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Making Space for Mindfulness | Mindful Campus Practices

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Category: campus experience Video duration: Making Space for Mindfulness | Mindful Campus Practices
Mental Health Initiatives Coordinator for Hokie Wellness, Swathi Prabhu, talks about the Mindful Campus Practices, a series of short, five-minute guided mindfulness practice recordings that combine imagery, sound, and other senses such as smell and feel. Accessible through YouTube, the initial goal was to give students and other members of the university a way to connect to campus regardless of where they were physically, but evolved into physical markers with QR codes around campus where students and others could easily access the recordings from the actual locations, including Hahn Garden, the Drillfield, and the Duck Pond. Swathi wants students and others in the community to know that you don't need to dedicate a lot of time, or need special equipment, for self-care and to re-ground yourself when things start to feel stressful or overwhelming.
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Have five minutes and need to recenter yourself? Listen to a Mindful Campus Practice here.
Visit https://hokiewellness.vt.edu for more wellness opportunities.
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Let us begin by bringing our attention to the present moment. Mindfulness can be a really incredible coping skill when you are feeling overwhelmed or even when you're just sort of feeling disconnected from what's going on. It can be a way for you to calm your thoughts, to calm your body. The Mindful campus practices are a series guided meditations. They're all really brief. They're about five minutes long, and they're in different locations on campus. We have a couple here and the Han garden, we have one at the Duck Pond and one on the draw field. You can just scan a QR code and it pulls up the video and the audio. Again, if you're in the location, you can just sort of looked around and use the current environment, or you can use the video as well. Some mindfulness practices focus on using the breath as a way of calming the body. The Mindful campus practice videos in particular focus on using the five senses. So allowing you to really center yourself in the sounds that are around you are allowing you to center yourself and the smells that are around to help you just kinda bring your body back to, oh man. We're the biggest misconceptions about self-care and certainly about mindfulness is that it has to take a really long time with the mindful campus practices. Hopefully that helps folks realize that you don't need a whole day or a whole afternoon, or really even any equipment to engage in self-care. You can very easily integrate mindfulness just into your typical routine as you're walking across that Raphael to your classes. In this guided, he will be engaging in some of our physical sense to feel more grounded. It focus or awareness present. I imagine students and really everyone in the Virginia Tech community right now is trying to anticipate what this year is going to look like. Being really excited about it, but also maybe being really nervous about meeting new people, creating the essence of belonging on campus. All of those might be racing thoughts and you also might be noticing that your body too. And so mindfulness can help you get to that place where you do feel recentered and ready to tackle whatever this year my brain.