Thursday, March 21

By Anonymous -

                                                                Our Metta Stones


Yoga

    Today, Wednesday, March 21st, is the fourth day of our Yoga and Mindfulness M Term. Today we started off the day with some yoga. Today’s yoga was on the more “resting” side. Sort of like Shavasana (a resting, meditation type of yoga). Though instead of resting lying on our back we rested in lots of yoga positions, such as the sleeping cobra. In this pose you lay on your stomach, stack your hands on top of each other and rest your forehead on tour hands. Most of the poses we did we help for about 3 minutes and stayed in a resting state with a slight stretch. This is called Ying Yoga.


                                        Resting Cobra Pose                                                       


We went ahead and finished off our Yoga with Shavasana for about 7 minutes, it was honestly so resting and it felt like way more than 7 minutes. 

After yoga we had a small 10 minute break just to reset and get ready for the next activity. 

Documentary

    After our break we finished the documentary we watched called “Mission- Joy”. This documentary was about two very important figures, Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu who are both very good friends, they had both went through so many things and still they are here with hope for the world and with smiles on their faces. This documentary was to understand them and their backstory's while asking question about how they stay hopeful and happy. 

Journaling / Listing

    After we came back from lunch we went ahead and started our Journaling, lots of us were already taking notes from the documentary but instead of doing those notes we got a new journal called “52 Lists for Calm/ Brave/ Happiness” There were 3 different types of books and we chose which ones we wanted. This book had a list prompt for each page and then goal is to do it every week for a year. 

                                                                   “52 Lists for Happiness”

Metta Stones

    Our next activity was something that we had done yesterday for the 1st time, today we kind of just got to jump into it, we all went straight onto painting rocks and it was very relaxing, everyone was kind of in their own zone. Most people (including myself) went in for a more complicated look now that they had gotten the basics down. We had a large selection of rocks, we had some darker kind of smoother ones and then some lighter ones with a few dents in them, I worked on a lighter one today and it honestly felt a lot different from the darker ones which is surprising to me. 

                                                            My Metta Stone Design
Yoga Pt.2

    After finishing our Metta Stones Dr. Reese came back and thought us a bit about Yoga Nidra. This yoga was very similar to Shavasana as well. We were on our backs this time with our feet flat against the wall as if the wall was our ground. Dr. Reese talked us through this meditation method, we went throughout the limbs in our body and relaxed every single one if them, many of us fell to sleep but it was so awesome how even if you were in deep sleep you could still hear her instructions about what to do. This seemed to be one of everyone’s favorite and I am genuinely considering using it if I ever cannot fall to sleep. 

Research

    After all of these lovely activities we did some research on the things we did today. Everyone contributed and the pages are posted on the blog as well under “Pages” they did such a good job I think you should go check those out as well. 

That concluded day 4 of Yoga and Mindfulness and I am really looking forward to day 5!


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