 Hello, and now we're actually going way over to the west coast of Canada to bring in Eric and look, if ever we needed something about mindfulness and screen breaks, this is definitely the last year, is it? So without any further ado, and we're going to have a cup of fuckel, Oscar, counting in Irish. Oh, on many layers, I can hear and see you all smiling, but there are a lot of people joining in. Okay, and we do it nice and slow. I count one and then I want you all to join in. Energy. Let's have some fun. Are we ready? I keep doing that. I'm doing that all day. I think we actually have to start for your range. We start again. Are we ready? Yes, we are. Are we ready? Here we go. Hi. Hi. Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah, Lori and I'd like you to follow along with me. Move your eyes away from the screen. Look around your space and count how many items you see that are green. Now do the same thing. Look around and see how many items within your space are brown. Are there any items at all within your room that are red? Come back. Let's take a nice big deep breath in. Breathe it all out. So now while you were looking all around your space were you thinking about any other part of your day or any other part of your life? So I'm taking her from Lori there and my name is Erica and Lori and I've been working online virtually for over a decade now and at times in an unhealthy way. That changed for us eight years ago when I had a car accident that left me living in constant pain and we had to figure out a new way forward and one in which put put health first while still doing exceptional work and the reality for us was that we discovered that putting our health first actually results in us creating some of the work that we're most proud of and that's also one of some awards. So fast forward another four years with me having started my masters and feeling rather chuffed at my my pain management which was sort of a combination of mindfulness and cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, meditation and healthy screen breaks or as my doctors would call them pacing. And then I had a second car accident and one that left me with a really bad concussion which when I started back into my masters I discovered was reigravating my concussion symptoms from from studying my masters online and so this made me reflect well made both Lori and I reflect back and realized that what we've been learning for for putting our own health first and taking those those breaks throughout our work day was what we really should be teaching and sharing with our students online. And then I as well encountered something in my life which made mindfulness a survival tool for me. I was I got Scott hit with the anxiety disorder out of the blue where I would start having panic attacks like seven panic attacks within one hour of my day and thanks to some really good friends they had me seek help and that's where I started learning all these wonderful tools but you know like me like many of you probably thought that to meditate meant you have to sit on a pillow in a quiet room with incense burning and I just couldn't do that especially when you have a lot of anxiety you can't just sit still with your mind and a lot of us in the technology world if we're sitting and we're surrounded by other people we're working but we encounter a lot of stress we can't just stand up and do yoga on the spot quite often. Sometimes we need techniques when no one is really aware of what we are doing but yet they help to calm us and bring about some mindfulness and a little bit of a break. So the looking around the room and counting colors is an example of one of those things that you can do anywhere just gives you a complete break from what you're doing. So I'm going to share one more of those ideas with you right now that just helps you to come to your breath it calms you down it's a scientific fact you cannot have a full blown panic attack if you are focused on your breath so we'll doodle along with you it's called a square breathing I don't know if you'll be able to see this but I'll draw here for you so I just want you to take a big deep breath in first breathe out we're going to draw a square so breathe in for four counts as you draw up on your square one two three four that's an awful square hold your breath for two counts at the top then breathe out across one two three four hold your breath for two seconds breathe in two three four hold your breath one two breathe out two three four hold your breath for two seconds one more time around breathe in two three four hold one two breathe out two three four hold one two breathe in two three four breathe out hold one two three four so you can do this you can doodle on a piece of paper you can draw an imaginary square in your mind while you're breathing and I promise you it will help so the way in which we've been sharing and demonstrating sort of digital hygiene and healthy living with our students is through activity breaks that we're putting into our units in our online courses and so this is just a picture here from from one of those activity breaks and so the way we've been doing it is where we can we tie the activity break in with the the unit's theme and some of those like like the one that's pictured here is fun and a silly way to get students up and moving and stretching and laughing some pull in some of the creations that our past students have made and some of them are just valuable life lessons like mindfulness and meditation so and then we've further been sharing these activities with the general public especially after the pandemic hit and the whole online world started going into the state of anxiety and so with those ones we've been sharing them sort of across the digital magazines that that we that we write on some of our blogs that we write and as well as you know through digital video and our new classroom platform that that we built you might find yourself working with kids online and it is possible to teach them some of the same mindfulness techniques that we've even done with you here today they really do appreciate them but in terms of taking breaks from the screen and just getting away and creative there's a lot of fun ways to do it what you see pictured here is one of my favorites it's the one-minute superhero challenge so you challenge everyone to run away for one minute and grab anything they have in their house while you play a superhero song so while that music is playing they're running running around grabbing whatever they can and here you can see what some of our kids brought back and they're now a superhero and they're dancing and moving around like they're superhero and then you ask them to tell you who they are what their superpower is and then they walk away from the screen completely draw a comic strip of their superhero in action so it could be a virtually led camp a youth group a class anything at all where you do have them engaged with you online but you can still get them to run away and do other things pump up the energy and have a lot of fun and so with these we invite all of you to reuse repurpose and remix the the the various different sort of health and wellness materials that we've been building currently they're sort of spread all across the web we've got them on my personal blog romancing emmy rogers his character we write and then in our story to go classroom site which i've written the address from for right there it's story to go dot ca dot slash classroom um and uh slowly we're also redeveloping all those activities so they'll be on the story to go classroom site as a part of a health and wellness studio that we're building on the site with open access healthy living experiences and so so with that if there's anybody who'd like to facilitate new health and wellness and healthy living activities on in the studio that we have on the site we'd love to facilitate that and as uh lori and i have learned from our first nations um who we um who we we whose traditional lands were we're on here in in british columbia um we'd like to say um we'd like to say thank you and there's several different languages in our area um but one of the ways of saying that is to bring your hands forward just like nacella is doing right now thank you i have to say thank you and and uh and get in and irish is a gaelic right they will have they will have to fill us in go to mochagos