
Practice Makes Perfect
The SEL Blog
My project, Find Your Center: Mindfulness Zen Room/Garden, has the ability to have an everlasting impact on students' lives. Cross Creek School hosts the most fragile students in the district. All students have a mental health diagnosis, are a part of the Exceptional Student Education program for the Emotional/Behavioral disabled, and have faced trauma of abuse, abandonment, neglect. Find Your Center: Mindfulness Zen Room is a project based learning opportunity to create a safe space on campus that students will be able to help create. This room will be turned into a hub for the healing of trauma and improved mental health well-being. Using a multi-sensory approach, students will take part in Mind Body Medicine groups to learn to handle stress in healthy ways in an effort to heal from the trauma they have endured. Students will learn the scientific researched practices of mindful breathing, guided imagery, autogenics and biofeedback, mindful eating, and drawings that are proven to lower blood pressure and cortisol production, decrease stress, and improve mood. This project will help students gain skills and coping strategies needed to help improve grades, attendance, and reduce behavioral incidents. The far reaching impacts include improved mental health, problem solving, and basic life skills needed for our fragile population of youth. Creating the room themselves will give them a safe place to call their own that they can visit in their times of need in order to Find Their Center, and begin the healing needed to accelerate their ability to thrive.
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