Academic Resilience

So thank you for joining us today. My name is Kelly Mullaly. I will be moderating this meeting, The Holistic Learning Strategies Toolbox: Bringing in the Breath and the Body.

Before we get started, I just want to mention a couple of things. We ask that you please mute yourselves during the presentation to avoid feedback and sounds and background noises.

The presentation will last 90 minutes. If you have any questions you may enter them in the chat. The presenters will do their best to address them throughout the presentation.

If your questions do run past the 90 minutes, your presenters have offered to make themselves available after the presentation.

So let me introduce you to our speakers today. We have Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer and Dr. Diana Brecher from Ryerson University; thank you.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: Hi everybody.

Dr. Diana Brecher: Welcome.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: Thank you so much for coming today. We are so jazzed about sharing this next time together.

Dr. Diana Brecher: Welcome. We’re going to just get right into it because there’s so much we want to share with you.

So we want to start off by really welcoming you, acknowledging the land and then taking off into our material.

So, Toronto… I want to start by saying that we’ve chosen to use the land acknowledgement from Toronto and from Ryerson because that’s where we’re situated and we know that all of you could be anywhere across the country but we wanted to kind of acknowledge where this work was created.

Toronto is in the “Dish With One Spoon Territory” that bound them to share the territory and protect the land. Subsequent Indigenous Nations and peoples, Europeans and all newcomers have been invited into this treaty in the spirit of peace, friendship and respect.

So we want to start off by giving you a brief introduction of ourselves and the work we do. My name is Dr. Diana Brecher, my pronouns are she and her and I am a clinical psychologist, deeply rooted in CBT and about five years ago, after 25 years in the Counseling Centre at Ryerson, I started the ThriveRU program, which is a resilience-based training program that I’ve been rolling out across campus to students faculty and staff. And, as part of that, I’ve partnered with Deena to create the Thriving In Action program and the Thriving in Action online that Deena will tell you a little bit more about.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: Hey everybody, hi friends. I’m Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer. Please call me Deena, my pronouns are she and her. I’m the coordinator of Student Transitions and Retention within Student Wellbeing at Ryerson, and what that means, the kind of nutshelliest version I can think of is that I create innovative learning-related programs, interventions to help students stay. Staying is the right thing and much of that work has become a really incredible partnership with Diana and the Thriving in Action program that we’ve created and it’s now spread across Canadareally beautifully and unexpectedly.

So that’s been our work and our immersion for the past four years, is how to integrate personal thriving and resilient skills with academic tenacity skills in order to support students who would articulate things aren’t going very well and where we might not be in a position to create system-level change, how can we support the students who are asking for a guide on the side.

And so we also translated some of that work into an online program which were actually we can share the login information. It was centered around a bit of a different question, so—next slide please—around How can I learn to love being a student?

Wonderful. And this was the hope of reaching students who might not be able to make it to class, who might be distance learning—this was pre-covid—so now all of us in a sense can’t make it to campus and we’re happy to share the login information. What it asks or what it offers in response is not a prescription or an imposition but rather 12 nesses or states of being or possible dispositions to practice in response to make things a little lighter. And we’re excited to share that actually it is now it has been free to our community. Anyone in our thriving connection community practice and who they shared it with but now it’s just entirely free for everyone going forward. So we’re really delighted to share that and the login information is next so you can take approval if you’re interested.

That was our hopeful login our password from last year and we shared itbut we’re still going. We’re still going so really it’s indefinite, if you want to take a look.

So introducing today what fueled us to want to present. You know, we are rooted and nourished by existing and exciting models of well-being. We’re interested deeply in how anxiety, depression, grief and trauma impact learning and make it difficult. We’re interested in kind of swimming in and exploring and offering what we’re calling polyvagal pedagogy.

And all of that leads us to want to make the case for what we call holistic learning strategies. So that’s what fueled us.

What frames today, we’re going to talk about some basics of the body in respect to sleep. So sleep is a learning strategy, becalming and how’s the nervous system at play, heartbeat and breath, the bond and mammalian caregiving system balance and what we can learn about some of the vestibular research and focus. What do we do in the spaces in between sort of connective tissue, not literal but metaphoric? And taking the breathing space in between learning strategies.

Ballads, so singing as a learning strategy and bounce how to have a little bit more joy and what the research indicates.

And then finally, fumbling around, what are we fumbling with? What are some of the questions, ultimately, we’re asking? How can we learn, and by that, you know, how can we show up how, can we attend, listen, reflect when we’re anxious or when we’re grieving? How can we study and perform, produce, like discern and space, and that spacing that we talked about in the keynote. How do we retain. how do we apply performance, even feedback when we’re overwhelmed and how can we create, make connections between topics, really go into the connectivity of our readings how do we connect with others in groups and on teams when we are struggling to cope?

So, first, you know, it’s really important that we mention some of the vast number of models of well-being because this isn’t around presenting something new; it’s about harkening or turning inward. So what helps us make sense in terms of frameworks or how we understand well-being?

So, first we turn to the work of Dr. Kathy Absolon. Medicine Wheel teachings are absolutely not ours to teach and so we turn to Dr. Absolon’s words. So, in this diagram, Medicine Wheel, “concentric circles represent levels of being and illustrate the reciprocal interconnections. At the center is a tiny circle representing the self; the next circle represents family and community and nation society and outward to the ecology of creation. Inclusive to all the levels are infants, youth, young adults, adults and elders. Each level of being is affected by the historical, social, political, and economic, and each layer has a spiritual, emotional, mental and physical elements.”

“Indigenous wholism considers the connections and the concept we are all related. Begins to make sense as we perceive each aspect in relation to the whole. I use the Medicine Wheel as a tool to depict Indigenous holistic theory, a concrete tool to understanding the nature of balance harmony and Bimaadisiwin–living a good life. It acknowledges the factors that contribute toward achieving that sense of peace and balance.”

So it’s not so much that we borrow and we don’t take but are inspired by and acknowledge.

We also encounter Te Whare Tapa Whā, a maori conception of well-being put forward predominantly by the work of Dr. Mason Durie. Again, not at all ours to offer but to name its existence and how it helps us make sense. So Te Whare Tapa Whā, here you can see, is the depiction of a house of “four dimensions of health seen as platforms for an integrated approach to the delivery of health services to Maori. A spiritual dimension recognized the importance of culture to identity as well as the significance of long-standing connections between people, ancestors and the natural environment. A cognitive and emotional dimension based on Maori ways of thinking feeling and behaving. Physical wellbeing, encompassing more familiar aspects of bodily health. And social wellbeing, family aspect. All four dimensions acting in unison seen as foundations for health and relevance to the full range of health services. Mental health services, for example, should not be so narrowly focused on the psyche that physical health spiritual dimensions or social relationships are ignored. A whole-person approach to healing is advocated.”

