The theme we have chosen at School Of The Arts in 2019/2020, our fifteenth year, is ‘Sustainable Wellness’.
Throughout the year, we will be focussing on the sustainable wellness of our pupils, staff, collaborators, venues, locations and planet; taking inspiration from young trail blazers like the global warming and environmental activist Greta Thunberg (16 years old), and the water warrior and protector Autumn Peltier (15 years old).
We will be approaching everything we do from a place of ‘sustainable wellness’, allowing this theme to impact and affect our projects, teaching, choices and work ethos and we are beginning by looking internally, the starting place of any performer.
Life can be stressful, and the growing pressures of life for the children and young people we work with are increasingly evident; not to mention the huge pressures that are often endured when training to be a performer in such a highly competitive and challenging industry.
This is why we are launching our year of Sustainable Wellness, (in connection with World Mental Health Awareness Day – 10th October), with Project SOTA BEEJA, an exciting project which gives all SOTA pupils across our three schools in Reading, Windsor and Bracknell aged 6-18 years the opportunity to learn how to meditate.
On the weekend of 5th / 6th October, Author of The Effortless Mind, Will Williams, Founder of Beeja Meditation, is bringing his team to teach staff and pupils in small groups how to meditate, using the simple and incredibly effective Beeja Meditation technique.
In Beeja Meditation you are given your own personal sound, a mantra that is specifically suited to you.
‘The reasons for learning this technique are many and varied. By enabling us to access a state that is so physiologically and neurologically profound, all systems with mind, body and nervous system can begin healing themselves from the straining effects of modern living’.
Benefits include:
~ Reduced stress & anxiety
~ More clarity & calm ~ Increased focus
~ Enhanced relatedness
~ Better sleep ~ Improved energy levels
Here is Will explaining to us how he came to delivering this exceptional technique and life skill that we are proud to be teaching our pupils.
Every pupil who learns to meditate during Project SOTA BEEJA will also be given the opportunity to take part in a research project in which the benefits that pupils may or may not experience from meditating will be studied by a team of researchers.
We can’t wait to welcome Will and his team and to SOTA this weekend and to see the impact it has on our Staff and Pupils.