Weds 26th November 2025
Prior to opening her current business, Mara Amore, Heather Carpenter had a long career in education. This started in GCSE dance education where she was Head of Dance, then left to run her own company selling dance resources to schools. More recently she has been a SENCO and Mindfulness Lead where she was responsible for emotional wellbeing across the whole school from 2019 to 2024, training over 1,000 pupils.
Using mindfulness in an often stressful educational environment helped pupils (and teachers) to be more resilient (which is not “being strong” but rather being able to get up after a struggle), and also helps Heather manage her own busy head on a daily basis. To quote Brené Brown….”Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it’s having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome. Vulnerability is not a weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.”
So why are our brains not on our side? Put simply, we are wired to constantly look for threat, and that builds a negative bias. Additionally, we like certainty and often fill gaps in to get it, but frequently we jump to erroneous conclusions, perceiving a threat that doesn’t actually exist.
Faced with threat our brain’s amygdala (i.e. the ‘panic button’) fires and our prefrontal cortex (the ‘thinking’ area) shuts down. This is why it’s often impossible to reason with someone who is panicking, and it’s better to sit with them until the panic subsides. Mindfulness is a process that allows you to manage that process for yourselves, as Heather demonstrated by leading the group through a quick mindfulness session.
Heather offered some useful sources of information too:
- The Power of Vulnerability TED Talk by Brené Brown
- Don’t Believe Everything You Think by Thomas Nguyen
- Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown
- The Being Well podcast by Rick Hanson
