In the daily routine of studying, getting dressed, commuting to school, taking a test, rehearsals and planning ahead for upcoming assignments and events, it is hard to be present and enjoy the moment.
“We live stressful lives right now, so we need to do what we can to take care of ourselves and mental health,” Cozby Library and Community Commons librarian Jennifer Franz said.
The Cozby Library hosted its monthly mindfulness practice session on Sunday afternoon.
“Sunday is our busiest day at the library, so I think it’s nice to have something where people can go off and have a moment to themselves and have some mindfulness,” Franz said.
Sheela Singla, a UCLA-trained mindfulness facilitator, has been guiding these sessions for the past three years.
“Mindfulness is one type of meditation where we bring our attention to the present moment with kindness, curiosity and nonjudgement,” Singla said. “Our minds are very lively and active, and wander away from the present. So when our mind wanders to past or future thoughts, we gently bring our attention back to the present moment.”
The first 15 minutes of the session are dedicated to an introduction to the topic of the day, and then concludes with participants talking about a relational practice in pairs.
This session’s topic was “knowing from a deeper and more intuitive place.”
“Typically when we have a problem in our lives, we approach it through a lot of discursive thinking,” Singla said. “But in mindfulness meditation there’s another way to arrive at solutions to problems that have been vexing and bothering us, and that is to allow a solution to arise from a deeper, more intuitive place of knowing from within.”
The time in between is spent practicing mindful meditation related to the topic, which, in this case, is learning how to solve problems in life at a deeper level.
“We practice by posing a question to ourselves in our minds, ‘What exactly is the problem that I’d like to solve? What would I like to find out about how I could oppose this problem?” Singla said. “Then we wait and we see what arises from within as a potential solution to the problem. We can ask a few times, and typically what people find is they get some kind of answer.”
The goal at the end of the hour is for participants to have more clarity on themselves.
“This was very interesting for me, and I found out exactly how busy my mind is,” Coppell resident Diane Tate said. “I feel very encouraged because I learned some things about myself today, and I want to go and practice what I’ve learned everyday.”
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