10 Day Mindfulness Challenge

Welcome to day 1 of the Student Wellness Center's 10-Day Stress Less Mindfulness Challenge!  To kick this off, let's start by STOPping...

The STOP (Stop, Take a breath, Observe, Proceed) practice is a basic mindfulness skill that, when done even in a bite-size manner, can help create an environment that doesn't feel so overwhelming. 

Option A:  

 2.5-minute STOP meditation
Option B: 6-minute STOP meditation
Option C: 11-minute STOP meditation

Through this practice, we learn to slow down, find some calm, and begin to gently explore what we may want, or even need to bring forward to feel more supported and present for what life brings.
 

Today we'll explore a simple, yet powerful practice: the Mindful Check-In. This practice teaches you to pause and recognize how you are feeling mentally, emotionally, and physically so that you can recenter and shift back to the present moment. 

Option A:  3-min mindful check-in 
Option B:  8-min mindful check-in 
Option C:  13-min mindful check-in 

Why it works - "The answer lies in its very nature.  This practice of moment-to-moment nonjudgmental awareness brings focus to whatever is happening in the moment, and it is only in the present moment that you can make changes." - Stahl & Goldstein, 2019 
 

The practice of mindfulness helps you to cultivate 8 essential attitudes: beginner's mind, non-judgment, acknowledgment, non-striving, equanimity, letting be, self-reliance/trust, and self-compassion. These attitudes can help you flourish both during your practice and throughout your daily life!

Before you begin today's exercise - mindful breathing - we encourage you to read through the linked article above and choose one of the attitudes to weave into the way you show up for your practice.

Option A:  5-min Breath Awareness 
Option B:  9-min Breath Awareness
Option C:  11-min Breath Awareness

A note on Wandering Mind: In practicing mindfulness, the mind will inevitably wander.  Bringing your mind back to the present moment is as much part of the practice as any other element of mindfulness. "It's important not to repress or suppress thoughts and feelings as they arise in the present moment. You are learning how to be with them as they are, rather than trying to force anything to be a certain way. It's important to first acknowledge where your mind went, and then gently bring it back to the object of focus." - Stahl & Goldstein, 2019
 

Today, we're going to shake things up a bit with a movement-based mindfulness practice - walking meditation! In walking meditation, the point is not to get from point A to point B, but for each step to be deliberate and purposeful; to be the anchor that brings you to the present moment. 

For this practice, find a quiet place where you can take 10-20 steps without changing direction, so that you can move back and forth regularly without being overly distracted. If walking is not possible for you for any reason, please consider doing  Option B - a Self-Compassion Break - instead. 

Option A:  5 minute Walking Meditation 
Option B:  6 minute Self-Compassion Break 
Option C:  10+ minute Walking Meditation 

Why it works: "By heightening awareness of mental and physical states, walking meditation - like mindfulness in general - can help us gain a greater sense of control over our thoughts, feelings, and actions, allowing us to respond in more constructive ways when we experience negative thoughts or emotions." - Greater Good Science Center
 

You have made it to the halfway point of this challenge. Nice work! Let's make this a restorative day. There will only be one practice today as a way to save you from having to make an additional decision. Instead, we invite you to lean into DOING NOTHING! We hope you enjoy! 

•    Do Nothing Meditation (8-min)
 

It is said that emotions live in the body, but for many of us, we have only learned to address our emotions from the neck up (by intellectualizing the heck out of them and falling into mind traps in the process). We live so much in our heads that we sometimes forget that our bodies hold quite a bit of information.

 
In today's practice, the body scan, we'll practice investigating our moment-by-moment experiences of the body so that we can get more in touch with what our body may be holding onto and where there may be some opportunities for greater ease. 

