INTRO 0:00 This recording is an offering of Networks for Training and Development's online University. Lauren Hackenburg 0:09 Okay, thank you. So the card that I chose today from the magical deck of cards is called Journal, and it reads like this. Spend a few minutes each week or month, adding to a journal, it can be a great way to organize your thoughts, to release pent up feelings, and to record the events of your life. Reading through your old entries, also allows you to see what patterns you repeat, as well as how you've changed. Your journal is also a good tool to help recall special memories. What was going on during one of the happier periods of your life? What made that time so good? How can you add these elements to your life now? Okay, and that's the end of that opening reading. Ginny Focht-New 1:04 Thank you so much, Lauren. Lauren Hackenburg 1:06 You're welcome. Thank you Ginny Focht-New 1:10 So I thought we'd start by working with our - the two senses that we don't really pay very much attention to, but are actually quite important, and can be really affected when we've had some stress in our lives. And they are - and these are big words, I'll just say them, and then I'll tell you what they are. The first is proprioception, and that means that we can figure out where we are in relationship to the parts of our body. The second is vestibular, and vestibular has to do with really balance and balancing things about our body, and with the world that's outside of us. So let's start by warming up our vestibular and proprioceptive senses before we move on to the others. And so the first thing I'm going to ask everybody to do is first just either sit or stand wherever you feel comfortable, and we're going to take a deep breath in just as just as deep as you can, might be just a little sip of air, that's just fine. Or you might be breathing in when everybody else has done and that's also good. So just breathe in. And then breathe out. Let's use our arms to help us with breathing, and maybe some people can bring their arms up over their head and clasp their hands above their head. And maybe some people can only move their arms up, maybe to their shoulder level, or maybe just a few inches away from their body, or even imagine, just imagine your arms moving, if that's not possible for you. So let's breathe in and bring your arms up over your head. Maybe touch your hands to each other. And then turn your hands out and bring your arms down and breathe out. Let's do that one more time. So Breathe in and bring your arms up. However you can, even if you are imagining moving your arms, that's fine. And then breathe out and bring your arms down. Okay, very good. Ginny Focht-New 4:16 The next thing that we're going to do is to pay attention to our neck and our shoulders. So if you take the left side of your face, and tip your head over towards - so your ear is approaching your left shoulder. You can take your left hand and just gently place your left hand on your right shoulder. And again, only do what you feel comfortable doing, even if it's imagining what we're doing. And maybe you'll get your head down to your shoulder, I can't do that but maybe you can. And just breathe for a moment, relax your shoulders and then bring your head carefully and slowly up, take your hand off your shoulder. We're going to go to the other side, so now we're going to take our right ear and tip our, our head over so our right ear starts heading toward our right shoulder and bringing our right hand up onto our left shoulder. And just gently place our hand there, or again, whatever you can do. And then just feel just feel that, that everything kind of go easy. Don't - nothing should hurt, if it hurts back off. And breathe here for a moment. We'll start bringing your head back up again, and take your hand from your shoulder. Okay. Now we're going to move our head to the side, so we'll face - so we'll turn our head toward our left shoulder first, you might just move your head an inch, or not at all. Or maybe you can actually turn your head and see over your shoulder, I can't quite do that, but lots of people can. And now you'll feel some stretching in the right side of your neck. Again, no pain, just feel it, if it feels painful, move your head back. Take a deep breath in, breathe out and bring your head back so that your face - facing forward. And now we're going to do this to the right, so turn your head to the right. however far you feel comfortable looking over your shoulder not take a deep breath in. Breathe out, relax your shoulders, and bring your head so that you're facing forward again. Okay. Now we want to do something with our shoulders because our shoulders can be really tight. And they're a source of tension and stress. And lots of things that we do today can really make it hard for us to relax our shoulders, so we're going to bring - first bring your shoulders up to your ears as high as you can, make it really, really tense and really, really tight. You might even clench your fist, you could do that too, for as long as you can stop when you can't. And then let them go down and just release your, your fists and let your shoulders go. And you can feel this some of the tension, leave your shoulders, it might be that like many people, they're not even aware of all the tension that they have into their shoulder until they actually tense up their shoulders, and just let go. So let's just do that again, because it's ever so important. So