Mindfulness
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Buddha in Your Backpack
Learn to navigate those trying teen years with greater ease using simple, effective teachings, meditations and mindfulness exercises from Buddhism
A guide for navigating the teen years, Buddha in Your Backpack is for young people who want to learn more about Buddhism or for those who simply want to understand what’s going on inside themselves and in the world around them.
This ispirational guide tells Buddha’s life story in a fashion teens will relate to, describing Buddha as a young rebel not satisfied with the answers of his elders. It then introduces Buddha’s core teachings with chapters like “All About Me” and “Been There, Why’d I Do That?”
Celebrated, bestselling author, Franz Metcalf, presents thoughtful and spiritual insights on school, dating, hanging out, jobs, and other issues of special interest to teens — inviting readers to look inside themselves for answers. -
Breathe Out
Life can often feel overwhelming and with pressure from school, relationships and social media it can be hard to remember to take a bit of time for ourselves - to take care of what's going on for us on the inside.
Breathe Out has been written specifically for young minds and the unique challenges that teenagers face today, it is filled with exercises, techniques and tips specially designed to help you to take a step back and take a moment for yourself.
With a variety of exercises that encourage you to be present, to be a better listener, articulate your feelings and get a handle on your screen time among many others, this is a hands-on journal that will allow you to track your moods and feel more in control when things can be a bit overwhelming. There are also mindfulness and breathing techniques to allow you to keep on top of your emotions wherever you are.
By unlocking your creativity - whether that's using colour, list making, noting your thoughts and experiences - you'll explore what makes you you, build new inner strengths and discover how to prioritize your wellbeing every day. The result? A happier, more fulfilled you. -
Stuff That Sucks
Sometimes everything sucks. This unique, illustrated guide will help you move past negative thoughts and feelings and discover what truly matters to you.
If you struggle with negative thoughts and emotions, you should know that your pain is real. No one should try to diminish it. Sometimes stuff really does suck and we have to acknowledge it. Worry, sadness, loneliness, anger, and shame are big and important, but they can also get in the way of what really matters. What if, instead of fighting your pain, you realized what really matters to you--and put those things first in life? If you did that, maybe your pain wouldn't feel so big anymore. Isn't it worth a try?
Stuff That Sucks offers a compassionate and validating guide to accepting emotions, rather than struggling against them. With this book as your guide, you'll learn to prioritize your thoughts, feelings, and values. You'll figure out what you care about the most, and then start caring some more! The skills you'll learn are based on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). Yes, there are a few written exercises, but this isn't a workbook. It's a journey into the stuff that sucks, what makes that sucky stuff suck even more, and how just a few moments each day with the stuff that matters will ultimately transform the stuff that sucks into stuff that is just stuff. Make sense?
Maybe you want to be more creative? Or maybe you simply want to do better in school or be a better friend? This book will show you how to focus on what you really care about, so that all that other sucky stuff doesn't seem so, well, sucky anymore.
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Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day
Stop stressing and start being your best self--master mindfulness for teens in no time.
Homework, relationships, social media, life planning...you've got a lot going on, but you don't have to feel overwhelmed by it. In fact, you could actually enjoy life more while getting more done. Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day shows you how to take control of stress and become the boss of your feelings--and boost your focus while you're at it.
Start feeling better with mindfulness, the practice of being fully present and cultivating calm, one moment at a time. Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day features simple and effective exercises--that fit perfectly into your daily routine--making it easy to keep yourself in the here and now, tackle challenges one at a time, and make the most of every minute.
Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day includes:
- Practice peace--Learn to manage whatever life throws at you and bring focus, calm, and joy back to your day with mindfulness for teens.
- 60 guided exercises--Practice helpful exercises and develop essential mindfulness strategies sure to help you through high school and beyond.
- Mindfulness now--Discover how you can rock your homework, connect to others, chill out, and sleep better using mindfulness--it only takes 10 minutes a day.
Less stress and more focus--Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day makes it easy.
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This Moment Is Your Life (and So Is This One)
This lively, hands-on guide to meditation, mindfulness, and yoga is a perfect introduction for tweens and teens.
Don't just do something, be here.
The key to happiness is being able to find comfort in this moment, here and now. When you are completely present and not distracted by regrets, worries, and plans, even for a little while, you begin to feel more confident and can deal more easily with everything you experience. This is mindfulness: paying attention to this very moment, on purpose and without judgment--simply being present with curiosity.
