Move. Breathe. Love.

I have this personal habit. I tend to feel overwhelmed and my mind goes blank when I consider creating activities for the upcoming school week. What helps me begin is to go back to a simple formula and then build from there. I would like to share one of those formulas with you: Move. Breathe. Love.

I'll share a little background that may also be helpful:

A broad tactic I use to 'keep things simple' is to focus on three main skills: self awareness, emotional regulation, and social awareness. I create all my lessons and intervention around these three skills. Building from and within those three skills, I return to one more guiding insight: I desire to teach Kindness, Compassion, and Belonging to dissolve bullies, violence, and suicide. Notice what happens in your body when you consider teaching Kindness as Bully Prevention, Compassion as Violence Prevention, and Belonging as Suicide Prevention. Teaching Kindness, Compassion, and Belonging is more inspiring, meaningful, and (most importantly for our own well being) sustainable.

Move.
I have done a number of different things for movement. From dance moves (to fun music) that intentionally cross the body's midline, to Brain Gym http://www.braingym.org/ exercises (again crossing the midline - much more practical for test taking or independent exercises that don't draw attention). For simplicity sake, are you familiar with GoNoodle https://www.gonoodle.com/? My favorite duo is Koo Koo Kanga Roo. KKKR make me laugh out loud which relaxes me and helps me be my best self with the students. Are you a yogi? Bring it to the classroom! I am a wannabe yogi - and I find such great moves and ideas on YouTube. I also use resources like Yoga Calm http://www.yogacalm.org/and Little Flower Yoga http://littlefloweryoga.com/.

Breathe.
I desire to facilitate an 'inner' experience for and with the students. We pay a lot of attention to what is going on inside the body. We talk about BIG feelings and how these BIG feelings want to stick around and they tend to get 'stuck' inside. We can teach movement as a way to get the energy of the BIG feeling unstuck. Once that energy is unstuck, we can use our breath to channel the energy back to where it belongs. Have you ever used a Hoberman sphere? The students love this little toy. It serves as a great visual for belly breathing. We can create our own Hoberman sphere by putting our finger tips together and expanding the hands as we breath in and out. I'll show you this on the video. Mindfulness has become quite popular, and for good reason! Your school district may offer a Mindfulness course if it is something you would be interested in learning more about - and mindfulness strategies could be incorporated into this 'Breathe' segment.

Love.
So now we have moved and hopefully the energy is flowing a bit more. We used intention with our breath to bring the energy in our body back into balance. Now we are going to take our hands that are still touching from the breathing activity, and lower the thumbs as we turn in our fingernails toward one another to make a heart. We put this heart over our heart space to help us channel our breath in a way that we are breathing directly into this space. You may be interested in HeartMath http://www.heartmath.com/ which specializes in the intelligence of the heart. I have learned that the energy of the heart space radiates 12 feet in each direction - and within three feet our heart beat can be measured with 100% accuracy. I understand the energy around the heart is up to 1000x more than the brain.
As we intentionally bring our breath into our heart space, we can share with the students that 'any feeling in your body that is not helping you now can be breathed into this space...imagine that the heart expands as you breathe in the feelings that aren't serving you...and trust that the heart can handle it.'
Building off of this, now suggest that the students think or imagine something that is really easy to love. Ask them to allow this feeling of love to fill their body: their skin, muscles, belly, heart, and mind. If they were able to create a good feeling, guide them now to share that feeling. You can do this simply by guiding their breath: 'As you breathe in allow your body to be filled with the feeling of love, and as you breath out give that feeling to the world.'  You can play with this and share that love with a special person, or a person in the classroom that you choose, or if you are in a small group and it feels safe, you can go through each person in the group and send love to each person individually.