The EU passed laws requiring tech companies to allow all citizens to opt out of being used for AI development. That’s the best way to protect human work as well as public trust in AI technology.