Very rarely will you hear the words “you should really do less.” It’s especially rare to hear on a bustling college campus. At Mindful Monday meetings, a collaboration between the University of Mississippi Collegiate Recovery Community and Department of Writing and Rhetoric, participants will hear just that.
Mindful Mondays provides students, faculty and staff at the university access to a free meeting every Monday with trained mindfulness instructors.
Camp Best, co-Founder of Mindful Mondays and academic mentor for FASTrack, says his favorite guided meditation to lead is “the radical act of non-doing.
“In other words, to simply sit in stillness and quiet and raise one’s awareness of what it is like to just be, rather than to be doing, fixing, achieving, accomplishing, comparing, striving, etc.,” Best said. “It is a chance to reclaim ourselves as human beings rather than human doings.”
Best received training in mindfulness based stress reduction from the Oasis Institute/Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. He leads the guided meditation that happens at the beginning of the weekly meetings, creating a safe space to unpack feelings and emotions. Later, instructors from the Department of Writing and Rhetoric provide journal prompts for participants to write freely about their thoughts and feelings.
The weekly meetings follow a simple structure: 10 minutes of guided meditation, 10 minutes of writing and 10 minutes of conversation on their reflection. But attendees aren’t just getting 30 minutes of thinking to start their Monday — they’re being taught how to engage in potentially life-changing practices by trained instructors. The ultimate goal of Mindful Mondays is to provide attendees with practical knowledge and tools they can use to cope with stress in their everyday lives.
“Mindfulness gives you the opportunity to have this pause where you settle in with yourself before you approach some kind of task, whether that’s schoolwork or even social situations that may make you tense,” said co-Founder Amber Nichols-Buckley, a professor in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. “And (with practice) it becomes a ritual, because a lot of times sitting down and doing one meditation will calm you. And those are the kinds of things we talk about — we talk about concrete strategies on dealing with stress and anxiety.”
Reactivity to increasing amounts of negative stress is the main marker of developing depression in college settings, usually brought on by academic pressure, issues with time management and difficulties within the university environment. A 2022 publication in the International Journal of Stress Management by the American Psychological Association showed the prevalence rate of depression in college students is nearly 37%. A 2019 publication showed that academic employees are growing increasingly more susceptible to high stress and burnout.
Kyle Loggins, a certified prevention specialist for alcohol and drug use at the William Magee Center, said there’s a pressing need on campus for an accessible outlet to help teach the community to cope with stress in a healthy way.
“I feel like a lot of times in society we tend to bottle things up — like Mentos in a Coke can — until it all blows up,” Loggins said. “We realized very quickly that (Mindful Mondays) is something that everyone needs — not just certain groups, or certain pockets of people. Everyone needs a place to be able to reflect and process (their) feelings.”
The first Mindful Monday meeting of the 2022 fall semester took place on Aug. 29 and provided participants with a place to examine the relationship between work life and being present.
The meeting focused on a quote by New York Times bestselling author John Green at this year’s fall convocation: “Learning is the application of attention and requires conscious presence.” Co-Founder Susan Nichols-Buckley said they chose to talk about this quote because it emphasizes the important role mindfulness plays in a higher education setting.
“In today’s age, with so many distractions, all of these burdens on our time, and how we’re spending our time — it’s hard to be consciously present,” Nichols-Buckley said. “We talked about how our bodies may be here, but our minds may be in a million places. What can help with that is the practice of mindfulness. And if you do it, and do it fairly regularly, you can start to have a vocabulary for how to be in the present.”
When it comes to the specifics of learning how to be mindful, Loggins says just making time to show up on a busy Monday is enough.
“Mondays are typically super stressful,” Loggins said. “You’re ‘shoulding’ all over yourself…‘I shouldn’t be doing this’ or ‘I should be doing that.’ But every Monday at nine o’clock, you get about 20 to 30 minutes just to slow down and be in a community of people that are going to be perfectly content in the present moment.”
Mindful Mondays will continue to meet every Monday of the fall semester on Zoom. There is no requirement for participants to verbally participate, or even show their face. The goal is to provide a place to learn that you’re not alone, and there are ways to cope.
“I think that’s what’s so unique about it,” Loggins said. “We always compare our insides to people’s outsides and it gets really tricky. But what’s great about Mindful Mondays is you kind of get to see the inside of each person — student, professor, parking employee — and realize you’re not alone with some of these struggles.”
The next Mindful Monday is 9 a.m. Monday, Sept. 12. To learn more, visit the ForUM.
