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Inner Space Turns 11! – Our One Most Important Learning About Mental Health

We turned 11 years old on the 26th of December! This time, we thought of sharing our one most important learning about mental health with you. This is the one thing that has stood out the most over all our work in the last 11 years. Working with this seemed to strengthen resilience of people no matter what their age or situation. That learning is –

Mental health is the ability to 'stay' with situations.

What does this mean?

Pick up any situation – a hectic vacation, a difficult relationship, a stressful job or a pandemic. What is the 1 thing that determines how well we are as the situation ebbs and flows? It is our ability to stay with the situation. If we have some relationship with whatever is unfolding at this moment, we are able to go through it more peacefully. On the other hand, if we don’t have any relationship with the present situation, we remain caught up in suffering. This suffering could look like loops of ‘why me’ – ‘why is my nose like this?’, ‘why is my relationship not good?’, ‘why is my life like this?’. We ruminate, we become closed, fearful and resentful. Our mental health suffers. 

As this insight became clearer to us, we were convinced that working on looking inwards and staying with oneself is indispensable to mental health. This became a part of our psychotherapy, group workshops, courses, our work with NGOs and other corporate organizations. Here is a snapshot of the year gone by-

Transition to Working Online For Good

One big change this year was that we surrendered our office space and moved to a fully online mode of work. Big as this step was, it came with the ability to work together even if the team was in different parts of the country! 

Ongoing Mindfulness Meditation Courses

8 Week Mindfulness Meditation Course

We created our signature 8 week mindfulness meditation course in a robust online cum webinar format. After a lot of thought into how this could be best done online, we came up with a format where course videos are shared with participants over the week. Towards the end of each week, there is a live webinar for further discussion, Q & A and meditation practice.

Our First Online Mindfulness Program for Children!

We have been doing the Breathing Happiness Program for Children since 2019. This time, we decided to do it online. We were overjoyed to discover how well the children took to it even in an online format! Inspired by this, we also conducted a mindfulness session for parents and children on Children’s Day.

Mindfulness Based Train the Trainer Programs with Non Profit Organizations

This year, we did mindfulness based train the trainer programs with 4 non profit organizations – OSCAR, CHIP Mumbai, Enabling Leadership and Saath Charitable Trust,  in partnership with EMpower. These programs were all about helping trainers imbibe mindfulness practices and then incorporate it into their curriculum. Some of these programs also involved teaching them to introduce mindfulness to adults and children. As a team, we were very thrilled to be doing this!

Mindfulness Programs
with Corporates

We also did mindfulness workshops with GroupM, ABP news and Mercury Capital. As always, it was nice to work with diverse themes like introductory mindfulness workshops, workshops customized for leaders and sessions tailored to better process emotions that were coming up due to the pandemic.

A Support Circle For Young Adults

Again, this is something we are thrilled about! We began a weekly support circle for young adults that one of our therapists facilitates regularly. We had been wanting to do this for a long time, since it is immensely helpful to see and hear others who are going through the same experiences and struggles! The group discussed topics like setting boundaries, motivating oneself, dealing with difficult emotions, loneliness, stress related to the pandemic and so on.

A Monthly Wisdom Circle

Our chief psychologist facilitated monthly wisdom circles which involve meditation, sharing and contemplation on various aspects of emotional health such as compassion to self, how to create some separation from the thinking mind and so on. This is a wonderful space to meditate and contemplate on nuggets of wisdom that come from psychology as well as mindfulness concepts.

The 'Ask the Therapist'
Platform

We also began a new platform called ‘Ask the Therapist‘ where anyone can ask any questions about mental health and they will be answered by our therapists. Out of all the questions that came to us, relationship queries and queries about how to help a family member who was going through some mental health condition were asked most frequently.

A Book by Our Chief Psychologist-
'You are Simply Perfect'!

One of the biggest things for us this year is that Sadia, our founder, authored a book – You are Simply Perfect! This is a book for teens and tweens catering to their emotional needs. It applies principles of mindfulness and compassion to help them cultivate a friendly relationship with themselves, which is crucial at that age. It is out for sale now!! Click here to get it now!

On this note, we end this year while beginning another one. Deep gratitude to each one of you who has been a part of our journey. Have a wonderful and peaceful 2022. May you be well, may you be happy!

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