Living Wisdom High School of Palo Alto

Two LWHS students are interning at Amanda Valley Farm this summer experiencing conscious farming and sustainable living principles in action!

Sourdough students with their beautiful loaves

Entrepreneurship at Living Wisdom is an integrated part of the curriculum. Students earn a portion of the expense for their annual Service Adventure Travel experience. In so doing, they call upon their skills and interests to pursue and create pathways for earning. Along the way, these teens build life skills including professionalism, work ethic, marketing, leadership, and cooperation. Miya, a senior at LWHS, shared their deep love for the arts through a series of drawing and painting classes for younger students! One young student told their mother, “Thursday is my favorite day because I get to do art with Miya! I wish every day was Thursday!” Congratulations, Miya, on meeting your entrepreneurship goal, building valuable skills, and sharing what you love with the world!

Curriculum Spotlight: The Art of Happiness (a Personal Development Course)
Why stumble around in the dark groping for a lucky breakthrough, searching for revelation in any of a million potential subjects when, ultimately, what we’re seeking is hiding right under our very noses? Books, teachers, classes, and experiences can only help spark the fire of inner awareness, for true self-understanding comes from within. Wouldn’t it be more effective, then, to search it out directly? “Certainly!”, the answer seems, but the question remains: How?
The essence of personal development is self-awareness and self-expansion. Self-awareness, a subtle and often underappreciated art, is the beating heart of an integrated life. Without self-expansion, however, it quickly slides into self-involvement and egotism: a surefire route to unhappiness. On the other hand, coupled with a growing ability to embrace all life as one’s own, self-awareness becomes the very seed of lasting inner happiness, the pearl of great price which all true teachers throughout the ages praise above all.

We will develop the skill of self-awareness by gradual refinement. Beginning with awareness of the body and the will required to dynamically express ourselves through it, we will use the physical to pave the way to deeper understanding: the experience of will and energy. We will utilize millennia old techniques of breath-awareness, breathing techniques, physical postures, conscious stillness, affirmations, visualizations, and meditation to learn to calm the mind and feelings, and to have a direct inner experience of our true nature, to bring us to a greater sense of self-awareness and to expand that sense of self into greater and greater realms of consciousness.

The LWHS Winter Musical Showcase is now available. Enjoy!
The music performed by Living Wisdom performing arts students was written by our school's founder, J Donald Walters. The showcase includes solo, ensemble, and choral performances. Every student brought their whole hearts to this work, and the beauty that they shared as a result is our gift to you, our global community!

Living Wisdom High School's Winter Musical Showcase 2023

Happy Finals Weeks! Around the class you can find classmates helping each other on Spanish assignments, faculty reviewing essays for editing and feedback, laughter with one another in a small math study group with Teacher Haze, students cheering on our ladies as they practice their chin-ups, and a couple of bass singers practicing their parts for our upcoming concert.

Sure, there is some nervousness, stress, and worry felt in the air, and along with those feelings are also joy, support, care, and happiness. Not to mention, the potential of centering ourselves in a student-driven meditation in the mornings before the start of school.

Our students are learning that even when there are difficult emotions that arise, underneath all of it, there is joy that can be found deep within ourselves.

Testimonial Tuesday!

Is your teenager looking for a school like ours? Priority enrollment ends on December 15. Call to make an appointment with our director to see if Living Wisdom High School is the right fit for you and your child.

Our Gift to You this Giving Tuesday - https://www.livingwisdomhighschool.org/happiness-and-success-for-teens-book

I am often asked what is unique about Living Wisdom HS, and I find this to be a perennially fresh and intriguing question to explore. It is noteworthy, reflecting on our school community, that what is happening at LWHS is dramatically different from many learning environments that are mainstream. Both the methods and the results are oriented towards self-understanding and self-mastery and are inexorably tied to the expansion of consciousness that naturally leads to lasting success and happiness.

The Joy Patrol caught these smiling musicians playing around on campus!

Cells and more cells! Bio students at work!

LWHS helped to put on the Harvest Festival at Ananda Village this weekend!
After a full day of service, we enjoyed a delicious farm-to-table dinner at The Expanding Light Retreat.
Service is joy!

Thank you, Education for Life, for featuring our Wholeness Week blog in the October EFL newsletter!

Wholeness - Education for Life At Living Wisdom High School in Palo Alto, CA, we start each year with Wholeness Week. Students and teachers come together on day one for an orientation. Then, bright and early the next day, we depart for our first immersive experience of the year. The priority on this trip is building connections w...

Join us this Thursday at 7 pm to hear from our director, faculty, and current students and parents.

Bring your teenager to see if our school is the right fit for both you and your child.

If you are looking for an amazing place for your elementary or middle school aged child, be sure to catch the upcoming open house at Living Wisdom School!

We are having an Open House next Wednesday, October 11th 7:00-8:30 pm. Please share this post!😀

What is it that teens need almost as much as the air they breathe? Challenge! Adventure! And the opportunity to marvel and the wonders of life! So, we took this group of teens on an all night hike to the base of Half Dome. A perfect adventure!

Live Like a Spartan Challenge
An experiential world history assignment

Dear students,

Per our conversation in class we will be embracing a challenge together as a group -- code of honor! We're all in this together. I will also be joining you.

For the next two weeks we will live (more) like the Spartans of old. We will give up some petty pleasure in the name of self-control and we will intentionally take on some discipline in the name of self-mastery.

We have all chosen one petty pleasure to give up. We all know what they are and have given our word to the group that we will abstain for the next two weeks.

Additionally, we will all spend 60 seconds a day perfectly still with our eyes closed. I recommend you do this every day at the same time, such as the last thing you do before you go to bed, or the first thing you do after showering so you don't forget. This is important! Remember to do this every day. It will get easier and easier, I promise you.

After two weeks, we will all reflect on our experiences and if we are beginning to notice a change in our lives...

Back-to-School with the Living Wisdom School TK-8th grade director, Helen Purcell

Why have Americans become so sad and so mean? What is happening in society? And, how are Living Wisdom School Palo Alto and Living Wisdom High School of Palo Alto changing the tide?

Back to School Night '23 To begin our 31st year Helen addresses the problem with modern education's over emphasis on competitiveness over kindness!

Congratulations, Krishav Gandhi, semifinalist for the National Merit Scholarship Award! Your curiosity and dedication to personal growth and learning is inspiring!

Here are the Bay Area’s semifinalists for the prestigious National Merit Scholarship Program Nearly 1,140 Bay Area students made the list.

Sharing Nature Worldwide is hosting a training in the Bay this fall! Teachers, this is a rare opportunity!

Integrated Physical Science has started with a bang!

Off to the opera on week #1! Now that is a great beginning!

Someone is ready for a new year at LWHS!

Study desk ♥

Study with one of our LWHS teen vloggers!

Study with me | Pomodoro technique | lofi music ♡

Capture the Flag in the dark (by the light of a full-ish moon was the grand finale of Wholeness Week 2023!

An enormous thank you to Joseph Bharat Cornell and Sharing Nature Worldwide for an immersive experience of the principles of flow learning through the phase change Sharing Nature activity. Some of our teen facilitators later brought Sharing Nature games to the children and families of Ananda Living Wisdom School (Nevada City, CA).