Building a Mindful Community with JG Larochette

Stephanie Domet: Hello and welcome to Real Mindful, this is where we speak mindfully about things that matter. Real Mindful is a twice monthly conversation with some of the teachers, thinkers, writers, and researchers who are engaged in the mindfulness movement. You’ll hear conversations about the science of mindfulness, the practice of mindfulness and the heart of it and we’re so glad you’re here. I’m Stephanie Domet, I’m the managing editor at Mindful magazine and Mindful.org. And this is Real Mindful. 

JG Larochette: 25 kids who maybe got still and silent for 10 seconds in the first five months of the school year dropped into practice, eyes gently closed, bodies still.

SD: That’s JG Larochette, he’s the founder and director at the Mindful Life Project. The Mindful Life Project is a nonprofit JG started almost a decade ago to help bring the transformative power of mindfulness and its tools to school kids and school communities.

The Mindful Life Project is a charitable partner of this year’s Mindful30, our annual 30-day meditation challenge that runs every September. It’s late in September now but you can still sign up to receive 30 days of mindfulness instruction straight to your inbox from some of our favorite meditation teachers, people like Sharon Salzberg, Barry Boyce, Shalini Bahl-Milne, Rashid Hughes, Sara Ivanhoe, and more. Also, your subscription to The Mindful30 helps support the Mindful Life Project and we’ll draw up a link to both Mindful30 and the Mindful Life Project in our show notes so that you can check both of them out and decide.

Now, I had the chance to catch up with JG Larochette recently to find out how the Mindful Life Project got started and what impact it’s had on thousands of lives, including his own. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

Hello JG and welcome to Real Mindful.

JG: Hello, Stephanie. Thanks for having me today.

SD: JG, you found mindfulness at a particularly turbulent time in your life when you cast your mind back? What do you remember about your first or your first few meditation sessions?

JG: Oh, I got chills when you asked that question, Stephanie. Yeah, a little context, I was a classroom teacher here in Richmond, California, before that, I was a coach on the playground during recess after school with amazingly resilient young people but also systemic issues that led to our kids not having the mental and emotional support they deserved, as well as me as an educator being burned out.

So, it was a deep suffering that happened in 2011 after many years of trying to push through being the educator that I wanted my own kids to have, but also being the advocate community voice. So, it was many years of pushing, pushing, pushing, not really finding the pause, not taking care of myself. In the fall of 2011, in the depths of my anxiety and depression, I tried so many different things to try to figure out how to be healthier and how to come back to myself, right? I’d lost myself fully.

So that first mindful practice—the meditation I did that pops to mind was here at the Kaiser, which is our health care provider, they had a mindfulness course here in Richmond, which I was surprised by in the first place. I felt a sense of belonging in my own experience and a sense of true freedom from those thoughts and emotions that I thought I was supposed to avoid and neglect and really a connection to my whole humanity and a welcoming.

And then over at Spirit Rock with Jack Kornfield on a Monday night talk a couple of weeks later—these are my first two mindfulness experiences—and just being like, “Wait a second. I think I’ve been avoiding myself for a long, long time. I think I’ve abandoned myself time and time again since I was a young person to fit the layers of conditioning in the narrative that were provided.” So here this is me, and maybe I can start falling in love with a true nature. And then I went to Jack. I was like, “I want this to go to schools across the country.” And so, I remember this moment in time in December 2011 that I was like, “Hey, I think everyone deserves this practice and everyone deserves it because it’s already in us. We were born with it. Everything that happens after is where we start abandoning.”

And it was beyond transformative. I went from deep suffering to liberation within a few weeks of space. I didn’t expect that.

SD: Wow. That’s incredibly powerful and a quick transition. Your head must have been spinning in some ways.

JG: I mean, I think that the thing that comes up is that it was already spinning right when it happened. What happened was that as an educator, as a human being, as someone that wanted to always be of service to others. I was eight years old when I started seeing injustices in schools here in Berkeley, California, or when I was in Indigenous places with my family across the Americas, or beyond in inner city parts of the community I’ve been in. So one of the things that happened for me was that I wanted to be of service but I also truly felt like this human being that I am doesn’t deserve the same thing I’m trying to give others. So that wanting to make everyone else’s life more enjoyable and empowering, I wasn’t fulfilling for myself.

As an athlete, I can say that sport was my first mindfulness practice growing up. Then I became this educator and sports was still there, but it was more had kind of overwhelmed and not so much connected to the body. Stillness for me became my true sanctuary. So, I think both pieces; the head spinning, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t functioning, I was trying to show up to school still without any idea of who I was anymore, and just trying to be of service without anything left in my being. So, you know, it’s that deep suffering that allowed the crack to open for me and realize that what I’ve been looking for externally was already internal.

SD: Right. And then you’re able to step into this space and step into that pause and kind of tap into your own wisdom and truly figure out how to serve the people you want to serve.

JG: One hundred percent. I mean, I keep on feeling so humbled. We serve fourteen thousand kids in direct service work with our organization in schools, with coaches that are mindfulness based, social and emotional learning, folks across the Bay Area and beyond now. And I keep on saying the real reason this worked was first and foremost for me, I was able to nurture an experience with my emotions, my thoughts, and my lived experience. It was compassionate versus critical