And you can see that it is predicated or based upon land and roots and so in this way we also don’t want to be part of or complicit in a silo discussion of learning strategies.

Dr. Diana Brecher: This comes from Positive Psychology, primarily Martin Seligman’s conceptualization of what it means to flourish but also Emilya Zhivotovskaya has added vitality. So, if we think of these as the six pillars of flourishing, we’ve got positive emotions, so you’re feeling good, excited, happy, content; you’re engaged in what you’re doing and it’s meaningful for you; the relationships you have in your life are positive and nurturing and you don’t have toxic relationships. You have a sense of purpose in what you’re doing and it gives you a sense of meaning. You achieve the goals you set out to achieve and vitality refers mostly to the body. Are you sleeping? Are you eating well? Are you exercising? Are you stretching? Are you at ease in your body? So, when we pull all of those together the big tent of flourishing that’s what we tend to be talking about within positive psychology of how we can engage in each of those areas almost like they’re juggling all six balls at the same time.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: And here, very briefly, just to show how these are coming up to belie all the work that we are doing. And so UBC Wellness Wheel and you can actually use that as an interactive tool with your students or for yourself to shade in each pie slice about how present, alive or tended to each particular area is. Then there’s this wheel from Alliance for Healthier Communities. It’s an organization of primary health providers in Ontario and they advocate research and innovate ever healthier province and you can see where social justice intersects. And then the Canadian index well-being, so here is 64 social health economic environmental indicators contributing to overall quality of life; really helpful to turn to things like community, vitality, belonging, volunteering, having five or more close friends. What are people articulating about those as being alive or present?

So what else is part of this work? And this is just us getting going. The Okanagan Charter. And so, you know, the shared aspirations are really that health promotion is infused into everyday operations within the campus and academic mandates. It, therefore, helps contribute to a culture of compassion on campus of well-being, equity, social justice. I love what they say: improve the health of the people who live, learn, work, play and love on our campuses.

And so I’m very exciting that LSAC has just last week signed a statement of endorsement, that we too and our work will do the same or already are CAUCUSS several years ago did and so we move now into how do we make the case for making the case, trying to make the case for wholistic learning strategies?

Beautiful. So let’s turn to some of the thinkers then who guide this. Laura Rendón, so she is from University of Texas, San Antonio, and she writes: “the transformation of teaching and learning so that it is unitive in nature. A teaching and learning dream”. She calls it “pedagogic vision based on wholeness and consonance”. So she’s the author of the beautiful book Sentipensant Pedagogy and she advocates and writes beautifully about a more whole and spirit-infused and heart-rich approach to teaching and learning. I’d like to think learning strategies are part of that.

Dr. Beth Berila. So she’s the director of Gender and Women’s Studies Program and the professor for Ethnic, Gender and Women’s Studies Department at St. Cloud State University of Minnesota, where she teaches courses in feminist theory, gender and the body and she’s the author of Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education. She writes: “Mindful education echoes many of the principles of anti-oppression pedagogy, bringing an embodied layer into the learning process. Reclaiming embodiment is critical for well-being”.

Okay another one of my favorites, Dr. Gregory Cajete, currently professor of Native American studies and language literacy and sociocultural studies, University of New Mexico. He’s author of a spectacularly beautiful Look to the Mountain, and he writes: “We learn through our bodies as much as our minds”.

Parker Palmer and a professor and writer and speaker. And in his 2015 Naropa University commencement speech writes: “Be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart. What I really mean is be passionate fall madly in love with life, be passionate about some part of the natural human world; take risks no matter how vulnerable. No one ever died saying I’m sure glad for the self-centered, self-serving and self-protective life I lived”. He writes: “Offer yourself to the world; your energies, your gifts, your visions, your heart, with open-hearted generosity. But understand that when you live that way, you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail. He encourages all to grow in love and service. And so he writes about teaching, good teaching, should address three connected critical paths that are related to the development of the whole person: intellectual, emotional and spiritual.

And, finally, yesterday an absolutely compelling keynote by Nana professor George Day. He writes: “When the mind, body, soul and spirit are in play” in his work and de-colonial change and anti-colonial education.

Diane: So we’re going to invite you to switch gears a little bit and I’m going to be really moving into my clinical psychology mind and telling you about what’s going on with our students typically when they present in a counseling center with anxiety, depression, grief, trauma and how it affects their academic performance.

So I want to start with the truth of the matter is, a certain amount of anxiety and stress actually supports performance and we know that.

So if you’re familiar with the Yerkes-Dodson Human Performance curve what you’ll notice here is that about midpoint for stress is our optimal performance. That’s when we have just enough worry about performing well that we put all our effort into it and we’re energized and focused and it feels effortless. But if the stress increases it becomes distress and that’s often where we would see people in the counseling center. They’re exhausted, they’re fatigued, they feel like they’re just falling apart. And so stress in moderation is very helpful.

But what happens when it’s not, when it’s actually hindering performance?

we’ve chosen to talk about these four issues because they’re actually the most common presenting issues that we’ll see in a student counseling center. Certainly that was the case at Ryerson. So we can characterize anxiety disorders–and there are many of them–by avoidance and procrastination as strategies that individuals work use to cope in the short term, but it tends to backfire in the long term.

With the clinical depression, we know that the symptoms of depression actually interfere with our overall functioning in all areas of their life including school. So it impacts appetite, energy, focus, concentration, world view around being very pessimistic a sense of hopelessness.

Grief actually presents with very similar symptoms to a clinical depression but the source of the problem is very different. It’s directly related to the loss of someone they deeply care about.

And trauma, generally, whether it’s historical or current, comes with a set of symptoms that are intensely disruptive and can impact focus and learning in multiple ways.

So let’s put this in the context of the pandemic. You’ll notice that youth ages 15 to 24 have been most severely impacted in terms of their mental health self-report by the pandemic. Whereas as you get older, particularly 65 and older, considerably less of the population is finding that covid had a very negative effect on their mental health generally. They coped better. Perhaps they have more resources.

This came out of the US, the CDC. They were looking at three timeframes: January to June is the yellow, 2019; then two months into the pandemic or the red bars, and nine months into the pandemic are the purple bars. And you’ll see that whether we’re talking about just anxiety or just depression or the combination, by December 2020 self-report suggested that US adults were struggling with these disorders far more than the year before.

