Mindfulness is a practice where you use the five senses to engage physically and non-judgmentally with the world around you. When you do a task with mindful awareness, you do it with 100% of your energy and attention.

Practicing mindfulness is incredibly empowering. It can help you to better stress and anxiety when it does occur. It helps with self-regulation, promotes positive emotions and self-compassion.  Any activity can be done with a sense of mindfulness, even eating dinner with your family.

How Mindfulness Benefits a Growth Mindset

Practicing mindfulness techniques can help children change their mindset from a FIXED mindset to a GROWTH mindset.

  1. Mindfulness can help children feel empowered, so they can learn to try new things and take more educational risks.
  2. Using mindfulness techniques like deep breathing and tensing and relaxing the muscles can help children overcome anxiety when life situations become overwhelming.
  3. By promoting self-love and self-compassion, mindfulness activities can help children overcome negative self-talk.

 

Being Mindful and Promoting Effective Self Care

Self Care is quickly becoming a trend in our world, but not always in the best of ways.  I want to teach my students about proper self-care and the importance of it.  Often, when people think of self care they think of indulging in the things that make them feel better, like taking a bath, or buying themselves a new item.  I want to promote self care in my students that stresses the importance of recognizing what you need to be successful.  Sometimes self care looks like washing your face, making your bed, or creating a routine schedule for yourself to follow.  Some of the best self care is not glamorous at all but is far more effective and efficient than having to take an entire day for yourself. Self-care should not be something we resort to because we are so absolutely exhausted that we need a massive break from our own relentless internal pressure.  True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.  True self-care is letting yourself be normal. Regular. Unexceptional.

Reflective Practice

I acquired Strong Nations Yoga Cards that I use to assist me while teaching reflective practice.  These cards helped students to connect their learning to First Peoples Principles of Learning concepts and interact with each other. The cards require students to work in groups to think creatively by using the cards to create their own yoga sequences.  Each group performs their yoga sequence in their groups and reflects at the end by flipping the final card over to the reflection side.  Students connect the First Peoples Principles concepts that I embed into lessons to the yoga activities and lessons.