 Hello everyone, we are honored that you are taking time to join us. I'm Angela from the CSAA team. Today we are here to celebrate you, our amazing teacher community. We know this is a really busy time of year and we wanted to give you a moment to pause, relax, and rejuvenate. I'm speaking on behalf of the CSAA team, and we want to just let you know how much we appreciate you. Sit back, get cozy, and let's get started. Today we will practice three exercises that you can use throughout your day to help yourself relax and rejuvenate. We are also going to experience a calming session to end today. That's going to be about 10 minutes of guided calming, which will be fantastic. I am so excited to introduce to you Whitney Reed. Whitney has been teaching mindfulness for 20 years and has worked with numerous companies during her career to bring mindfulness into their culture. She was also an assistant teacher in a Montessori school, as well as a coach for a children's racing team. She has noticed that her work of mindfulness has helped many people rejuvenate their minds, and she is excited to bring these tools to teachers. Whitney, I am so excited to have you with us here today. Yes, thank you so much, Angela. I really appreciate it, and I'm so grateful for CSAA for including me in the great work they're doing. And I just want to let everybody know here as well, those of you that have come to PD and PJs before, once I hand it over here to Whitney, she is going to be with you the entire session. So at the end, we'll kind of phase out. So you're really leaving us calm and relaxed. So enjoy everyone. Hi, hello. Thank you so much for joining. This is a beautiful practice that helps build the mind for relaxation and rejuvenation. And it's something to actually practice throughout your day, maybe even designate a few days or longer to do this. So in the first practice, the rejuvenation practice, we're going to explore how to work with refreshing and rejuvenating the mind. What specifically we're doing here is we're getting in touch with more of a what drives you, what is your fundamental kind of purpose through your work, tuning into why the why of what you're doing, bringing a more of a macro lens to your work and your day. Sometimes we get caught up in the micro details of what we're doing. Are we organizing things right? How are we doing it? Are we doing it good or bad? And we forget the deeper purpose of why we're here. So in the following exercise, what I want you to do to just tune into this, why were you a teacher to begin with? Why did you go to school for education or what was the deeper reason of you coming to the classroom and having inspiration to do this job? So starting with getting into a comfortable position, maybe find a comfortable place to sit, maybe if you're standing, take a moment to get comfortable and shut your eyes. Once your eyes are shut, go ahead and take some long deep breaths. So you're very simply taking the focus out of the buzzing motion of your thoughts, maybe lists of things to do or maybe you're analyzing conversations from the past. You're just taking your focus out of that buzzing motion of thinking and anchoring your awareness in the calming waves of your breath. So bringing your attention into the sensations of your body and taking some longer, deeper breaths. You can follow your breath with your focus through the entire inhale and all the way through the exhale. Once you feel more grounded in your body and your breath, tune into your deeper purpose, the macro reason or the fundamental reason you are working as a teacher. Just take a moment to tune into that, staying present in your body as you bring this to mind. In this place, set an intention for how you want to give back. How do you want to move through your day with this deeper purpose or the why in mind? So I recommend to do this in the morning before you go to work. It's a good way to fuel what you're doing, especially if you're ever feeling burned out. And let's move on to the next exercise here. And here's actually a list of the rejuvenate exercise. Remember your why? I was reading an interesting article in Psychology Today and they said the first way to work with burnout in work is to tune into that purpose of what you're doing. So that's what we were doing in this exercise. Moving on to the next exercise. This is an exercise you can do throughout your whole day. You can do it in moments if you're ever waiting in line, the bank, or maybe you're sitting at your computer and you just have one quick moment. And it works specifically with the nervous system. So the idea behind this is the neurosynapses that fire together, wire together. So we're working with the nervous system to retrain it for calmness. So in other words, we're training the mind to be less reactive throughout the day, to move more towards a calm state as opposed to a reactive stressful state. Now, this is a three breath pause relaxation exercise. So three breath pause button, just pressing the pause button throughout your day. And very simply, why don't we go through this? What you do is, again, we're shutting the eyes. We're taking the focus out of the buzzing motion of thoughts, of vortex, of thinking and anchoring the awareness in the body. And very simply, bring one hand to your belly. We're gonna take three long, deep breaths here. And as you take these breaths, with your focus, follow the breath throughout the whole inhale and see if you can actually feel the breath against your hand. So you feel the belly rising with the inhale, the belly pressing against the hand, the sensations of the inhale, and then notice the sensations of the exhale. And you take a second long, deep inhale, breathing all the way to the bottom of the belly, anchoring your awareness in the breath, and then exaggerate the exhale. Exhale all your air out. One more long, deep breath in, breathing all the way to the bottom of the belly, feeling the expansion of the inhale beneath your hand. And then you exaggerate the exhale and follow the stream of breath. So you're following that stream of inhale and exhale with your focus. Again, anchoring your awareness in a more calm and present reality, one that subsides in the body