Get Grounded by Training the Brain

Sara and Blake's sand mandala  For day 8 of this J-term, we continued on with the regular schedule of yoga, meditations, and creative projects. This is unfortunately one of our last days of J-term, so Dr. Reece has surprised us with a little sort of closing activity. As usual, we started off our day with our daily meditation to get us ready and present for the rest of the day’s activities.  stretch. It also allowed some time to do personal reflection and work on really being present in the moment. We then went to our daily yoga practice although this one was very different from our usual practices. We practiced Yin yoga today and usually we do it differently forms of Yang yoga.  In Yin yoga you hold yoga poses for extended periods of time. In our practice we held them for about  minutes each.  We did poses like child's pose, dragons pose, cobra and many more. I personally really enjoyed this Yin yoga practice because it allowed me time to really get into  Students doing the dra

Blake working with beads   Sara + Kilali in Meditation Today was a really fun day for the J term. We start off the day by doing the 52 list book. It was a really good time for everybody to get a chance to reflect. Then we moved on to some mindful movement. Today was a very different day than our usual routine. It was much more active than usual. We did more Vinyasa style yoga today which was a lot more active than vigorous. The new routine seems to be more challenging for many people but also rewarding when you are able to do the complicated poses. After we all relaxed with a savasana it was time for the first people to give their presentations. Jayla's, Sara's, Henry's, and Evan's presentations and Were all amazing and super well planned out. We all really enjoyed doing their mindful movements. The entire class really enjoyed listening to their talks and meditations. After we came back from lunch everyone started working on their final sand Mandalas. Though most people

Starting the day, the class participated in a guided mindfulness and yoga session. We focused on different poses and calming our minds. After finishing the practice, we journaled in our notebooks in order to record and reflect on the experience. We also split into groups in order to share our thoughts with a partner. The whole experience was relaxing and left me in a peaceful, calm mindset for the remainder of the day.        In the afternoon, we practiced creating mandalas out of colored sand. After watching a couple of video tutorials, we each designed two unique sand mandalas, each one using a single color. This practice helped tap into our creative mindset and prompted calm, focused energy. Each mandala was unique to the creator and reflected each individual’s creativity.

  Each day we do different types of yoga at the beginning of and throughout the day. Today, we did many new yoga poses and meditation. We focused on moving our bodies and paying attention to our breath. followed by a seminar to review our reading. We talked about the Seven Chakras and Hatha yoga, also implementing the seven chakras in our yoga. The experience of doing yoga with classmates is bonding. <This is how some of the students mandalas turned out Today we made sand mandalas, showing the cycle of life by creating something beautiful, just to destroy it in the end. The mandalas ended up looking very beautiful and detailed. The moral of mandalas is about how things can come and go quickly, just like sand is pulled into the ocean by an ocean wave, or someone close that we love must go, but we have to move on. They may be gone, but we will remember the memories we had making them.  At the end of the day, we all made sticky notes full of kind words. We first wrote kind words to Ms.

On this last day of our first week into Getting Grounded by Training the Brain we started off with learning a new grounding technique using only our hands. This is a great way to stay in the present time and to lessen fidgeting by using one hand to trace the other. Keeping your breathing to match the rising and fall of the outline of are fingers. Afterwards doing a basic meditation on the ten percent happier app to get us ready to start off the day. It was called behind the waterfall, the topic of this exercise was mindfulness of thoughts, acknowledging all of the emotions we were feeling during this meditation session and sitting with them.   Around ten thirty we began a yoga movement around the topic of equanimity. This is the process of having a balanced mind with openness and compassion for each other and ourselves. Today we explored many new yoga poses including revisiting a difficult one known as “chair”.  This was a great way to focus on a breathing anchor technique and to ackno

F eel free to visit our Padlet where you will find ALL of the Creative Mindful Projects each of the students has made.

Get Grounded By Training the Brain, Day 3 By Kilali and Evan Jayla's metta stone We started off the day by having Dr. Reese join us on the zoom call and walked us through some meditative movements, yoga, and a great group discussion about what it really means to meditate, about last night's reading, and much more. We then as a class got to have our first J-Term seminar! It was super interesting and very enlightening to see all the different points of view from people throughout the class, how they interpreted the reading, their thought process throughout the article, and what it made them think of. In-Person students in the first seminar I really enjoyed how the entire class came together to trade ideas we all had about the reading, like how emotions are deserving of validation, to listen to other’s problems, and to have empathy for others. We  also learned about what it is to have empathy for others. Dr. Reese told a lot about how to have sympathy in situations where it may be

Get Grounded by Training the Brain, Day 2 By: Henry and Sara We had another amazing day of mindfulness, yoga, and meditation on Day three of getting Grounded by Training the Brain. The day began with a meditation to get us in the mood for all the fun activities that were planned. However, things did not go quite as planned today, as Dr. Reese had stepped away from the class to deal with some family issues. Nonetheless, we had a really fun morning.  We began by writing in our ‘52 Lists for Calm’ books, which was a way to reduce stress by listing things like ‘objects that bring happiness in your life’, ‘the emotions you feel when stressed’, ‘ways in which you are different now than you were in the past’, and many other prompts. We then played with our zen gardens, making cool designs and just having fun with the sand. Next, we learned about the zentangle, which is a really fun drawing practice involving patterns and shapes.    ^ This is Jaylas Zen Garden We then discussed the material th

Training the Brain, Day One Today we focused on getting to know what the course is about and what we will spend our time on. We had fun creating an account on the Ten Percent Happier app. This app will guide us throughout these nine days and help us focus on expanding and training the brain. We had fun adding each other on the app to guide us through this journey. In the second hour, we started to move with Dr. Reese. The class had fun learning new yoga poses, some challenging and some very relaxing. Afterward, we learn the real meaning behind the word “namaste.” It means hello so we will not be using it at the end of our yoga sessions. We moved onto the second half of the day where the group learned plenty about mandalas. Not only did we color them, but we also read how important they are to Asian cultures. Ms. Novak then led a very fun activity. The class made Zen Gardens. They consist of a small box filled with sand and different designs created by students. Dr. Reese then taught us

 Let's  explore mindfulness, movement, creativity and meditation to improve experiences of everyday living.