This engaging guide, packed with simple exercises and endearing full-color artwork, provides a handy starting point for bringing mindfulness into your daily life. Chapters on meditation, yoga, and mindful breathing explain the benefits of these practices, and you are free to pick and choose what to try. There are quick exercises throughout, and a more extensive tool kit at the end of each chapter. The final chapter offers satisfying five-day challenges that map out ways to pull all of the book's mindfulness techniques together in your day-to-day life.
With the appeal of a workbook or guided journal, and full of examples relevant to tweens and teens today, this book will be your trusted companion as you begin the valuable, stress-relieving work of being still with skill.
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Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Teen ADHD
A powerful and compassionate guide for cultivating self-confidence, independence, and the executive functioning skills you need to live your best life!
Being a teen with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) doesn't stop you from wanting what almost every other teen wants: independence, good grades, and a healthy social life. But ADHD also presents obstacles that can keep you from reaching your goals. At times you may become frustrated, sad, or even angry at your inability to achieve the things you want. This book can help.
This unique guide will help you develop the skills you need to strengthen your executive functioning, foster the self-compassion essential to overcoming self-criticism often caused by ADHD, and gain the confidence and resilience necessary to take control of your ADHD--and your life. You'll also learn how to manage your emotions, focus, practice flexible problem solving, change habits, and improve communication skills. Finally, you'll learn how these skills can improve your relationships with friends and family, and help you succeed in school--and life!
Your ADHD doesn't have to define you, and it certainly doesn't have to determine your life. This book will allow you to step off the path of self-criticism, and guide you on the path toward self-compassion, self-confidence, and success.
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Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day
Stop stressing and start being your best self--master mindfulness for teens in no time.
Homework, relationships, social media, life planning...you've got a lot going on, but you don't have to feel overwhelmed by it. In fact, you could actually enjoy life more while getting more done. Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day shows you how to take control of stress and become the boss of your feelings--and boost your focus while you're at it.
Start feeling better with mindfulness, the practice of being fully present and cultivating calm, one moment at a time. Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day features simple and effective exercises--that fit perfectly into your daily routine--making it easy to keep yourself in the here and now, tackle challenges one at a time, and make the most of every minute.
Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day includes:
- Practice peace--Learn to manage whatever life throws at you and bring focus, calm, and joy back to your day with mindfulness for teens.
- 60 guided exercises--Practice helpful exercises and develop essential mindfulness strategies sure to help you through high school and beyond.
- Mindfulness now--Discover how you can rock your homework, connect to others, chill out, and sleep better using mindfulness--it only takes 10 minutes a day.
Less stress and more focus--Mindfulness for Teens in 10 Minutes a Day makes it easy.
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Mindfulness and Self-Compassion for Teen ADHD
A powerful and compassionate guide for cultivating self-confidence, independence, and the executive functioning skills you need to live your best life!
Being a teen with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) doesn't stop you from wanting what almost every other teen wants: independence, good grades, and a healthy social life. But ADHD also presents obstacles that can keep you from reaching your goals. At times you may become frustrated, sad, or even angry at your inability to achieve the things you want. This book can help.
This unique guide will help you develop the skills you need to strengthen your executive functioning, foster the self-compassion essential to overcoming self-criticism often caused by ADHD, and gain the confidence and resilience necessary to take control of your ADHD--and your life. You'll also learn how to manage your emotions, focus, practice flexible problem solving, change habits, and improve communication skills. Finally, you'll learn how these skills can improve your relationships with friends and family, and help you succeed in school--and life!
Your ADHD doesn't have to define you, and it certainly doesn't have to determine your life. This book will allow you to step off the path of self-criticism, and guide you on the path toward self-compassion, self-confidence, and success.
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This Moment Is Your Life (and So Is This One)
This lively, hands-on guide to meditation, mindfulness, and yoga is a perfect introduction for tweens and teens.
Don't just do something, be here.
The key to happiness is being able to find comfort in this moment, here and now. When you are completely present and not distracted by regrets, worries, and plans, even for a little while, you begin to feel more confident and can deal more easily with everything you experience. This is mindfulness: paying attention to this very moment, on purpose and without judgment--simply being present with curiosity.
This engaging guide, packed with simple exercises and endearing full-color artwork, provides a handy starting point for bringing mindfulness into your daily life. Chapters on meditation, yoga, and mindful breathing explain the benefits of these practices, and you are free to pick and choose what to try. There are quick exercises throughout, and a more extensive tool kit at the end of each chapter. The final chapter offers satisfying five-day challenges that map out ways to pull all of the book's mindfulness techniques together in your day-to-day life.
With the appeal of a workbook or guided journal, and full of examples relevant to tweens and teens today, this book will be your trusted companion as you begin the valuable, stress-relieving work of being still with skill.
