Getting Grounded By Training The Brain Day 8- Kilali and Jayla


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 dragon pose.

After our yoga practice we went on to watch three more meditation presentations from Nabeel, Alice and myself. Nabeel’s meditation was about depression and avoiding dwelling in the past too much. Alice’s meditation was on managing your anger and controlling how you react when you are mad. Finally, my meditation was on removing self-doubt and building confidence. Everyone did an amazing job at their meditation and really blew all of us away.

After we took a break for lunch, everyone started working on actually putting the sand on their sand mandalas. We used a lot of different colors this time. The online students each got to design and create their own mandalas, while the in-person students worked in pairs. Each person and group came up with a design that represented something meaningful to them. For example, my groups mandala was about building confidence. Today we finally got to see everyone's mandalas come to life and they were absolutely beautiful! I think we all did astounding work for one of our first times working on sand mandalas.

Dr. Reece then had us all work on a small activity to kind of reflect on this J-Term. We first listed words that we thought represented this J-term. Then we all made our own Haiku poems about the J-term. Then we were given an activity called bracelet intention. For this activity we made bracelets out of string and either put three knots in it or three breads.

Isabelle creating her sand mandala.

These knots or beads symbolize our intentions, which are things that we wanted to continue from this J-term and commit to. My intentions were kindness, compassion, and confidence. Now we keep this bracelet on us until it falls off or breaks, as a reminder of our three intentions. I thought that the bracelet intention activity was a great way to really take what we learned from this J-term and keep a reminder of it on us. Overall I had an amazing day and I can’t wait to see what we do tomorrow for our final day of J-term!

Intention Bracelets 
Students listening to Alice's meditation presentation.
Class doing cobra pose. 
Nabeel focused on completing center of his sand mandala. 


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