Mindfulness is a double-edged sword when it comes to trauma. In recent years, educators and school administrators have increasingly embraced mindfulness techniques as an essential tool to foster a supportive learning environment. Mindfulness, defined as the practice of maintaining a moment-to-moment awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and environment, […]
education
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Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.Her early leaf’s a flower;But only so an hour.Then leaf subsides to leaf.So Eden sank to grief,So dawn goes down to day.Nothing gold can stay. As our friend Robert Frost said in his poem: Nothing gold can stay. But what is gold, […]
From stream-of-consciousness writing to guided journaling, jotting down what’s inside our heads has the power to make sense of the tangle of ideas in our brains. I started journaling when I was a teenager and have never really stopped doing it, but the format, the content and the language have […]
What is Meditation? According to the dictionary, ‘to meditate’ means to focus one’s mind for a period of time, in silence or with the aid of chanting, for religious or spiritual purposes or as a method of relaxation. There exist different practices, such as mindfulness, mantra chanting, focusing the mind on a […]
Meditation in Spanish Awareness is like the sun. When it shines on things, they are transformed. I have talked extensively about the benefits of meditation for your language learning practice. Having a calm mind will result in a more efficient Spanish practice, but what if you combine meditation with Spanish at the […]
“I don’t remember the time when speaking didn’t make me anxious”, she mumbled, still trying to smile but unable to look me in the eye. “I feel you, sister”, I wanted to say, to help share her painful load and to show her that I’m proof of living with that […]
I originally wrote this article on 17th September 2011. Back then, I believed that the main purpose of language was communication. Now, ten years later, after ten years of teaching and exploring languages, my vision has changed a lot. In fact, I disagree with what I wrote back then. So, […]
I recently sent a questionnaire to my audience, asking them about their Spanish struggles and what they wanted or needed more of to improve and progress in their Spanish journey. One of the questions I asked was how interested they were in a poetry course in Spanish to improve their […]
Journaling in my mother language led me to write poetry, an activity I loved but which I stopped doing because I was young and influenceable and I believed then that if I couldn’t write good poetry (like the wordsmiths I studied in college), then I should not write at all. […]