•    Option A:  3 minute Body Scan 
•    Option B:  6 minute Body Scan 
•    Option C: 25 minute Compassionate Body Scan 

Why it works:  The body scan can help you become more aware of where you unknowingly carry stress and tension in your body.  Often just with this new awareness, ease and release naturally arises within your body, which often has a correlative effect with mental and emotional tension as well. - Greater Good Science Center 

"I can't stop my mind from thinking" is a common frustration from those trying to establish a meditation practice. Mindfulness is not about stopping our thoughts, it's about NOTICING them without getting stuck in them or pulled downstream by them. 

In our practice today, Mental Noting/Labeling Thoughts, we'll intentionally welcome thoughts in, calmly call out their presence with a simple label like "thinking", let them go, and return our awareness to the present moment. 

We are wired to think, so this is a practice you will likely need to use more than once. Repeat as often as is necessary, and see how this practice can help you tame those pesky thoughts.

•    Option A:  4 minute Mental Noting
•    Option B:  6 minute Mental Noting 
•    Option C:  15 minute Labeling Thoughts

 
Why it works: When you learn to bring mindful awareness to your thoughts and emotions, you begin to see the habitual mind traps (e.g. negative self-talk, catastrophizing, blaming) that play a role in how you relate to stress in your life. By nonjudgmentally recognizing what gets you stuck, you can more easily avoid these traps and choose to respond in a more skillful way that will ultimately make a difference in your stress and wellbeing. 
 

Today's practice, RAIN (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) is a meditation for both deeper and kinder exploration of our difficult emotions. Many of us are so busy doing, that we often don't even recognize when we are feeling overwhelmed and are on the verge of burning out. Even when we DO recognize these feelings are present, we may try different strategies to avoid them for any number of reasons. 

This practice will help you build the capacity to be with things as they are, cultivating the resilience and care that is necessary to work with and through stress and anxiety. 

•    Option A:  5 minute RAIN Practice
•    Option B:  10 minute RAIN Practice 
•    Option C: 15 minute RAIN Practice 

Why it works: Mindfulness-based approaches like RAIN have been proven to help decrease symptoms of stress and anxiety. They work by teaching you to be with a wide range of experiences (including difficult ones) with more objectivity and space. This allows you to develop greater awareness in how you habitually react to stress and move toward more skillful ways of responding to challenging experiences (Miller, Fletcher, & Kabat-Zinn, 1995). 
 

As we near the end of this Stress Less Challenge, we wanted to equip you with a practice to cultivate your capacity for greater compassion toward yourself and others. Let's dive into loving-kindness and compassion meditations. 

In today's practice, we will send phrases of goodwill inward and outward. Take some time to reflect after your practice and notice any changes in your feelings toward yourself and others. 

•    Option A:  5 minute Loving-Kindness Meditation 
•    Option B:  7 minute Self Compassion Meditation 
•    Option C:  18 minute Loving-Kindness Meditation 
 

Why it works: People who practiced loving-kindness meditation daily for seven weeks reported a steady increase in their daily experience of positive emotions, such as joy, gratitude, contentment, hope, and love. They also reported greater life satisfaction and lower depressive symptoms following the intervention, compared to when they started (Frederickson et al, 2008). 
 

Congratulations! You have reached the final day of this Mindfulness Challenge!  What do you need most, today, to support all the effort that you put forth this past week and a half?  Maybe you need another Loving-Kindness practice because there is some part of you that is critiquing how you moved through this challenge. Perhaps you want to feel the focus and calm a body scan can provide.

Or maybe you're ready to step back from guided practice and try something a little more self-directed at this point.

Give yourself a moment to mindfully check-in and listen, and then choose a practice that best fits your needs for the moment.

While you are at it, congratulate yourself that you dedicated time over the past 10 days to care for yourself! That is something worth celebrating!!!

•    Option A:  5 minute Body Scan 
•    Option B:  5 minute Mindful Movement (Pick Me Up Flow) 
•    Option C:  10 minute Loving-Kindness for Peace & Grace 
•    Option D: 11 minute Lightly Guided Meditation
•    Option E: Choose a favorite from a past day or set a timer and sit in silence for an amount of time that works for you.