The counseling center’s new mindfulness mediation group presents Mississippi State University students with a way to overcome the Monday blues and start the week fresh and stress-free.
The eight-week program, currently in its third week, has been beneficial for many students. The mindfulness meditation group, held from 9 to 10:30 a.m. Mondays in the Sanderson Center Classroom, will continue meeting until April 1.
Victoria McCaffrey, a senior chemical engineering major, said even though this is her first time attending the event, it has already helped her view meditation in a new way.
“I think that it’s helpful to think about meditation in a different way, and I think that it’s helpful to figure out how to use that in our daily lives as college students,” McCaffrey said.
For those not exactly sure what mindfulness is, Corey Fitzgerald, a staff counselor at the MSU counseling center and the leader of the group, defined it as “being aware of what’s happening in the present moment, and holding that in awareness in a non-judgmental way.”
Fitzgerald, an LSU graduate and a first-year employee at the MSU counseling center, said he helped with a mindfulness group during his graduate work, and wanted to bring the idea here.
Each week, the group works through a specific aspect of mindfulness and meditation. The topic of the most recent meeting was informal practices of mindfulness, or incorporating intentional thinking into daily activities.
“We talked about how can we bring mindfulness into walking, how can we bring mindfulness into just eating and how can that give us back a lot of our time and help with interpersonal relationships, how can that help with de-stressing,” Fitzgerald said.
Another member of the meditation group, a graduate student who wished to remain anonymous for privacy reasons, said the group had already helped her with her anxiety.
“I feel like it’s very helpful, it’s helping me be less anxious,” she said.
Through his work at the counseling center, Fitzgerald has seen how anxiety and depression are way more common than people realize.
“More times than not, we all deal with something that we don’t want to talk about. For instance, two of the biggest diagnoses that we see at the student counseling center… are depression and anxiety, to the point where a lot of us will deal with it,” Fitzgerald said. “But we just don’t talk about it—we just struggle in silence.”
Fitzgerald said mindfulness, though not necessarily the whole solution, can help reduce anxiety and depression.
“Now mindfulness, I’m not marketing it as an end-all-be-all, but it helps with those things, it helps bring down levels of anxiety, it helps point out different avenues of gratitude to increase pleasant events in your life,” Fitzgerald said. “The more we give to mental health, the more we engage in the mental health conversation–it can shift a culture.”
Additionally, realizing you are not alone in these feelings is immensely helpful, Fitzgerald said, and is the point of a having a group and community setting to discuss meditation.
Fitzgerald also said one of the main tenets of mindfulness is understanding how to deal with thoughts, both positive and negative, because they are a necessary part of human life.
“The idea is not to replace negative thoughts. The idea is that thoughts are neither bad nor good, but they’re there. And we should welcome those thoughts because whenever we welcome them and give ourselves time to feel them, they typically dissipate,” Fitzgerald said. “The goal of the group isn’t to say, ‘OK, we’ll never feel bad ever again.’ It’s just to become more comfortable with feelings we know are going to happen anyways because we’re human.”
This philosophy on thinking has greatly helped the participants.
“I definitely think it helps me to be more mindful of how I feel about different things, whether it be about a class or a person, and help me to look at the more positive side of things rather than thinking all these, not necessarily negative thoughts but not necessarily positive, and trying to view my life in a more positive manner,” said the anonymous graduate student.
According to Fitzgerald, there is a myth circulating campus that there is a waiting list to be accepted into the university’s counseling services. This is no longer true, although it does take time to go through the screening process. Fitzgerald said he does not want this to be a deterrent to anyone seeking help, and the counseling center offers many workshops and other programs, such as the Monday meditation group, anyone can attend.