Non-Fiction Reads
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Black Birds in the Sky
A searing new work of nonfiction from award-winning author Brandy Colbert about the history and legacy of one of the most deadly and destructive acts of racial violence in American history: the Tulsa Race Massacre. Winner, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award.
In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District--a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives.
In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history. But how did it come to pass? What exactly happened? And why are the events unknown to so many of us today?
These are the questions that award-winning author Brandy Colbert seeks to answer in this unflinching nonfiction account of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In examining the tension that was brought to a boil by many factors--white resentment of Black economic and political advancement, the resurgence of white supremacist groups, the tone and perspective of the media, and more--a portrait is drawn of an event singular in its devastation, but not in its kind. It is part of a legacy of white violence that can be traced from our country's earliest days through Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement in the mid-twentieth century, and the fight for justice and accountability Black Americans still face today.
The Tulsa Race Massacre has long failed to fit into the story Americans like to tell themselves about the history of their country. This book, ambitious and intimate in turn, explores the ways in which the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre is the story of America--and by showing us who we are, points to a way forward.
YALSA Honor Award for Excellence in Nonfiction
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Ain't Burned All the Bright
Prepare yourself for something unlike anything: A smash-up of art and text for teens that viscerally captures what it is to be Black. In America. Right Now. Written by #1 New York Times bestselling and award-winning author Jason Reynolds.
Jason Reynolds and his best bud, Jason Griffin, had a mind-meld. And they decided to tackle it, in one fell swoop, in about ten sentences, and 300 pages of art, this piece, this contemplation-manifesto-fierce-vulnerable-gorgeous-terrifying-WhatIsWrongWithHumans-hope-filled-hopeful-searing-Eye-Poppingly-Illustrated-tender-heartbreaking-how-The-HECK-did-They-Come-UP-with-This project about oxygen. And all of the symbolism attached to that word, especially NOW.
And so for anyone who didn’t really know what it means to not be able to breathe, REALLY breathe, for generations, now you know. And those who already do, you’ll be nodding yep yep, that is exactly how it is. -
Revolution in Our Time: The Black Panther Party’s Promise to the People
A National Book Award Finalist
A Coretta Scott King Author Award Honor Book
A Michael L. Printz Honor Book
A Walter Dean Myers Honor Book
With passion and precision, Kekla Magoon relays an essential account of the Black Panthers—as militant revolutionaries and as human rights advocates working to defend and protect their community.
In this comprehensive, inspiring, and all-too-relevant history of the Black Panther Party, Kekla Magoon introduces readers to the Panthers’ community activism, grounded in the concept of self-defense, which taught Black Americans how to protect and support themselves in a country that treated them like second-class citizens. For too long the Panthers’ story has been a footnote to the civil rights movement rather than what it was: a revolutionary socialist movement that drew thousands of members—mostly women—and became the target of one of the most sustained repression efforts ever made by the U.S. government against its own citizens.
Revolution in Our Time puts the Panthers in the proper context of Black American history, from the first arrival of enslaved people to the Black Lives Matter movement of today. Kekla Magoon’s eye-opening work invites a new generation of readers grappling with injustices in the United States to learn from the Panthers’ history and courage, inspiring them to take their own place in the ongoing fight for justice. -
We Are Not Yet Equal
This young adult adaptation of the New York Times bestselling White Rage is essential antiracist reading for teens.
An NAACP Image Award finalist
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year
A NYPL Best Book for Teens
History texts often teach that the United States has made a straight line of progress toward Black equality. The reality is more complex: milestones like the end of slavery, school integration, and equal voting rights have all been met with racist legal and political maneuverings meant to limit that progress. We Are Not Yet Equal examines five of these moments: The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with Jim Crow laws; the promise of new opportunities in the North during the Great Migration was limited when blacks were physically blocked from moving away from the South; the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 led to laws that disenfranchised millions of African American voters and a War on Drugs that disproportionally targeted blacks; and the election of President Obama led to an outburst of violence including the death of Black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri as well as the election of Donald Trump.
Including photographs and archival imagery and extra context, backmatter, and resources specifically for teens, this book provides essential history to help work for an equal future. -
Stolen Justice
A thrilling and incisive examination of the post-Reconstruction era struggle for and suppression of African American voting rights in the United States.
