Fun does NOT mean drinking or partying.
Fun can be a night in your house alone reading a book. Fun can be a deep conversation. Fun can be a walk. Fun can be creating art. Fun can be listening to music.
Fun can be dancing in the rain. Bill Connolly said, "I hate all those weatherman, too, who tell you that rain is bad weather. There is no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothing, so get yourself a raincoat and live a little." :)
Meditation can also be Fun. Solitude is often nice, no endless conversations, just you and your thoughts. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "Adopt the pace of nature, her secret is patience."
Meditation is one of the single tools to help you stay focused. Contemplation can be Fun. Your calm mind is the ultimate weapon against your challenges.
Meditation can help us understand how our emotions work. Most of the time, we are hesitant to acknowledge negative emotions. We are growing up thinking anxiety, anger, sadness are bad emotions. But naming and accepting these emotions is a foundation to problem-solving how to manage them.
Yoga can be Fun. Yoga can be used in the classroom or at home to create a unique and fun learning experience for students. Meditation and yoga can give us a sense of calm, peace, and stress reduction, leading to improvement of our emotional well-being.
Practicing meditation has been linked to decrease stress, greater mindfulness, and improved psychological health.
Meditation leads to mindfulness. Mindfulness is paying attention to what is happening in the current moment, both within our thoughts and bodies and the world around us. Mindfulness helps us to turn our focus to experiences occurring in the present moment in order to create awareness and gratitude. Mindfulness can help us to notice our stresses or negative feelings early on in order to change the way we perceive them.
Practicing mindfulness can be Fun. Practicing mindfulness regularly can ease anxiety and stress, improve self compassion.
Inhale. Exhale. If you can do this fun exercise, you have everything you need at this moment.
Rumi said, "There is a voice that does not use words. Listen." Breathe. Sometimes you just need to disconnect and enjoy your own company.
Today is always the best day to listen to the birds, to notice nature's beauty, to smell the flowers.
Find a quiet place and get into a comfortable sitting position. practice focusing on your breath, and the present moment.
Start by centering yourself on you breath, noticing your inhales and exhales without you trying to change the natural rhythm of your breathing. Next, turn your focus to your body, beginning either from the top or the bottom. How is your head feeling today? How are you neck and shoulders? Continue moving down, lingering for several moments on each part of your body and noticing any stiffness, tension, soreness...
Once you have scanned your entire body, you can once return again to your breath, then slowly come out of your meditation.
Mindful walking can be Fun. Walk more slowly than usual, making it a smooth and continuous movement, while being conscious of every step. This can have a huge calming effect because it forces your mind to slow down along with the rest your body.
Hanh said, "Life is both dreadful and wonderful. To practice meditation is to be in touch with both aspects."
Meditation is a secular practice, not a religious practice. Meditation helps us to be aware of the thoughts we are thinking.To be mindful entails examining the path we are travelling and making choices that bring happiness to ourselves and those around us.
You made a mistake. That is okay! Meditation helps you see that mistake in context, while mindfulness helps you remove the stories you are telling yourself about it that are out of proportion to reality.
We are not monks living in a monastery. We need to find the best time to practice meditation and mindfulness within the normal flow of our day.
I use mindfulness as a way to help my students build self-regulation skills and learn to calm down when they become frustrated or angry. There are lots of informal ways to bring some of the benefits of focusing on the present in the classroom. It might become routine at the start of the day, or when class begins, to do a mindful check-in: each student takes a deep breath, and shares how they are feeling at the present moment. Indeed, it is a great way to embed a mindfulness practice in the DNA of the classroom.
We need to explain to our students the relationship between their amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. Students should know that an "amygdala hijack" is a physiological response to stress that makes it harder for them to think, learn, or remember. While it is not their fault, it is something that they can learn how to control through mindfulness practices.
We can encourage our students to practice acts of gratitude by creating a gratitude tree. It can be a drawing or wire frame of the trunk, limbs, and branches of a tree. Each day, students write one thing they are grateful for on a paper "leaf" and attach it to the tree. The leaves can be anonymous.
Mandala coloring can be Fun. Mandala coloring pages are made up of repetitive shapes and patterns that students can take their time to color as they chose because there is no right or wrong way to complete the designs. Mandala coloring is very useful for students who prefer to process their thoughts silently.
Mindful writing can be Fun. Whether through daily journal prompts or written reflections after discussions, the act of putting our thoughts on paper brings about a similar kind of metacognition and awareness as meditating.
Meditation can slow down a lot of the buzzing thoughts we have in our mind, and deep breathing helps to increase the flow of oxygen to the brain, which helps release endorphins and calm our body.
Deep belly breathing, where you put one hand below your diaphragm and one on your chest, focusing on the body's sensations, also works to calm the brain and body.
Remember Fun is yours. Fun can be knitting, coloring mandalas, exercising. Fun can be journaling, playing or listening to music.
Fun is Yours.
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