Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat. Feel calmer? Mindful breathing focuses on calming the nervous system, helping to reduce stress, anxiety and even high blood pressure.
Between a new set of responsibilities and pressures and the first glimpse of adulthood, high school can be an incredibly stressful time. 14-year-old UAHS sophomore Riddhi Gupta had the perfect solution.
She coordinated with nonprofit humanitarian organization Art of Living to provide free breathing techniques and meditation workshops to her peers.
Gupta had been attending these workshops since she was in elementary school and saw the benefits these techniques could bring to her classmates.
High school can be difficult during a typical year, but during a pandemic, balancing classes, home life and a social life has become challenging for many students.
“(It) becomes overwhelming,” Gupta says, “and (students) become stressed and depressed sometimes. ... I was really lucky that I got these tools early on in life and I wanted to share them with others.”
Gupta reached out to volunteers at Art of Living and connected with Laura Moore, an instructional leader at UAHS’s Research and Design Lab, to find a way to make these workshops available to her peers.
Laura Moore
In addition to her Research and Design Lab involvement, Moore is also a freshman English teacher at UAHS and for the online academy. Although she remains optimistic about schooling throughout the pandemic, she has noticed troubling changes in her students’ ability to concentrate and motivate themselves. So, she says she was happy to help Gupta bring these resources to the classroom.
Moore and Gupta promote the Art of Living workshops to students in UAHS’s newsletter and online. The workshops are 45-minute classes held weekly via Zoom.
Juan Mosquera, the Art of Living teacher, volunteers his time to teach UAHS students. He’s been involved with Art of Living since he was in college and says that he couldn’t say no to Gupta’s passionate and persistent requests to bring the program to the high school.
“I think the main thing I want the students to take out of it is that one of the greatest gifts and skills you can develop is to learn to deal with your own mind and emotions,” Mosquera says, “because we take that everywhere, right? In school, we learn math, science, maybe even home economics, but no matter what you do in your life, you’re going to have to deal with your mind and emotions.”
Gupta says the breathing techniques covered in class can help students with performance anxiety, low energy, motivation and focus. These techniques give students the tools to lead a happy and healthy life, no matter what stresses they face at school or at home.
“There are so many different scenarios that we do different breathing techniques for,” Gupta says. “We also do some guided meditation, relaxation and mindfulness things, which really calms us down and just gives us a break from our daily routine and everything.”
Moore gives Gupta credit for taking the initiative to help her classmates through the program.
“I want to give her a shoutout because this is something she already had access to that she’s been involved in for a long time,” Moore says. “She had the resources, the practice. She could have continued doing this on her own, especially as an online academy student, and she was really persistent over the summer, emailing saying, ‘How can we start this? How can we figure this out?’”
Because of uncertainty surrounding how the year would look due to the pandemic, Moore says it was difficult to direct Gupta on how to set this program up, but that didn’t deter her.
“She knew it was important,” Moore says. “She was just really advocating for something that she knew would provide a benefit.”
Gupta estimates that about 25 students have joined at some point and about seven students continue to come back each week. She takes feedback about the workshops through email, and after discovering that the original time wasn’t working for some students, she switched the time of the workshop to the students’ lunch break so those who wanted to join could.
Moore says that some of her students’ lives have been flipped upside down by the pandemic. Parents losing jobs, family members getting sick and school changing to remote learning have caused some of her students to struggle through these months.
“There have been some students whose lives have been changed in ways that right now, they’re just surviving to get through,” Moore says. “Then, on the other end, there are students who are thriving, they’re doing better than they’ve ever done before.”
On top of concern for her students, Moore has to manage her own personal challenges that come with teaching during a pandemic.
“Trying to figure out how to preserve the human piece of this, I think, has been the hardest thing,” she says. “I have never sat students voluntarily in rows ever. That’s not how I teach. I’m somebody who wants people looking at each other. I like circles. I think that the change just that comes physically from the way that we had to adjust has been the hardest thing for me.”
Gupta is on the online academy path of schooling, meaning she is working through the remainder of the school year entirely online at her own pace. She says that not being able to see her teachers or peers in person has been one of the biggest challenges for her as well.
“I’m definitely using the breathing techniques and meditation to keep me calm and everything,” Gupta says. “I’m using planners, too, so that I can plan my day and not get stressed ... and I feel like my friends are using the same things.”
Nora McKeown is an editorial assistant. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