And then, if we look at it by age group, you’ll notice adults ages 18 to 24 are by far the highest reported group in terms of reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression. This pandemic has had a huge impact on mental health.

let’s talk about anxiety. As a cognitive behavioral therapist, I would talk about anxiety and present it to my clients as saying it’s really about the perception of risk and the belief that you can’t cope with that risk. And treatment really involves challenging that perception of risk and in keep increasing coping resources. The interventions that typically occur is to change that perception of risk. But from an academics perspective, it’s really giving students the benefit of the doubt, giving them opportunities and accommodations to rewrite the exam or get an extension or an alternative format for presenting a presentation in class, for example.

I want you just to note these symptoms and imagine that you had four of them all at the same time. That is how we diagnose a panic attack. I would say, based on my clinical experience, most of my clients had many more than four of these symptoms, but that’s all we need. And consider how disruptive it would be to be having a panic attack or anticipating that you would have one in terms of your capacity to learn.

Then moving on to depression.

This is a word cloud I found that I think describes the subjective felt experience of many people who are in a depression. Depressions can be mild, moderate and severe. In a counseling service you will often see mild and moderate and occasionally see severe. If they’re really severe often these students have taken a short-term medical leave.

And these are the symptoms that the individual experience during the clinical depression depressed mood and or often loss of interest or pleasure plus five of these other six. And you’ll notice here that all of them could separately impact learning but together they really pack a wall up. And in order to be diagnosed with the clinical depression, these have to have some kind of impairment, in terms of your capacity socially or occupationally. And so depression can be very debilitating.

Moving on to grief, it really occurs in response to the loss of a loved person and it’s very distressing. The individual will describe many of the same symptoms as depression and sometimes, in prolonged grief, it actually meets criteria for a full depression.

The biggest difference between these two is the source of the symptoms that they’re experiencing, and the similarities are the intense malaise, sleeping disruption, loss of appetite, weight loss. And then, all the other issues are considered very specific to either grief or depression, but either way the individual will not be an optimal learner.

And then, finally I want to just mention trauma. These are… I’m touching on these very lightly, just to kind of paint a picture. Bessel van der Kolk says that trauma is an overwhelming event to the nervous system which changes how we process and recall. It’s not the story itself but the current imprint of pain horror and fear. Now trauma has in the past been considered an anxiety disorder and currently it’s considered a separate disorder trauma and stressor, but regardless the symptoms are extremely disruptive; they are intrusive and they interfere with learning. Nightmares, unwanting, upsetting memories, flashbacks and on and so forth.

And so this is a fairly long quote, but I’m just going to focus on the last two pieces of it. “Your whole mind, brain and sense of self is changed in response to trauma. The brain has been reorganized to deal with danger”. So if you think about that that’s not a receptive learning brain. That is a brain that’s managing a whole set of things that at that moment are far more important to the individual.

And so how can we take all of this together, the frameworks, the calls to action that invite us to remember that learning is embodied and that we are integrative beings with a desire to offer rich learning strategies, honoring the variety of experience from grief through trauma that our students are experiencing for a host and braided number of reasons. And so what’s happening in the body and how can we learn more about that and then turn to its wisdom?

So we just want to offer a very light beginning on polyvagal theory and its wisdom. And so we have what’s called a vagal nerve. Vagal like vagabond or wandering and this “wandering” nerve is the longest of the autonomic nervous system nerves and it wanders or travels from the brain our neck, our heart, our lungs, our gut and many more organs are implicated. It quite literally connects the brain and the body.

The autonomic nervous system–just so we’re all on the same page–is an underlying system of the body outside our conscious control. It oversees digestion, blood pressure, heart rate variability, people dilation, respiration rate, and many other functions, including our response to danger of all kinds, often before we know it. And we think usually and have conversations about the nervous system as having two parts.

The sympathetic, so that mobilizes us, it activates us, helps us take action when our contexts feel safe enough, and the parasympathetic, and this you know, calms us down, helps us to unwind after that activation. It’s the once-the-fight-is-over system and, again, if our conditions feel safe to do so.

Now, over activation of the sympathetic can happen when we perceive danger that lead us to fight flight or freeze and chronic over-activation can lead us to anxiety and stress. Parasympathetic can help us experience ease, yes, that rest and digest, but if it’s over stimulated we can’t rally we can’t act or rise to action or connect with others we might feel we need to hide. So Linda Graham says that what we really want is to experience a state of physiological equilibrium. Not too revved up, not too shut down; regulated. Able to be in relationship, able to reflect, able to take action when needed, able to take rest when needed, and I would argue, able to learn.

Okay so, we can see here sort of the three dimensions, the polyvagal theory. So this is the work of Steven Porges, Deb Dana, Barbara Fredrickson, many others, and they offer nuance to the two parasympathetic and sympathetic of the nervous system and, in fact, actually allow us to understand the sort of two branches of the parasympathetic.

So, in our healthiest state, ventral vagal kind of sphere, we’re feeling safe and social; that’s part of the sympathetic, when we’re feeling connected. Sympathetic, that’s when we’re mobilized. The dorsal vagal is the other part of the parasympathetic and it’s when we’re shut down, but these aren’t static states. What we aim for is movement, for what Peter Levine calls “pendulation;” it’s a physiological resilience or for vagal variability and tone.

Okay, polyvagal learning. So from a ventral vagal place we can be organized, we can follow through, we can take care of ourselves, we can connect with others, we can regulate we can feel productive, we can take time for work and for play, we can sleep well, we can have a chance at experiencing well-being.

From a sympathetic state there’s that neuroception of danger and that leads us to anxiety or anger. We might struggle with memory, we might struggle with taking in the good, might struggle with sleep, with stress, with that unwind with bodily tension.

And from the dorsal vagal place, we might dissociate and isolate. We might struggle with connection, with energy, with hope, with clarity of thought.

So, then, if we go back to today’s fumbling, what counts as a learning strategy? What knowledges are informing the learning strategies we offer or impose some of the time? What’s in our learning strategy toolbox for our students and for our own selves that honor the body, heart, spirit, soul, along with the mind and that honor how tricky, sometimes impossible, it can be or feel to learn or work? And how can we help each other learn more and broaden what we consider to be learning skills, capacities, competencies, tips, tricks, tools, hacks and interventions?

Dr. Diana Brecher: So I’d like to start off by making the observation that I recently came across this very interesting fact that all mental illness has as one of its symptoms disturbed or disrupted sleep. Sleep, it turns out, the neuroscientists are telling us, is implicated in so many… good sleep is implicated in improvements in a whole host of areas, and poor sleep is a causal agent for many, many problems. So what I want to do is talk to you about the relationship between sleep and learning.

