Community Support and Wellness Workshops – Positive Thinking!

Jasmine Shrestha

Undergraduate life can be really hectic, not only for the students, but also for the faculty members and all others who work under constant physical and mental pressure to get their task done. After surviving in the midst of chaos throughout the academic week, giving yourself a time for relaxation that energizes you and gears you up for another week is important. For this, attending Community Support and Wellness Workshops every Thursday can be one of the options.

Community Support and Wellness Workshops are initiatives carried out by Dr. Kathryn Ayoob, Prof. Tiffany Cone, and Dean Rania covering topics such as Empathy, Adjustment, Dance Therapy, and Compassion. For the session on 19^th September, the central topic it covered was Positive Thinking. A special guest from Nepal, Mr. Durga Upreti attended the session where he introduced Vipassana Meditation to the audience. Vipassana meditation was first introduced by Gautama Buddha. This kind of meditation is done with the help of anapana. Anapana is a practice of meditation by concentrating on one’s breath. When we have a restless mind, the thoughts overpower our mind and it prevents our mind from concentrating on one thing at a time. While practicing anapana, if it becomes difficult for us to concentrate in your soft breath, then inhaling hard breaths to bring our attention towards our breath works. After calming our minds by doing so, then we can inhale normal soft breaths. Since this practice of vipassana meditation is found to be beneficial in the long run, Mr. Upreti made the crowd practice a 10-minute long guided meditation and trust me, it was refreshing and worth giving ten minutes time.

Followed by the meditation, Prof. Tiffany took over to enlighten the crowd about positive psychology giving an example of how you would perceive a partially-filled glass as: a half-filled glass or a half empty glass. According to her, perceiving the glass as a half-filled one would be the answer of a person with a positive psychology. In order to engage the crowd and promote interaction among the participants, she shot questions such as ‘what is one funny thing that you experienced today?’, ‘what is one thing that you’re grateful about today?’, ‘how do you imagine yourself in the upcoming future?’ and ‘what is one experience from your past that you feel burdened about at the moment?’ The answers to these questions had to be shared with a person right next to us. I guarantee that due to this activity, most of us got to know more about the person sitting beside us.

So, on a Thursday evening, if you’re up to relaxing and spending your time productively, then these workshops are the ones you’re looking for. This also seems to be a great opportunity for you to know people around AUW community and socialize with them. The topic for coming Thursday as announced is Self-awareness and Safety. Hope you don’t miss out on that!