The Paths Social-Emotional Education Curriculum with Reflections on Felt Bodily Experience and Buddhist Principles

Abstract

This report focuses on the PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies) social-emotional education curriculua for preschool and elementary school students developed in the 1990s, by Dr. Mark Greenberg and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA. In considering Greenberg’s discussion of the PATHS program with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the article first offers a brief Buddhist context for emotion education. Of interest is that the PATHS curriculum also uses the concept of “feelings that arise in the body” and so in the later part of the article I draw out the implications of this concept in my discussion on the nature of bodily experienced emotions. In this discussion, I also give reference to developments in Humanistic Psychology, Neuropsychology and Buddhist mindfulness meditation.