So, two neuroscientists that I have come across, that I think have written very accessible books on the importance of sleep. Russell Foster and Matthew Walker. Russell Foster is at Oxford and Matthew Walker is formerly from Harvard and is now at Stanford. Or, sorry, UC Berkeley. Wrong California. They both have TED Talks, as well, that I think are excellent and I would encourage you, if you’re interested, to listen to them.

But what I want to do is, I want to talk about what Matt Marker in particular says about learning memory and creativity. It turns out that when we sleep before we need to learn something new, it enables us to absorb, imprint, new memories in the brain. It’s kind of like absorbing these memory traces, and so the better rested we are before we’re tackling something complex that we need to learn, the easier it is for us to recall. While we’re sleeping, in particular during our deep sleep cycles, we’re able to take those memories from short term and put them into long term. It’s kind of like future proofing that information.

And then, it turns out that sleep can lead to a three-fold increase in creativity and problem solving, particularly during the REM cycle of sleep. And so if we miss out on that time of our sleep, we don’t integrate that new information adequately and, in fact, we aren’t able to be as creative as we would like to be.

So I want to introduce to you, just in a brief snippet, a description of what pulling an all-nighter does in terms of our capacity to perform and to learn. This is Matt Walker on the TED stage.

Matt Walker: “…That pulling the all-nighter was a good idea. So we took a group of individuals and we assigned them to one of two experimental groups: a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group. Now the sleep group they’re going to get a full eight hours of slumber but the deprivation group we’re going to keep them awake in the laboratory under full supervision. There’s no naps or caffeine, by the way, so it’s miserable for everyone involved. And then, the next day we’re going to place those participants inside an MRI scanner and we’re going to have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we’re taking snapshots of brain activity. And then we’re going to test them to see how effective that learning has been.

And that’s what you’re looking at here on the vertical axis. And when you put those two groups head-to-head what you find is a quite significant 40 percent deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep. I think this should be concerning considering what we know is happening to sleep in our education populations right now. In fact, to put that in context, it would be the difference in a child acing an exam versus failing it miserably, 40 percent.

And we’ve gone on to discover what goes wrong within your brain to produce these types of learning disabilities, and there’s a structure that sits on the left and the right side of your brain called the hippocampus. And you can think of the hippocampus almost like the informational inbox of your brain. It’s very good at receiving new memory files and then holding on to them. And when you look at this structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet in those people who were sleep deprived we actually couldn’t find any significant signal whatsoever.”

Dr. Diana Brecher: So it’s a great TED talk worth watching. I just wanted to get you to be thinking about the direct cause and effect from one night to the next morning and what we’re able to learn. So I want to provide some strategies related to sleep. This happens to be one of the things I’m most interested in, the whole neuroscience of sleep, so I can probably do a whole two-hour session on it, but it’s just going to be about three more minutes.

So there’s something called the “warm bath effect” and so I think intuitively a lot of people think, well if I take a bath before I go to bed I’m going to feel cozy and warm and I’ll just go to sleep. They’re not wrong but it turns out that if you take a warm bath about an hour before bedtime you have a drop in your core body temperature two to three degrees Fahrenheit and by bringing all the blood to the surface you’re cooling yourself off. And it turns out that the body needs to drop its core temperature in order to fall asleep. So oftentimes we’ll do that by having maybe setting our thermostat so the room is cooler opening a window but you can also do that through the warm bath effect. So that actually can help you fall asleep more easily and it can be a very effective strategy so that you don’t toss and turn when you actually get into bed.

Another way of thinking about it is creating a buffer zone. So this is what I think of as de-velocitizing. So when you’ve been on a highway and you’re going 100 and whatever per hour and then you end up on a residential street it’s like it feels weird, like you should be going at least 60, you know 120, and you’re actually going 40. So you have to transition out; it’s kind of like landing a plane, you can’t just drop down. So what’s in that transition? Is it reading a relaxing book, journaling, stretching, meditating, or taking a hot bath? That can help with the transition to sleep and ensure a better night’s sleep.

I also wanted to share a resource that my colleague, our colleague Dr. Colleen Carney, who’s a psychology professor at Ryerson–her focus is on sleep and CBTI which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia¬–, she with colleagues put together a sleep app and this is the link to it it’s free it’s for individuals I think ages 16 to 24 more or less. And a lot of our students have started to use it and have reported that it’s been incredibly helpful for them to regulate their sleep.

Okay, Deena.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: So let’s move into becalming. So if we go to the next slide, the last thing you need is, you know, my definitions. You are all masters at metacognition, to swim a little in some of the languaging. What does metacognition hope for what does it ask of us, what does it demand, what does it take? So we might think of metacognition as awareness above the subject matter as assessing, you know, what do I know before I start, what have I come to know and what’s been challenged in my thinking? What are my strengths? How can I use them? What needs skill building and how do I plan for that skill building?

Metacognition is working through¬–I love this languaging–the muddiest point. Identifying places of confusion and then, you know, changing tack. Metacognition is understanding what drives me, metacognition is supervisory thinking; so much more than just learning how to learn, but the, you know, the overarching boss of the show and as coming to know myself as a learner, trying out a variety of strategies and interventions and discerning what the task at hands ask we could go on and on.

But let’s build on this. So if we were to practice metacognition–this slide, by the way, is inaccessible for a purpose. Let’s let’s do what some of Dr. Hindle asks in them, from last year from The Learning Scientists, some of the questions that are in doing metacognitive work. So if we’re, you know, looking at a passage or looking at an assignment or looking at a question does this remind me of anything in anything else in an unrelated domain of knowledge? Can I think of anything I know that contradicts? What other things do I know that support the truth of this? Are there practical examples? Is this the first time? Where else have I come across this? Has anyone else tried to teach me this before? Am I certain it’s true and correct? Does it relate? Where in my life can I find an example? Other related concepts, what’s difficult to grasp? If this is a what, can I explain the why? Application, what’s important? What else do I want to learn?

Okay that’s only half the list, only half the list and this, of course, is not an exhaustive list of questions. What does it feel like to do metacognition some of the time?

If we don’t want to give up because if we look at the work on metacognitive self-regulatory capacity and interesting research out of that kind of contemplative science world, what does metacognition do for us? Oh! Clears up executive function, attention, emotion regulation, negative rumination disruption, existential awareness of some of the big purpose questions, contemplation. Holy smokes, how can we replenish this so-called superpower? And we want to, right? Because the metacognitive self-regulatory capacity is the natural propensity of the mind that enables introspective awareness, a necessary prereq for self-regulation, including the support of one’s well-being. What does it help us do, right? Notice and effectively manage your thoughts or emotional responses or behavior, orienting, shifting, sustaining attention.

