I attended a mindfulness-based stress reduction workshop yesterday, devoting my afternoon to a search for positive energy instead of going to the chili festival in town that I had been looking forward to for a week. After an average month of "going through the motions," I decided that it was time to get myself out of my mental rut and see if I could get anything out of this workshop. Ever since I got back from El Paso, things have been okay--not amazing. My new classes, while interesting and engaging, seem like a hodgepodge of unrelated subjects. I'm still not totally sure what I want to study, to the point where it has turned into a bit of an academic identity crisis. Reality is sinking in, and each experience is not new and exciting like it was in fall term.
I went to the workshop with these anxieties, these common anxieties that all college students unfortunately have to share. The room was filled with people who were interested in subjects like neurology, psychology, and religion, in addition to people who just wanted to figure out how to stay sane for four years. Most of them were people I had already known, whether we were classmates or good friends. In fact, we all had the appearance of regular students who weren't quite yet on the brink of ruin. The truth is that stress is something that all college students must deal with, and there is no escaping it no matter how much training we have in mindfulness and stress reduction. Our education system is designed that way, so that with each level of schooling, the pressure increases. But there are ways to deal with stress productively, and I am convinced after this workshop that there is hope.
We did some typical meditation practices, including breathing meditation, a body scan, and some yoga. As we practiced the yoga, I wondered how many people were nursing a hangover that afternoon and thought that some meditation would be the cure-all. A Saturday afternoon mindfulness workshop must be more effective than the traditional bacon and coffee cure. We lay around the room in sweatpants and hoodies on our yoga matts, moving around in awkward positions and cracking bones as we did so. It was refreshing, especially when we did a 15-minute body scan and I could soon hear people snoring while we lay on our backs. Our instructor guided us through the meditation calmly and peacefully. It felt as if time had been suspended for a while, and we were floating in space for an eternity with the occasional reminder of our instructor to rest our minds on our elbows, then our wrists, then our fingers. What was really helpful was to be in a room filled with people who had an interest in meditation and wanted to discuss how to incorporate it into their everyday lives. It was relaxed, open, and laid back.
I enjoy when discussions about stress on my campus take place. It is such an obvious element to college life, yet it is so easily ignored. People accept that it has to be the reality and that there is no other way to go about life here. I left the workshop with a renewed sense of peace and truly felt that it is possible to recognize the hundreds of satisfying moments that occur every day as long as we are aware of them. It is far too easy to cover them up when we are stressed.