Following the Civil War, the Reconstruction era raised a new question to those in power in the US: Should African Americans, so many of them former slaves, be granted the right to vote?In a bitter partisan fight over the legislature and Constitution, the answer eventually became yes, though only after two constitutional amendments, two Reconstruction Acts, two Civil Rights Acts, three Enforcement Acts, the impeachment of a president, and an army of occupation. Yet, even that was not enough to ensure that African American voices would be heard, or their lives protected. White supremacists loudly and intentionally prevented black Americans from voting -- and they were willing to kill to do so.In this vivid portrait of the systematic suppression of the African American vote for young adults, critically acclaimed author Lawrence Goldstone traces the injustices of the post-Reconstruction era through the eyes of incredible individuals, both heroic and barbaric, and examines the legal cases that made the Supreme Court a partner of white supremacists in the rise of Jim Crow. Though this is a story of America's past, Goldstone brilliantly draws direct links to today's creeping threats to suffrage in this important and, alas, timely book.
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The Beautiful Struggle (Adapted for Young Adults)
Adapted from the adult memoir by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Water Dancer and Between the World and Me, this father-son story explores how boys become men, and quite specifically, how Ta-Nehisi Coates became Ta-Nehisi Coates.
As a child, Ta-Nehisi Coates was seen by his father, Paul, as too sensitive and lacking focus. Paul Coates was a Vietnam vet who'd been part of the Black Panthers and was dedicated to reading and publishing the history of African civilization. When it came to his sons, he was committed to raising proud Black men equipped to deal with a racist society, during a turbulent period in the collapsing city of Baltimore where they lived.
Coates details with candor the challenges of dealing with his tough-love father, the influence of his mother, and the dynamics of his extended family, including his brother "Big Bill," who was on a very different path than Ta-Nehisi. Coates also tells of his struggles at school and with girls, making this a timely story to which many readers will relate. -
If I Go Missing
Combining graphic fiction and non-fiction, this young adult graphic novel serves as a window into one of the unique dangers of being an Indigenous teen in Canada today.
The text of the book is derived from excerpts of a letter written to the Winnipeg Chief of Police by fourteen-year-old Brianna Jonnie — a letter that went viral and was also the basis of a documentary film. In her letter, Jonnie calls out the authorities for neglecting to immediately investigate missing Indigenous people and urges them to "not treat me as the Indigenous person I am proud to be," if she were to be reported missing.
Indigenous artist Neal Shannacappo provides the artwork for the book. Through his illustrations he imagines a situation in which a young Indigenous woman does disappear, portraying the reaction of her community, her friends, the police and media.
An author's note at the end of the book provides context for young readers about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Canada.
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Everything You Wanted to Know about Indians But Were Afraid to Ask
From the acclaimed Ojibwe author and professor Anton Treuer comes an essential book of questions and answers for Native and non-Native young readers alike. Ranging from "Why is there such a fuss about nonnative people wearing Indian costumes for Halloween?" to "Why is it called a 'traditional Indian fry bread taco'?" to "What's it like for natives who don't look native?" to "Why are Indians so often imagined rather than understood?", and beyond, Everything You Wanted to Know About Indians But Were Afraid to Ask (Young Readers Edition) does exactly what its title says for young readers, in a style consistently thoughtful, personal, and engaging.
Updated and expanded to include:
* Dozens of New Questions and New Sections--including a social activism section that explores the Dakota Access Pipeline, racism, identity, politics, and more!
* Over 50 new Photos
* Adapted text for broad appeal -
Becoming Maria
Pura Belpré Honor winner for The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano and one of America's most influential Hispanics--'Maria' on Sesame Street--delivers a beautifully wrought coming-of-age memoir.
Set in the 1950s in the Bronx, this is the story of a girl with a dream. Emmy Award-winning actress and writer Sonia Manzano plunges us into the daily lives of a Latino family that is loving--and troubled. This is Sonia's own story rendered with an unforgettable narrative power. When readers meet young Sonia, she is a child living amidst the squalor of a boisterous home that is filled with noisy relatives and nosy neighbors. Each day she is glued to the TV screen that blots out the painful realities of her existence and also illuminates the possibilities that lie ahead. But--click!--when the TV goes off, Sonia is taken back to real life--the cramped, colorful world of her neighborhood and an alcoholic father. But it is Sonia's dream of becoming an actress that keeps her afloat among the turbulence of her life and times. Spiced with culture, heartache, and humor, this memoir paints a lasting portrait of a girl's resilience as she grows up to become an inspiration to millions.
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The U.S. Latino Community
Each title in the highly acclaimed Opposing Viewpoints series explores a specific issue by placing expert opinions in a unique pro/con format; the viewpoints are selected from a wide range of highly respected and often hard-to-find publications.;; "Each volume in the Opposing Viewpoints Series could serve as a model not only providing access to a wide diversity of opinions, but also stimulating readers to do further research for group discussion and individual interest. Both shrill and moderate, th"
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