So how do we do it in a way that is well? So let’s listen to a moment to a physician speaker work- life integration specialist. Here we go, she’s going to explain how to attend to our rest deficit.

Saundra Dalton-Smith: “Have you ever tried to fix your chronic lack of energy by getting more sleep only to wake up still feeling exhausted if that’s you here’s the secret sleep and rest are not the same thing we have incorrectly combined the concepts of sleep and rest and in doing so we have dumbed down rest to the point it appears ineffective you see sleep is only one part of the big picture it’s only one of the seven types of rest. Many of us are going through life thinking we have rested because we have slept but, in reality, we are missing out on the other types of rest that we need. The result is a culture of high achieving, high producing, chronically tired, burned out individuals. Many of us are suffering from a rest deficit because we do not understand the power of rest. Rest is the most underused, chemical-free, safe and effective alternative therapy available to us. Every activity you do requires energy and most of that energy is not merely physical. When your boss calls you into the office to discuss a problem you still yourself for the potential conflict and in doing so you draw from your emotional and social energy. When you’re stuck in traffic you’re using mental and sensory energy to process your surroundings and when your teen asks for your car keys you draw from your creative and spiritual energy as you pray for a great excuse to say no. The first step to conquering your rest deficit requires you to identify where you are using the most energy in your day. Then you can focus your attention on getting the type of rest needed to restore those specific areas. Rest should equal restoration in one of the seven areas. If your definition of rest is comprised of sleeping or lying on the couch binge watching an entire season of a TV series you leave yourself open to chronic exhaustion.”

So Dr. Sandra Dalton-Smith on these seven types of rest we need to recharge and they’re making the extension here to do the important and effective academic work of metacognition. So let’s take a look at those seven types of rest and we want to ask you here how do you tend to each of them? What do you do to take and to nourish physical rest and spiritual rest, mental rest, social rest, sensory rest, emotional rest and creative rest?

If you would consider popping into the chat, one of our fumblings and hopes of today was not to come here as, you know, experts and you know final-word knowers, but as facilitators of a conversation that we are deeply curious about. So can you help us in this conversation, can you participate with us and share in the chat what do you do? And, very important to ask especially when we have constraints, this is very beautiful, but are there any rests missing for you, like community or activist rest?

So if you would be willing to share… Oh Gene Blessing, walking outside alone without your phone or headphones, yes! Christa Yoga, spending time in nature, journaling. Aaron, reading, walking, time with family. I love that you’re writing, reading. You know, a friend of ours, Stanford, introduced us to contemplative reading as a strategy which I love. Julie, so nice that you’re here, paddle boarding, gardening, spending time with your cats, massage. Lillia, crocheting, yeah hand work, totally; kayaking, cuddling with your cat, beautiful. Thank you so much. Yes, turning off computer, full stop. Heather, painting.

Okay so next slide if we continue with this notion of metacognitive self-regulatory capacity, you know, what this depiction aims to get at it dives into the interacting systems and processes of metacognition and attention, emotional regulation and conceptual awareness. We can see that interplay which includes the autonomic nervous system. And so all of this is meant to explore with rigor and, more importantly, curiosity. How techniques of breath and body modify the mind and brain and therefore things like learning. So can these go into our learning strategy repertoires?

So one-minute, tiny, micro student breaks and support of this metacognitive self-regulatory capacity and vagal tone and rest is to splash cold water on your face or to take a cool shower, literally, very akin to sleep in coolness is cooling down the body.

Mindful hydration, kind of, one to five steps, you know, notice any sensations of thirst or eagerness to drink, notice whatever vessel of water you have, gratitude goes into that, all of the pieces that are holding the vessel, experiencing it through your senses. Take a sip but, interestingly, if we want to actually access the vagal nerve, you can gargle it; you can gargle for vagal tone. Then swallow slowly fully immersed in the sensations of that and then noticing any discernible sensations after rehydrating. So, you know, dehydration leads us to feel sluggish and foggy and lethargic; it decreases stamina and energy; makes us irritable. Hydration perks us up and it improves academic performance. Diana teaches a lot on this, as you know, hydration is a micro resilient strategy, strategically drinking water. Hydration lowers stress within two minutes of taking a drink. It improves test scores, alleviates anxiety.

More on this, you know, small micro moments inhaling through the nose, inhaling as a hummm again vagal tone or a haaaa… so that parasympathetic stimulation of the connected ventral kind or, let’s do this too now, and stand up, because we’ve been sitting for a while. If we stand, if you’re able, if not, no problem, stay seated, we will take five or three really for time, what I’m calling “Y” stretch yawns. So yawns do a similar thing that parasympathetic and a ventral state reset. And so to actually bring movement into this, if we, you know, opened up into a stretch almost like a “Y” really just to make it easy to remember the contrivance, “Y” for yawn and force yourself to yawn. Ahhh. Lower your arms. I don’t have much space; doesn’t matter, you don’t need much, again, and “Y” and then let it out as a yawn, you know, ahhhh. One more time… Ahhh…

It’s very curious research about yawns and it’s not yet complete. One of the theories is it cools the brain and in so doing relieves some of the blood pressure. We’re trying to do an intervention in the things that we have no conscious control over by adding these little bites these little micro hacks.

Okay let’s move on to beats, heartbeats and breath. So you know sister to and entwined with polyvagal theory is heart rate variability. And heart rate variability or HRV measures the variation in time between each heartbeat and it turns out that heart rate variability measures have been shown to be positively associated with cognitive processing and positive association between cognitive processing and academic performance has been demonstrated. So if a student or any one of us is in that sympathetic state of fight or flight the variation between heartbeats is low if a student or any one of us is in that ventral vagal parasympathetic state, safe and social and connected the variation between heartbeats is high.

Low HRV is attributed to depression and anxiety; low HRV is also correlated with dementia so that’s where the extrapolations are being made. But there’s increasing interest to study more about the precise intersection of HRV and cognitive function and performance. So when we have that autonomic resilience, that vagal health, we’re able to switch gears faster. In our bodies we have more resilience physiologically and flexibility in the face of stress. When our systems are functioning healthfully our HRV increases during relaxing activities like sleep, like rest, like any kind of contemplative engagement. Those are parasympathetic inducing activities.

HRV decreases during stress. HRV is higher when our heart speeds slow it slowly and it’s lower when our heart starts to beat more quickly. So it’s meant to change within the day and from day to day but what if we are chronically stressed, overloaded, imprinted by trauma, stuck in the sympathetic fight, flight or freeze even when we’re at rest. So what can we do is we can improve our HRV through, for example, sleep, exercise with periods of recovery and rest in between, and conscious breathing exercises.