and the breath. So this is something again you can do throughout your day if you ever have an extra moment. Doesn't take long at all, but it's very, it's like fresh water for the nervous system. Again, just calming the nervous synapses of the nervous system, training the nervous system to reside in a more grounded and present reality, remembering that the nervous synapses that fire together, wire together. Move on to the last practice, exercise three, reflect. So for this exercise, this is good to do at the end of the day. The premise of this exercise is based on the concept that the seeds you plant, the positive seeds you plant, bear positive fruits. So the seeds you plant, bear the fruits that grow. If you are kind and generous throughout your day, then inevitably generosity and kindness will arise. So we're reflecting, we're taking a moment to reflect on positive seeds or positive moments that have arisen throughout your day. So again, we're just shutting the eyes, bringing the awareness into the sensations of the body, anchoring the focus in the body, grounding yourself, relaxing for a moment. And call to mind a positive moment that has arisen throughout your day. Maybe it was a burst of laughter from your students. Maybe one of your students understood a concept that they were really struggling with. Maybe a friend showed up for you in a way that you appreciate. Just take a moment to reflect on a positive time that arose, something that uplifted you throughout your day. And once you've thought of that, contemplate two other positive moments. We have so many throughout the day and oftentimes we don't take time to appreciate them. So we're just taking a moment to appreciate positive things that have arisen, positive moments that have arisen throughout your day. And then if you have a moment right down, of course you don't need to write this down, but it's helpful if you can write down one of those moments. And then appreciate the positive seeds or the positive causes and conditions that have contributed to that. So you're just writing down one burst of laughter or burst of generosity or kindness that happened throughout your day. Quickly jot it down and then appreciate your contribution to that. What positive seeds did you plant to contribute to that? This is one that takes a little bit of practice. So often we forget to appreciate ourselves or bring appreciation to what we're planting or what we're contributing. And the intention of this is really to take those moments to not only appreciate the good, but appreciate your own contributions towards that. And moving on to our final calming session. This session works with taking the focus out of the highway of thinking, the kind of buzzing cars of thoughts that are busily buzzing or racing through our mind and anchoring the awareness in a more grounded and present reality, one that subsides in the body and the breath. So again, go ahead and make sure you're comfortable. Find a comfortable position, sitting in a chair, can even lean against the wall if you're standing. We're actually gonna start this exercise with one of the tools we used in the previous exercise. Place your hand one hand on your belly and shut your eyes. Just take a moment to notice if you're carrying any tension or tightness in the belly. Whenever we feel nervousness or fear, the belly is actually the very first muscle to contract to protect the internal organs. It's where fight or fight response starts. So start by relaxing the belly, feeling the muscles in the belly, relax beneath your hand, soften them. Now your attention to the breath, taking a long deep inhale, breathing all the way to the bottom of the belly and just bring your attention to the rising and the falling of the breath beneath the hand in the belly. Notice how every inhale has a slightly different texture, shape, size. Notice the whole cycle of the breath. Notice the shape and size of the exhale, allowing your belly to soften around the breath. Your hand on your belly, feeling how with the inhale, the belly rises, feel the skin and the shirt pressing against your hand with the inhale and allowing the muscles in the belly to soften, observe how the belly draws in and up with the exhale. So you're anchoring your awareness in the body and the breath. The same way an anchor keeps a ship from sailing in all different directions being carried by different currents. We're anchoring the mind in the body and the breath to help keep us anchored in the present moment as opposed to sailing in all different directions with our thoughts and reactions. So really using the breath as a solid grounded anchor to bring the attention in the present moment into the sensations of the body. Notice if your breath is short. Notice if your mind starts drifting off. You start thinking about your day or a list of things to do or, oh, I didn't get this done, just observe that and then kindly and gently draw your attention back to the breath. And at this point in the exercise, you can just allow the breath to be as it is. Allow it to flow in its natural rhythm. I'm just gonna stay with this for a few more minutes following the whole cycle of the breath. The expansion of the inhale, the drawing in and up of the exhale, drawing the breath to deepen and open and the belly to soften around it. And if your mind wanders, kindly and gently drawing it back and judging yourself, just objectively observing and then re-anchoring your awareness in the body and the breath. We're gonna end this practice now with three long deep breaths. You can keep your hand on your belly here. So if you can follow my lead here, everyone take a long deep inhale, breathing all the way to the bottom of the belly, feeling the breath expanding to the bottom of the belly, breathing in and in. Exhale, exaggerate the exhale, empty it all out. And again, long deep breath in, breathing all the way to the bottom of the belly. Exaggerate the exhale, releasing any holding or gripping the belly or the body. Last one, take a long deep breath in, inhale. All right, well, thank you so much. Maybe these practices calm your nervous system, relax your body and your mind and rejuvenate and fuel you throughout your day. Thank you, thank you.