Students challenged to embrace feelings at Dal meditation class

Class offered by Shambhala Centre is about "coming to terms with how you feel."

Ommmmmmm.

Deep thought and meditation might be just what the doctor ordered.

Students have a lot of reasons to be stressed out. Deadlines, part-time jobs, and the general pains of life. But they don't have many options when it comes to dealing with stress.

Well, what about meditation? The Shambhala Centre is offering free classes every Friday from 4-5 p.m at the Dalhousie University Student Union Building.

Tips

If you don’t think structured meditation is for you, Dalhousie’s on-campus counsellor Jennifer Volsky Rushton offers these tips to help reduce stress:

  • Analyze exactly what you're thinking and feeling
  • Write down the thoughts that come into your head when you start to feel anxious
  • Write the further implications of those thoughts
  • Try to come up with counter-thoughts that are more rational
- If that is difficult, try to imagine what you would say to a friend who just said the same thing
  • Practice deep breathing from the abdomen instead of the chest
  • This brings more oxygen into the body, calms it down and helps to relax muscles 

From Alleviating Exam Stress

Jeff Torbert, who was born into the Shambhala Buddhist community, leads the class. As a music professor at Dalhousie he has witnessed meditation classes around campus start and stop for years. He wants a class for students that will be more of a permanent fixture.

Torbert explains meditation as "coming to terms with how you feel."

He suggests that rather than suppressing your feelings, it's best to feel your feelings, even if they're bad ones.

Does that mean allowing oneself to feel overwhelmed?

Yes, he says.

You should never bottle up your emotions. Suppressing them could, in time, result in some kind of hair pulling, wall punching emotional explosion. And, usually, things aren't as bad as we make them out to be.

"When you actually look [within yourself], you realize that... I'm OK," says Colin Stubbert, a fourth-year philosophy student at Dal who attends the weekly classes.

He meditates regularly and says he feels like a more rounded and happier individual when he does. "There's no necessary faith, there's no rules," he says. It's just a practice to make friends with yourself and cultivate some form of sanity."

And anyone can do it.

No experience is necessary to take part in the class. Torbert says new people try it out every week. All you have to do is sit down and be quiet for five- to 10-minute intervals.

After that, Torbert gives students time to reflect. "People get a chance to ask questions and to talk about their experiences," he says.

Dalhousie's on-campus counsellor Jennifer Volsky Rushton explains in a previous article that meditation is "a skill that you can translate into all different areas of your life."

Stubbert thinks meditation is a good stress-reliever, too.  

He says he relies on meditation to make him a happier and more "together" person in every aspect of his life.

Without meditation, Stubbert describes his mind as an atmosphere of chaos.

"You have all of these thoughts and you sort of get pulled off. They're distracting you from what's going on," he says.

After meditating, Stubbert compares his mind to a jar full of clear water, "and that's very refreshing," he says.

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