It’s also about the number of beats per minute, and it turns out there’s something quite right about fewer than ten, ideally six beats per minute for mood stress and awake learning. Next slide please.

Great. So we really love what they’re doing sort of greater good worlds at Berkeley, so I’ll just read here: “focusing on the timing and pace of our breath can have positive effects on our body and mind. Several brain regions linked to emotion, attention and body awareness are activated when we pay attention to our breath. Paced breathing involves consciously inhaling and exhaling according to a set rhythm. For example you might inhale for four counts, exhale for six. Prior research shows that paced breathing exercises can both focus attention and regulate the nervous system and so to date there hasn’t been much known about that but the findings are representing a kind of breakthrough because for years we’ve considered the brain stem to be responsible for the process of breathing, but actually breathing also uses neural networks beyond the brain stem tied to emotion, attention body awareness, tapping into these networks using the breath. We gain access to a powerful tool for regulating our responses to stress. Let’s try.

So I have a physical metronome. I think I’ve had it since the earliest days of enforced piano practice, which I’m grateful for and so if you have a physical metronome or not there’s free metronome apps and if you set it to 60 beats per minute you can do this sitting or lying down. So, you know, take whatever posture makes the most sense for you so long as you’re not at risk of falling asleep and we’re gonna begin by inhaling to the beat for a count of four exhaling to the beat for a count of four but we’re gonna extend this to six so you’re gonna try in your own way when you wanna extend it to five and then to six but let’s do this for a moment.

Okay, we’ve got a lot to move through but as a beginning quick but potent intervention to intervene to inner resource on your behalf. Thanks.

Dr. Diana Brecher: So I’m going to be talking about the bond the… we’re going to hearken back to polyvagal theory but in a very different kind of way. So let’s just start by talking about emotional regulation which, you know, if we think about how important emotional regulation is when someone is trying to study let’s say for an exam or write a paper or figure out a formula, this is based on the work of Paul Gilbert. He talks about three types of emotional regulation that are… that we kind of move through in different kinds of ways.

If we start with the threat system, the threat system is kind of like a “better safe than sorry” operation. We stay alive by scanning our environment and identifying threats. And this has been fine-tuned for thousands of years of survival and evolution and the stress, the hormones associated with it are cortisol and adrenaline. And so we can’t live like that indefinitely but there are times we are feeling that kind of stress and oftentimes we fluctuate back and forth between the drive system, the drives the threat system. The drive system is really our kind of drive for achievement, for competitiveness, for status. The hormones that are at play here is typically dopamine, which is a reward chemical, so whenever we achieve that reward we get that really good feeling. We feel satisfied, resolved, accomplished, relieved. And many of us move back and forth between drive and threat but actually we must be more effortful, I think, in activating the soothing system. So that’s safe calm peaceful content. It’s where really the parasympathetic system is activated. The hormones related to this are oxytocin, endorphins. It’s about feeling safe, feeling connected. And so it’s about tapping into what’s referred to as the mammalian caregiving system. And that is something that is pretty accessible; I’m going to teach you a couple of access routes to it.

So the mammalian caregiving system activates the release of oxytocin, which is often referred to as the love hormone which leads to an increase in the sense of trust, calm, safety, generosity, and connectedness and amplified self-compassion.

So Kristen Neff, who is one of the most prominent researchers in the area of self-compassion and compassion generally, she works out of University of Texas at Austin. She talks about different access points to this caregiving system. So I’m going to invite you to do this right now. For a moment put both hands on your heart and just breathe to those hands. Each in breath… feel that connection and then, as you exhale, feel that connection. To do this for 30 seconds or a minute can actually start that cascade of the parasympathetic nervous system kicking in. For some people this is… works better with a hand on heart and hand on your belly, particularly tapping into the breath. So as you inhale the belly extends and as you exhale it draws back towards the spine.

For others it could be to cup one cheek or both. This is the one that somehow gets me the most. And it’s just like, oh, I just kind of feel safe. And the fourth one, hug yourself, hug your arms. Each one of these are inner resources that we can tap into as we need and it will set off this cascade of that oxytocin. It’s about receiving affection, receiving care, it activates acceptance, kindness, warmth, encouragement, support, affiliation. It really makes a difference. So you have a highly anxious student who’s really struggling. What would it mean to teach them these skills to tap into as they need to?

I want to take us through a brief loving kindness meditation if you’re willing. So if you can sit in what we think of as that kind of settled pose with a straight strong back, soft front, both feet on the ground, hands in your lap or on your arm rest, so whatever’s comfortable for you, and close your eyes if you’re comfortable, or just look down towards the ground if it’s more comfortable for you. In this meditation on loving kindness it’s about allowing yourself to switch from your usual mode of doing to your mode of non-doing; of simply being.

As your body becomes still, bring your attention to the fact that you are breathing and become aware of the movement of your breath as it comes into your body and as it leaves your body, not manipulating the breath in any way or trying to change it. Simply being aware of it and the feelings associated with breathing. Being totally here in each moment with each breath, not trying to do anything, not trying to get any place, simply being here with your breath. Now bringing to mind someone for whom you have deep feelings of connection and love, seeing or sensing this person and noticing your feelings for them arise in your body. It may simply be a smile that spreads across your face or your chest becomes warm, whatever the effects allow them to be felt. Now letting go of this person in your imagination and keeping an awareness the feelings that have arisen bring yourself to mind now. And seeing if you can offer love and kindness to yourself by letting these words become your words. May I be safe and protected and free from inner and outer harm may I be happy and contented may I be healthy and whole to whatever degree possible may I experience ease of well-being. Just notice any feelings that arise and let them be as you look within. This is the meditation that actually goes in circles we start with the self then we focus on someone who we feel has always been on our side and we send them the same messages and then we broaden it out to the broader community of which we feel apart and then to the planet itself. And with each of those circles out it becomes a way of tapping into that parasympathetic nervous system, our self-compassion and compassion for others. We have a recording of this on our thriving and action online website if you want to hear more about it.

And I want to talk just a little bit about meta meditation, which is what we’ve just done, meta meditation and loving kindness are often considered synonymous. Why should we do it? It’s the most direct route to our feelings of happiness and self-worth. And it works because it helps us to cultivate our feelings of kindness and connection with others while reducing that focus on ourself. And so this can become an incredible strategy for someone who’s feeling kind of chronically anxious as in the generalized anxiety disorder, for example. Always uptight, always tense. What might this do to help them just self-regulate?

