Angelique M., Student, 18 years
During my first year of IB, my English teacher announced to my class that we would have a meditation class once a week. The class instantly became noisy because of the excitement that entered the room. We were very excited to have meditation because we were the first class in the school to experience something new, which made us feel special. We were excited as a whole because sometimes school can be very overwhelming, especially because it is our senior year which causes a lot of stress when trying to keep up with good grades and college applications. Meditation for us meant being able to relax for once and to take our mind off of the things that were stressing us.
Learning meditation for the first time was exciting and very interesting. Our first meditation class was fun because we were learning the basics of meditation and it was interesting because we learned how our instructor, Amy, used meditation when going through her recovery from an accident. It was amazing to hear how meditation worked out for her. My first time doing meditation was hard because I could not focus and I could not take my mind off of things that were going on around me. I started to give up on meditation because I thought it was unnecessary and didn’t work. However, the more we got into the meditation course and learned different methods of meditation such as my personal favorite, the chocolate meditation, and body scan meditation, the more I started to understand. In addition we did a lesson with learning about different parts of the brain which correlated with why some people were not able to focus. This lesson was also powerful for me because it correlated with biology and learning about the human body, which is my favorite.
Meditation started to become easy as the course progressed. Meditation made me feel very relaxed and my body was not tense like it usually is. Meditation took my mind off the negative things that were stressing me and made me feel better when going to the next class afterwards. Therefore, I would definitely take meditation and the developmental perspectives with me to college. I would take meditation with me to college because it is very relaxing and gives me time to have time for myself and to reflect on life. Meditation would be helpful in college because it can help me cope with stress, nervousness, and anxiety while being in college away from my mother. Meditation in college would give me a feeling of security and relaxation which would be a tremendous help.
