Eliko Ozeki
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Unified Mindfulness L² Coach
Educator, L2 Coach, CEB Teacher
Eliko comes to mindfulness education with over 29 years of classroom teaching experience in public and independent schools in Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York City, and Silicon Valley. She brings her insights and skills as an international mixed roots multilingual, life coach, mentor, and parent to her mindfulness practice and teaching.
Eliko’s desire to slow things down for herself due to her rich, busy life as a full-time working parent led her to explore Qi Gong and Tai Chi in 2013. She began sharing her practices with her students soon after. She saw their positive and eager responses to the slow paced movements that helped them cultivate body awareness and moments of balance. Eliko started practicing mindfulness after attending the Summer Institute for Educators at The Greater Good Science Center (UC Berkeley) where she learned about the power of mindfulness as another approach to build social emotional learning skills in the classroom. Although she was a skeptic at first (“There is no way I can ever sit still for more than a minute!”) she slowly developed her personal mindfulness practice. Once she began seeing the centering and calming effects of stillness, Eliko was convinced this was another tool her young students would benefit from. Her purpose in sharing mindfulness with her students is to teach skills that develop compassion, self awareness, flexibility, and focused attention. She frequently attends conferences, workshops, and retreats to learn new ideas and skills for her personal practice and for her mindfulness teaching. She trained with Mindful Schools Year Long Teacher Certification Program. Shortly after, Eliko trained in the Unified Mindfulness Pathways program and appreciates the beauty and power of this explicit and clear system to practice and teach mindfulness to others. Additionally, Eliko incorporates her training from Cultivating Emotional Balance, taught by Eve Ekman PhD and Ryan Redman into her teaching.
Eliko wholeheartedly believes that students benefit from having different access points to mindfulness. She weaves in Qi Gong, Tai Chi, crafts, and games to her lessons and is experimenting with IMPROV games to her classroom mindfulness practice and teaching.
-The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak- Hans Hofmann