Health & Fitness
A Healthier Lifestyle: One project at a time.
New blog explaining some of our helpful New Leaf Projects and how we plan to keep them going this upcoming school year.
As summer draws closer to an end, I am finally able to start preparing for my senior year at high school as well as get back on track in my blog. Throughout summer, I found myself preoccupied with the summer Institute program that I attended Diablo Valley College, which helped me get a better understanding of college life, but kept me from participating in New Leaf activities. So far, my class has attended two farmers markets, has given out more info about our program, has worked on the local GreenHouse botanical parking project, and has continued to maintain our orchard. Also, we’re making preparations for the school year by planning possible new teams and seminars we can include in our academic and service-learning projects, including new plans for healthier lifestyles for ourselves and our planet.
Last year in New Leaf, we had many successful seminars that taught us about different relaxation and stress-relief techniques, such as an ancient organizing technique called Feng Shui, a heart coherence technique known as HeartMath, and a psychology course for understanding mental illness.
I wanted to share a little info about our Feng Shui seminar in hopes that it would be helpful to anyone having trouble cleaning a room (we‘ve all been there). Feng Shui is an old Chinese technique that helps one remodel their home in a more organized and calm way. As part of Feng Shui, all life has Chi, or energy, that we give off, and when we become stressed, that energy doesn’t flow smoothly. A person’s home has to be organized in a specific manner so that a person’s Chi can move freely without being affected by a messy room. The way to organize a room is by following a specific map; and 3-by-3 grid called the Bagua, which separates the area in different squares, each representing a part of a person's life. Having followed this map, I organized my once-messy room to match who I am and what represents myself, and now I feel much more relaxed in my own bedroom.
Our Heartmath seminar also taught us another way to act calmly by teaching us how to stop, asses the problem we face, and figure out the best way to deal with a situation to which we would normally react with negative emotions. We were all introduced to Heartmath by local members of this project who were very helpful and dedicated to helping all of us spend less time stressed, and more time feeling positive. The way we achieved this is by using different Heartmath tools, or techniques, that had a different purpose for different types of situations, such as resetting our emotions, or appreciating something or someone in our lives. I personally found this program to be very helpful and a good method for kids and adults who might be dealing with worries and stress most of their day. This seminar was so successful that we got a grant to not only keep Heartmath in our school, but receive a fund for buying our own emWave materials, which monitor our heart rate to let us know if we’re calm, or need to stop to take a breath.
Our psychology Seminar helped students who were dealing with mental problems by recognizing what these mental illnesses are and how we can both understand and heal our own mind. This seminar was led by a local psychologist who gave a lot of his time to visit our school and teach us about problems we deal with in our minds and the best solutions to them. We learned a lot about different mental illnesses, but also the stigma of having a mental illness and how we can prevent teens who’re struggling with these problems from being judged by their families and peers. Another way that this project can be very helpful is that we can expand this seminar to help out those teens who might be dealing with suicidal thoughts, and reach out to these students so they can be saved and have the support they need. Having experienced mental illnesses in the past, and being interested in psychology, I truly found this seminar very helpful and am glad we will keep this project going during our next school year.
In one way or another all these seminars have helped our entire New Leaf program, and there are many more ongoing projects that will continue to improve over the future. We’re planning to continue these seminars due to how successful they were and also add new ones which will promote healthier lifestyles. Currently, we’re focusing on getting our New Leaf culinary team going, but we also have planned environmental projects such a building our own vegetable garden, which will help our campus become greener and hopefully inspire others to do the same.
I encourage anyone interested in either Feng Shui or HeartMath to learn more about these great stress-relief techniques, informative websites and books can all be found on these subjects.
Finally, I would like to mention the ongoing effort for saving the Alhambra Highlands, and encourage anyone who is willing to help to visit their face book page and join the project.
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Alhambra-Hills-Open-Space-Committee/189042...
Don’t forget to check out our New Leaf Facebook page also for upcoming events!
