Resiliency Resets

Mitra is redirecting interested participants for Fall 2024 and Spring 2025 to Mindful Mornings.  Read on if you'd like a classroom visit!

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Resiliency Resets are an opportunity to try a set of practices that you can engage in any teaching and learning environment. The following information is applicable to classroom workshops, as well, which are live and in person. Please contact Mitra if you'd like to organize a classroom visit.

• Need a five minute class opener to have your students (and yourself!) fully arrive into the classroom - whether you are online or in person?

• Need a way to "integrate" new information and ideas when you see that students have lost the thread or their capacity to pay attention in class?

• What about a way to settle your own nervous system after the day's or the week's challenges and triumphs?

Sessions vary in the amount of time from 10-45 minutes and offer all participants an opportunity to connect with our whole being wellbeing. All of what we do are practices that can be regularly returned to in any classroom (virtual or in person).

In these sessions, you'll hear the word soma or somatic; these terms refer to your internal experience and engagement with your bodily being — that’s the source for tuning into the flow of resilience. 

These are all practices and approaches that can be used in classrooms, advising sessions, and/or any other arenas where we encounter each other and our students.

So what is resilience? How do we know or notice our own resilience when we encounter it? There is a prevalent concept of resilience out there in the world that tends to be about powering through or bouncing back -- quickly getting back to the way things were. While sometimes these definitions are necessary, I am not in favor of them as a basis for wellbeing. My work, particularly in these sessions, challenges that concept of resilience. These pervasive cultural definitions come to us from engineering and physics, from the question of how well a specific material can resist an impulsive force (such as rubber, putty, fabrics, and some metals). 

But we are not buildings, pieces of steel, or mechanical contrivances. What happens when we apply “resilience” to humans? From My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem:

Resilience “is not a thing or an attribute, but a flow. It moves through the body, and between multiple bodies when they are harmonized” (p. 51). 

How do we recognize this flow in ourselves and in connection with others? a flow that moves through our bodies and can be supported by each other, as we gather, and by our own experience as we attend to our well-being. 

Let’s set an intention for today to attend well to ourselves by sensing and feeling that flow of resilience. 

We begin by finding a comfortable seated position - on a chair, on the couch, on the floor ... whatever works for you.

As you get comfortable, let's sit together and begin to notice our breath....