Having free drop-in sessions on campus allows students to take a break from their work and come back with a clearer mind. It also provides an environment for beginners to practice with guidance of instructors. It’s a pretty cool thing to have on campus!
Since the start of the new semester, my anxiety has come back with a vengeance. I have always been an anxious person, and have struggled with anxious thoughts and constant worrying at different points in my life. However, my anxiety…
Mindful Meditation I’m all for trying new things and stepping out of our self-designed bubbles, but that’s the thing with ‘self-design’, even when we try new things it is within a certain category. It will usually be things that we’ve…
Three years ago, I was going through a rough semester and my boyfriend’s mother gave me a book called Wherever You Go There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a stress reduction and mindfulness expert. Prior to this point, I’d thought of…
Let me start this off by saying I am not a yogi, nor am I a master of the subconscious – or any other level of consciousness for that matter. U of T’s new yoga and meditation programming is inclusive and inviting, and all you need in order to participate is your presence.
Yoga and meditation are available across campus five days a week at a variety of times to suit our crazy schedules. It’s drop-in programming so you can go as often or as seldom as you like. If it’s Wednesday, 5:15 p.m. and you’re thinking you’re done for the day, you can pop over to the Goldring Centre and join the “Yoga and Meditation” session which runs from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. It’s flexible – in more than just the obvious sense.
That’s the session I had the pleasure of attending this week. It was held in the dance studio/multi-purpose room on the top tier of the Goldring Centre’s strength and conditioning centre. I’d never been in that space before and oh how I wanted to dance! It’s so bright and open, with a wall of mirrors that I could think of many ways to exploit.
Hi there!
Last week I wrote about being ill, and I speculated that (in addition to cold weather and a nasty cough virus circulating in the air) my sickness was due to being out of touch with my body. It happens every once in a while when we get so busy that it can be a challenge to keep tabs on how we are (really) feeling and what our body (really) needs.
I mentioned to a friend in passing this week that I sometimes attend Mindful Moments sessions on campus to get better connected with my body. He giggled, and said that he imagines me sitting cross-legged with my eyes closed, deeply concentrating on foretelling the future. I think at some point my friend was misinformed—mindfulness, meditation, tai chi, or yoga are not activities done to prophesize about the future. Quite oppositely, the goal is to bring more awareness to the present moment, to the body, and the breath.
A storm had been ravaging my mind lately. It had been swirling and churning for the past few days, screaming at me during every moment of the day to study, study, STUDY, and so on Thursday night, instead of tackling the pile of work sitting at my desk, I decided to go to the weekly Chan Meditation session held at the Multi-Faith Centre.
When I think of multitasking, I usually don’t equate it with being mellow. In fact, to me, multitasking looks a bit like this: I kid, I’m not actually a busy octopus—I actually just draw that badly—but multitasking feels like that…
If you had told me in September that 8 months from now I would be an avid supporter of meditation – I would have told you that you were crazy! I grew up my whole life with a mother who…
It always surprises me when I learn a practical life skill in class. Does that sound anti-academic? I don’t mean it to. A lot of the knowledge I gain from my classes is interesting and it usually helps me to…