Research tells us that the benefits to meta-meditation are multiple: more positive emotions, it increases the sense of resilience if you’re dealing with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, it increases your sense of connection to the community at large and the increase in your self-worth because you do deserve to feel this connected to yourself, less self-criticism, less self-destructive thoughts and kind of reduce stress overall in your body.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: So now we want to talk about balance but quite literally balance. So our next slide outlines two forms of movement-based meditation. Perfect. So we won’t do this here, but just to honor that for all kinds of reasons, including trauma and grief, sitting with breath as anchor can be unsettling, can be counterproductive for some, not at all for all, but for some. And so a walking meditation is where the anchor becomes each footstep and the physicality of in a sense being off balance,, moving from step to step and you can synchronize,, you know one lift of the foot and then the exhale with placing it back down. You don’t need much space at all I’m in a very small room and you can have you know ten steps in one direction and then the other way and it’s so slow it won’t make you dizzy so you are really moving as slowly as possible. As your breath slows down so too does your footstep. Mindful walking is around going more slowly than your usual going somewhere pace. I love that folks were mentioning, you know, no headphones, no external stimulation outside of the natural world or the world that we find ourselves in outside our door. Noticing the body, heartbeat, gait, and really attending purposefully to each sense. But we’re going to move on into some really interesting research around balance and attention.

So balance function has been reported to be worse in children diagnosed with ADHD and there’s a research hypothesis that an improvement in balance can result in better cognitive performance for those with ADHD so kind of working on the vestibular impairment that can coexist with ADHD. So the vestibular system includes the parts of the inner ear and brain that control balance and eye movement. And spatial orientation it’s what helps us feel upright and stable and it helps us know where our body is in space. And so if we can borrow and infer it’s really interesting, you know, that can we interrupt stagnant studying breaks with balance work? So let’s actually do it so, just check in really briefly and you know we’ve been asking a lot of your attention so it’s not really fair but, check in, you know, are you bored are you sleepy, are you feeling alive, are you feeling curious, are you just about done? Are you feeling cooked? Where are you? And then let’s do a few of these together.

So I do these with my with some of my students. So we’ll begin with a really basic one. If you if you can’t do these and you want to learn how to vocalize them, that’s okay too, but if you’re able and want to, please join me. So if you were to stand on… I’ll be your mirror. You can’t even see my legs, doesn’t matter, I’ll make it easy for myself. I’ll stay on my left leg you stand on your left leg and if you raise your right one and if you kick out like you’re kind of rocking a boat that’s kind of a gentle first move, okay? Let’s switch sides. Do we feel any of the wobbles or having some cross-hemispheric action happening? Okay, pretty straightforward, maybe.

Okay, well let’s amplify it a little bit with a sock challenge. So I wore my best socks for you today so what you’re going to do stand back on your left leg and can you take off your sock and then can you put it back on all with just standing on your one leg? Now, you know, I am hyper focused on trying to do this. Switch legs. Okay, I’ve never taken off my socks in a conference before. All right, sock back on.

All right, down. The last one we’ll do today is one of my favorites. Five items of any kind that you have around. So you can do this with playing cards traditionally or I’m just gonna have five markers, that’s what’s easiest for me. So you’re gonna begin with five. You’re gonna stand on your left leg and you are going to, one at a time, squat down on one leg and put them down and then rise back up. Now I’ve got four and i’ll go down and back up, so we’ll just do two for today. And now I’m going to bend back down and pick it one up. And then I’m gonna bend back down and pick the other one up. So you would do five items bending down each one and then five items pick them up and then switch legs. So how do you feel now? You know, how do you feel? Is there any greater sense of refresh? I am, I am. So can these become included in what we consider learning strategies to physically turn to the body and its inner wisdoms to get us back kind of online the task at hand and the present moment and what it’s asking us.

So next then I want to talk about breathers. And what I mean by this next slide is. This is, I think, the question that is really on my mind and in my heart is, what goes between chunking or spacing or distributed practice or practice questions? What goes between flash cards? What goes between elaboration? What are the connective tissue learning strategies that help us keep going physically, spiritually, emotionally?

So I have come across this idea of taking a tech shabbat. And, of course, really, it’s just talking about taking a break, but I love the language of it so let’s watch. Let’s take a look.

Tiffany Schlain (in video): “I love technology. Like everyone, I’m totally addicted, but it’s also consumed all of my time, where I feel like I’m constantly responding to everyone and not really responding to myself in some ways. But a few years ago I started thinking a lot about time. My father was dying of brain cancer and sometimes he only had one good hour a day so made me think about how little of time we have. And during that time my family and I decided to completely unplug from technology one day a week. We call it our technology shabbats. We’ve done it every week for more than three years and it’s completely changed my life. I’m Tiffany Schlain. I’m a mother, filmmaker; I founded the Webby awards and this series is about how the future doesn’t start somewhere far off in the distance. The future starts here. Let me start by saying that I’m Jewish, but I’m not religious. But I love the rituals, I love the rituals. I’m culturally Jewish. And there’s this organization I’m a part of, called Reboot, that was doing a national day of unplugging several years ago and my family and I did it and it was such a profound experience that we’ve done it every week since it’s like our modern version of a very old Jewish tradition of taking one day off a week called shabbat. We still drive cars and use electricity but for us no screens. No TV, no cellphone or anything that pulls us away from being together. It’s our interpretation of the essence of shabbat, being present and the idea of taking a day off has like happened all over the world in all these different cultures. To take breaks, pray, do rituals or to experience time in a different way. In the Jewish tradition it’s from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. What one of my favorite Jewish philosophers, Heschel, calls a palace in time. For Muslims, the sacred day is Friday. For most Christians it’s Sunday, and for the never distracted Buddha you could just say that being enlightened he was having shabbat all the time.

But with all these new delicious technologies today when do we ever get the space to take time off? I mean, doesn’t it feel like you’re always being distracted or beeped at or tweeted or, I mean, I just feel like I’m influenced by so many different things. I feel like I’m in an emotional pinball machine! It just seems like a good idea to have…”

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: Yeah, to have one day a week, she’ll go on to say. So that’s Tiffany Shlain, creator of the Webby awards and the beauty of her being so tech-immersed and taking that tech off. And so as we move into a little bit more on this can you describe what your best weekly day off would look like? Can you write that?

So just to say you’re not alone. I love this. National day of unplugging is in early March, if you want to officially participate. Next slide there are folks taking the pledge. We won’t go into the minutia of the research of the impacts; you know it and you live it, but kind of declarations of what folks actually unplug to do. You’ll see some of them “to connect, to cuddle, to be me” and so if you want, and you’ll have these slides, the next slide is, I’ve I signed up on everyone’s behalf from myself so that you could have it if you want it if you want to print it out from the slides when you receive them.

