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Spring can be a very difficult time. With the ACT, AP testing, and the start of the very last nine weeks, we seem to be so close to the finish line, yet so far away. Stress adds up, and before pool time can begin, that stress must be handled. But there are ways to decrease the burden placed on our shoulders.Â
Recently, I attended a meditation retreat held by the Meditation Center of Alabama. Granted, I was skeptical at first, but as the day went on, I felt more and more comfortable being present with myself. It felt weird in the first five minutes, but as soon as I accepted the challenge of mindfulness, I began to truly relax. The monk who taught the class came from Thailand. He told us about how he didn’t enjoy meditation for the first five years of his induction. Finally, someone to relate to! Instead of hearing all the wonderful stories of immediate epiphanies and immediate love for meditation, I finally felt like I could truly relate to someone so different from me. I may still be a novice meditator, but I learned a lot from those few days. Since now is a time of stress in the school year but growth in the season nature is in, now is the perfect time to practice mindful relaxation and grow alongside the flowers.
Dr. Nena Nimit, a psychiatrist certified by the World Peace Initiative as a Mindfulness and Meditation Trainer, has taught me so much about meditation. Oxford Learning states that students who practice meditation for twenty minutes four times a week show significant improvements in memory and cognition as well as decreased stress levels (1). They scored approximately ten times better in memory tests than the control group (1). A Harvard study conducted with the help of Calmer Choice, a non-profit mindfulness education group, showed that sixth graders who participated in a week-long mindfulness class responded less to scary images than their counterparts (2). More specifically, those who consented to brain scans helped prove that the amygdala has a calmer response to stressful situations with the practice of mindfulness (2).
Although meditation can be viewed as weird or abnormal, the benefits of mindfulness are real. And during a season so characterized by growth, why not grow too? Start small. A few minutes a day can cause a large difference in the perception of stress. Join the flowers and bloom!