��͹��Ƶ

Great universities thrive when their faculty flourish. Join us for Vitality Days, where we’ll explore mindfulness, build resilience, and create a culture of wellness together!

Please find more details outlined below, including time and location, and register here:

• Join the Zoom meeting:
• After attending this session, participants will be able to:
  • Understand how bite-sized interventions cause significant and enduring improvements in well-being.
  • Demonstrate the changing patterns of well-being in the workforce over the past several years.
  • Review and evaluate bite-sized resources and interventions that improve well-being.

• Buddhist Meditation - Led by Dr. Michael Sheehy
  • The Buddhist Meditation session will begin with a brief introduction about what is “Buddhist” (and not Buddhist) about meditation. We'll explore how our mind can be sticky and how to settle the mind naturally. The session will facilitate a practice on Open Awareness to elicit spontaneity of mind and promote wellbeing. This style of meditation practice is conducive to releasing tensions of the ordinary busy mind. No previous experience in meditation is needed. 
• Journaling - Led by Dr. Louisa Igloria
  • This creative journaling workshop, “Writing the Body”, is dedicated to Healthcare Professionals, Teachers, but also open to all who care for others and must also care for themselves. Individuals who are responsible for seeing to the nurture and support of others, are called to heightened service in their line of work every day. At the end of the day, how do they/we attend to their own need for rest and healing? In this short creative journaling workshop, we will focus on the ways in which poetry, like medicine, requires us to practice deepened forms of attention (observing, listening) — to the body and to the world immediately in front of us. Together we will look at some curated poetry selections, and write along to some guided writing prompts. We will write to find the fundamental metaphors we need, which might allow us to make more sense of experience, navigate complexity, and offer respite. Participants will decide how much of their own experiences & contexts to bring into their writing, as well as to share in the group. It is hoped that this workshop can function as an empathetic space in which poetry can be used as a means to explore and articulate what is often difficult to put in language: about human encounters related to the body, with all its flaws, its beauty, its failures, and promise.
• MIEA Mindfulness - Led by Dr. Richard Handel
  • The Mindfulness Institute for Emerging Adults (MIEA) program was developed over the course of a decade by psychiatrists Holly Rogers, MD & Margaret Maytan, MD to bring the benefits of mindfulness to the college students they worked with at Duke University’s student counseling center. The course is an introduction to mindfulness and meditation, taught as a weekly, 75-minute class over four weeks. Intro to Mindfulness is an evidence-based curriculum specifically designed for teaching mindfulness, meditation, and stress management to college students and other young adults.  Although the program was developed for “emerging adults,” the specific mindfulness and meditation practices in the curriculum are applicable to all age groups. In this session, participants will be provided with a brief sampling of teaching concepts from the MIEA program.  In addition, attendees will participate in one meditation exercise drawn from the MIEA curriculum, followed by a brief discussion period. 
• SKY Breath Meditation - Led by Dr. Andrew Cohen & Dr. Sharan Asundi
  • In this interactive session, you’ll learn simple yet powerful movement and breath practices to release stress and refresh your overall well-being. You’ll be introduced to mindful breathing and meditation, highlighting how these practices uplift mood and enhance daily well-being. We’ll have a gentle warm-up and yoga postures, followed by guided breathwork to relax the body and focus the mind, as well as a short Panchakosha Guided Meditation (an inner journey through the five layers of self to deepen awareness and peace). This sample will conclude with open reflection and group discussion to share experiences and insights. This session is suitable for all levels—no prior yoga or meditation experience needed. Come as you are, and leave feeling lighter, calmer, and more centered.

• What are the Contemplative Sciences? How have scientific discoveries from the Contemplative Sciences over the last quarter century informed our understanding of human well-being? In his presentation, Dr. Sheehy will discuss three key discoveries that have shifted our understanding of how to flourish as humans.