Practical, Youth Inspired, Mindfulness and Stress Relief Activities

Shoshana Phoenixx

Training Description

This training will teach training attendees how to perform multiple mindfulness and stress relief activities that draw on youth’s strengths, cultures and experiences. Ways to integrate these activities into their day-to-day routines will also be discussed using journals, smart phones and/or tablets. These activities can often be taught initially without the overlay or emphasis of their supportive capacities. Participants will be encouraged to playfully introduce a variety of vital stress relievers to assist a system involved youth they support and how they can develop their own independent or group-based practices to improve outcomes for system involved youth.

Learning Objectives

Participants will:

· Explore their own stress experiences and coping styles and support the youth they support in identifying theirs;

· Learn how to creatively introduce the tools of mindfulness and stress relief activities to system involved youth and families; and

· Present different techniques being taught with both virtual and in-person prompting.

Agenda 

10:00am – 10:30am Introduction of trainer and participants to each other and sharing of their personal and professional experiences with both mindfulness practices and system involved youth

10:30am-11:00am Teaching: History of mindfulness-based practices in faiths and medical settings. Evidence based practices research review.

11:00am-12:00pm Activity: Three different mindfulness-based activities that are useful for system involved youth will be introduced to and then practiced by the group

12:00pm-12:30pm Lunch Break (CEUs will not be offered for this time)

12:30pm-12:45pm Group Reflections: on the experience of those practices and how they can be used at the different stages of getting to know a child placed in their care and throughout the long-term care of that child.

12:45pm-1:45pm Teaching: Stress relief activities can be physical, musical, artistic, breath related and most importantly, fun. Multiple stress relieving activities will be described and taught.

1:45pm-2:30pm Activity: Group will practice 5 different stress relievers that are inspired by youth interests. We will discuss how to best assess them for varying ages and physical abilities.

2:30pm-2:45pm Appreciations, Work Integration, and final questions

2:45pm-3:00pm Evaluations

Meet Our Trainer

“We can create together. We can heal together. We can mark the moments of ritual together. May the work of our hearts and hands speak together the truth of our lives.”

Shoshana has been working with communities and professional caregivers educating and training on the issues and challenges around progressive illness, trauma, death and bereavement for families for over 36 years. In that work she has supported people in many ways and forms as they experience illness, grief, healing, recovery, and transformation.

She began her grief and loss professional journey during the illness and death of both of her parents when she was a teenager. She subsequently served a residency in Berkeley to become an interfaith chaplain and now describes herself as “a Jewish chaplain, who works from an interfaith perspective”.

She has trained, counselled, and supported adults and children dealing with terminal illnesses, (and students/volunteers wanting to learn) using art modalities and non-traditional approaches

The thread that stitches together all the pieces of her work life is care, compassion and comfort for suffering people who find themselves outside the system of norms in American mainstream culture.

As a person who has lived outside those norms all her life, Mama Shoshana says with conviction, “We have our unconventional ways, and I am here to tell you that they are valid. There are many roads up this mountain called life, and we survive the unimaginable by stitching together all that we learn from one another.”

This course meets the qualifications for (4.5) BBS CEUs for LCSWs, LMFTs, LPCCs, and LEPs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.