Blog Day 4: Getting Ground by Training the Brain- Nabeel and Jayla
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 acknowledge how our body felt in this position. Whether it be neutral, pleasant or unpleasant. The important part is to be self aware of our thoughts during this activity and if our thoughts wander we continue to bring back our minds to the present.
Another new pose we practiced is “crow” otherwise known as Bakasana. A position that places a lot of stress on the body specifically in your arms as you try to lift your feet off the ground and lift your legs up. It was a harder pose to accomplish. Many of us did our best however we had the option to focus our energy on getting one leg up rather than both.
After these yoga poses we moved into the discussion of quartz. Each of us having our own purple quart, Maestra, leading a discussion on the energies and thoughts we could transfer into the stone. Learning that in this spiritual belief the quart stone is one of the most powerful of its kind. We started off with rinsing our quartz while thinking positive thoughts to claim the stone as our own. Learning that this resource object is one we can use to help us ground ourselves or can also be used in other meditation practices.
We ended the first three hour period by taking a twenty minute nature walk. We gathered supplies for our upcoming mindful craft activity in the afternoon. Materials used include rocks, leaves, flowers, sticks, moss and others. In addition to these each of us received a shell to use as our centerpiece. The afternoon started with a reflective seminar discussing the two assigned articles for homework. We talked about The Five Hindrances: ill will, sloth and torpor, restless and remorse, doubt and sensory desires and how these can be linked to social media. Including what mindfulness exercise can be used when dealing with these five hindrances.
The craft today was to make nature mandalas. The key learning of this activity was to be able to make something beautiful with our nature supplies and to destroy it afterwards. The purpose of this is to show we hold the ability to be untethered to materialistic objects.
We finished the day with a discussion lead by Dr. Reese on empathy. We watched a short video explaining the difference between empathy and sympathy narrated by Brene Brown outlining the four faces of love. This brought us to the end of the week by closing with a practice called Shavasana meditation.
Our nature mandalas
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