So that’s really looking into the minutia of one week. Now let’s go in the absolute opposite direction by taking the longer view, perhaps the longest view of all time. So there’s something called the long now, and the 10 000 year clock. And so it is a monument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock that is buried in the hills of Texas as an icon to long-term thinking. Comes from computer scientist Danny Hillis and it’s the language of musician Brian Eno. And so if we get overly stuck in the minutia and, you know, Diana and I have talked a lot about awe and wonder and we teach it but what if… what would take us out of the minutia of this studying moment? Thinking about time in this way. So “I cannot imagine the future but I care about it. I know that I’m part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues along beyond anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change and I feel a responsibility to make sure the change comes out as well. I plant my acorns knowing I will never live to harvest the oaks”. And so what is this clock? “A clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every 100 years. The cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10 000 years and so what I’m kind of likening this to is in a recent On Being podcast, a brilliant reverend asks how will you live your dash? Meaning, and I don’t mean to get bleak here, but on a gravestone there is our birth date and when we die there is our end date. And his provocation is, well how are you going to live your dash?

Dr. Diana Brecher: So we’re going to dash in a different way through the last 10 minutes of this presentation really quickly. So we want to talk about singing. And it turns out that singing is… has so many benefits. Now, granted, we shouldn’t be doing it in groups of people today and all of that, that’s fine, but when I am working with really anxious clients, I invite them to sing whenever they feel anxious, because it’s actually impossible to feel anxious while you’re singing.

Singing can improve and reduce stress and anxiety, increase social connections, it strengthens your immune system and it improves memory, particularly for people who are suffering with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s and other things. So it has been used therapeutically in a multitude of different ways. Stacy Horn has written a wonderful book and in it she says, she talks about singing and the role of singing in our lives: “The elation may come from endorphins, a hormone released by singing which is also associated with feelings of pleasure, or it might be from oxytocin another hormone released during singing which has been found to alleviate anxiety and stress. So if you think back to the mammalian caregiving system, we’re actually tapping into it when we sing. Oxytocin also enhances feelings of trust and bonding, which may explain why still more studies have found that singing lessens feelings of depression and loneliness singing may release endorphins associated with feelings of pleasure as well as stimulate the release of oxytocin a hormone that’s found to alleviate anxiety and stress.”

One of the interventions early on that Deena and I did was, we invited a choir master to come to our amphitheater in our student learning building right during exams and we invited people to sing together as a pop-up choir. It was fabulous.

But I’d like to tell you a little bit about a different choir. Now, this is a choir that came from Australia. It was originally known as the Pub Choir and they moved it to the Couch Choir for… during the pandemic and they invited all these people to come together through videoing their music and I’ll just let it speak for itself.

(Choir sings) It’s so beautiful but, in the interest of time, we’re going to invite you to watch the entire thing afterwards.

And finally, we want to talk about joy. So I want to tell you about something called The Happiness Project which is: a group of neuroscientists have invited people to download this app and as they interact with it neuroscientists are collecting information about happiness, what makes us happy, how we make decisions, how we learn and on and so forth. I really encourage you to download it yourself and play with it a bit before you encourage anyone else to use it but I think it’s a really interesting thing. I heard about this through Dr. Lori Santos, who is a professor at Yale and she runs the Happiness Lab Podcast and which is wonderful, if you’re ever interested in learning more about positive psychology.

I wanted to mention that exactly a year ago yesterday, May 18th, the New York Times invited 14 different journalists to write about how they’re finding joy in the pandemic and this is a link to that New York times article. So just to give you a flavor of some of the things they wrote about” the joy of having plans cancel themselves; the joy of circling the block; the joy of picking a fight with a friend; the joy of getting lost and finding my way.

I also want to talk about something based on the work of Bonnie St. John and Allen Haines, who wrote the book Micro-resilience. They talk about the concept of creating a joy kit. So just like you have a first aid kit for cuts and bruises what if you had a first aid kit for your joy or your attitude to shift out of those negative emotions into gratitude and creativity. It can include digital photos, music, souvenirs, anything you want. In a class that Deena and I taught this year we invited our students to create it and they referenced this joy kit regularly after the fact.

So here’s some photos from Deena’s joy kit.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: Very simply, my kiddos, when Diana and I did the Thriving in Action Institute, I think, 2018, in Charlottetown and then, you know, when we were allowed to be in person, I would run the Ryerson paddling program as an extension of the Thriving Action Program. We just came back from a five-day trip to Algonquin.

Dr. Diana Brecher: This is a view from the porch of a cabin that I’ve been renting in Ontario in Muskoka for the past almost 30 years and just seeing this regulates my heart rate. It just makes me feel so calm.

And then we wanted to share just a snippet of this video that went viral and then we’ll wrap up.

(Music video plays)

Dr. Diana Brecher: I’m mindful of time so we’re gonna keep going.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: So all to ask this hour and a half together. What wholistic breath body learning strategy are you gonna try first for yourself or for your students and to that end which ones would you like to offer here in this community of friends? Feel free to pop those into the chat or take them as contemplative prompts. As you know, we really swiftly wrap up and we’re happy to take one minute of questions.

Actually Diana, if you wouldn’t mind, if you could put on the final slide of our presentation just with our contact information. Thank you, so you know, we had so much we wanted to share. Not a ton of questions. Yeah, Mark, well no, you don’t, you have to come to the AGM in 15 minutes, don’t! Take a bath later! So we are gonna dive… Great, great, just mute the video or not. You know, we’re a loving community.

Thank you so much for your kind attention, for spending this time with us. We don’t take it for granted. It means a whole lot to share in this work together. Oh, this is so great, thank you so much. Blessings, Chrissa, Aaron, thank you. Yeah! Youtube karaoke! Yes!

Dr. Diana Brecher: This is our joy place, to share what we’re learning with our communities so thank you so much for being here and being part of this.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: Oh thanks Julie and Charisse. Thank you Kim. Kim we danced together two days ago, yes! Please, in 14 minutes come to the AGM. It’s so important and on a very mechanical level it’s important because to move motions we need like a hundred and bazillion people to come because there’s a lot of people attending the conference so thank you for your great energy, thank you for your gratitude and we look so forward to hearing from you.

Kelly Mullaly: I think it’s pretty safe to say that on behalf of everyone thank you very much Dr. Diana Breacher and Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer for your wonderful presentation. It was not just a brilliant toolbox but I think you left us all feeling very relaxed and refreshed and I really appreciate it myself, so again, before anyone takes their tech shabbat, make sure that you in 14 minutes our LSAC members please head off to the AGM. I’m going to put that in the link as well, just so that everyone knows where that zoom link is.

Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer: Thank you so much.

Dr. Diana Brecher: Thank you; it was such a pleasure.