Mental Health & Mindfulness Day 4 (Madeleine Genzer)

On day 4 of Mental Health and Mindfulness, we started bright and early at 8:30 with Dr. Reese for morning yoga up until around 10 AM. Some of the poses we did consisted of Child's Pose, Windshield Wipers, and Wild Thing, and some of the previous poses we had been working on throughout the week, as well as new poses that Dr Reese taught us.   Which was fun to learn and get to try out the new poses she showed us.   I think the group could agree that we felt very relaxed and refreshed to start our day off right.

After yoga and mindfulness, we quickly set up the room for our guest speaker.  Sofia Heyl who talked to us about Music Therapy and how it is a professional, healthcare, and educational discipline.   She also went into depth about how in order to become a Music Therapist you must have a bachelor's degree or higher in Music Therapy from  The American Music Therapy Association.    Another thing she talked about was how Music Therapy is implimentit into someone's day to day lifestype and the different job oppurtunites you could have if you had your major in Music Therapy, which is the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit which stand for NICU.  That is a specialized hospital unit which provides critical medical care for newborns who are premature or need more medical care.  Ms Heyl also talked about how Music Therapy can evoke and alter emotional reactions.  She also talked allot about how client preffered music is effective at inducing dopamine activity to the brain and she listed the intervetions being, Receptive, Recreative, Compositional, and the last being Improvisational.  

After lunch, we painted rocks and made fun designs on the rocks, for the remainder of the afternoon and to finish off the afternoon Ms Shivani came in and guided us through breathing techniques and meditation and one of the techniques we worked on was box breathing.   Overall the day went well and we learned a bunch of fun things to carry on through our life and I think we could all say we had an overall fun day.

During the breathing techniques with Ms Shivani, we have learned a lot of useful techniques that are very useful to know, as if we were about to take a test at school, or feel very worked up and overwhelmed, these breathing techniques, like box breathing,  Traditional Pranayama practice, and lastely Bhramari which is a humming bee breath which you take a gentle inhale exhaling with a long humming breath to release any tension or anxiety you might have.