shoulders up toward your ears, tight, tight, make a fist. And then as long as you can keep breathing, and then let go, let it all go. Let your fist go. Shake it out. Okay. All right. So now we want to roll our shoulders. So we'll start by rolling our shoulders forward, and up, and back and down, and come back to where you started. And do that again, go forward, and up and back, down. Let's go - let's reverse that. So we'll bring our shoulders up, and back and forward. down. Okay, let's go forward, and then down and back, and then and then back to where you started, okay. So bring your shoulders forward, and down, and back, and up, and around. Okay, very good. Again, if you feel comfortable, just shake it out the best you can. Okay. Ginny Focht-New 9:15 So why does this relate in any way to our senses? Well, I can hopefully answer that question. So first, when we are working our body in that way, we become more aware of where our body parts are, and also our balance. And our senses are mostly in and around our face, although our skin is a sensory organ too - actually our whole body is something that is activated around our senses. Ginny Focht-New 9:49 So I'm going to ask you to do five things. We'll take one step at a time, I'll give you the direction, and then I'm going to just wait five seconds, so there'll be like silence. And then I will tell you what I might see or hear using my senses. Ginny Focht-New 10:10 Okay, so the first step we're going to take is using our eyesight. And maybe some people don't have great eyesight, and that's okay too, you might have things that you can imagine. So looking around you I want you to find five things that you can see. Okay, I'm gonna wait five seconds, and then I'll tell you what I see. So I see a rock on my desk that has koi fish painted on it. And I see a pencil, I see a lamp with the light turned on. I see a pair of scissors, and I see some flowers. Okay, let's take a nice deep breath in. And breathe out. Just give you another moment to just kind of look around and see what you can see. Ginny Focht-New 11:32 Okay, so the next sense that we want to activate is our sense of touch. So I'd like you to find four things that you can touch, might be things that are close to you, or they might be might have to stretch your arm out. Or, again, it might be just something where you have your hands on your legs, or someplace else, and then you can imagine touching things. Okay. So I'm going to give you five seconds to find things that you can touch, and then I'll tell you what I find, okay. Okay, so I touched the surface of my desk, it's kind of smooth, and cool. I touched the pencil that I saw before, and it has different sides on it. I touched my pants that I'm wearing, which are also smooth, and soft. And then I also touched the stone that was in front of me, which is also smooth, and it's very cool. So in case you need a little more time, just gonna wait a few more seconds, if you want to spend a few more seconds, just touching things. Ginny Focht-New 13:13 Okay, so the next sense that we're going to activate is our sense of hearing. And again, five seconds, because it might take that long or maybe even longer to hear something around you - maybe you're in someplace, it's really quite busy right now, and so it's not so hard to hear things. You might be in a place, thats really quiet, and it might take several seconds before you actually hear something. Okay, so five seconds of quiet so that you can listen. I'll tell you the three things that I could hear. I could hear a clock in the other room ticking, I could hear my neighbor's dog outside barking, and I could hear some traffic on the street where I live. So again, I just want to give you a few more seconds if you need a little more time to be able to hear things around you. Ginny Focht-New 14:40 Okay, so the next sense will be our sense of smell. This might be a little more difficult for some people than others. Some people have a better sense of smell than other people do. And you're going to try to find two things that you can smell. So let's just see how that goes, okay? So again, five seconds to give you time to just kind of smell what's around you. Maybe it's easy because you're eating, you're eating food right now and food can have more smell then, then sometimes just the room around us. Alright, here we go. Okay, so the two things that I could smell. One is a candle that's sitting on my desk, smells like vanilla-y, kinda. And I could also still smell my shampoo, from when I washed my hair. Again, I want to give you a few seconds, do you need a little more time to just see what else you might smell around you. Ginny Focht-New 16:14 Okay, and the last sense that we will focus on is our sense of taste. Maybe you just ate something, maybe just drank something, or maybe none of that. So at any point in time, you can just use your imagination, because sometimes we can even imagine that we're tasting something and we can actually feel like that this thing is the taste of that is in our mouth, okay, so I'm going to give you five seconds, I'll be quiet, and we can think about taste, see what you can taste. Okay, right before we began, I was drinking some of my kombucha, and I can still taste that in my mouth. So again, few more seconds if you need a little more time to think about taste, or actually taste something. Ginny Focht-New 17:26 So these are all the ways that we take information into our body and our brain, and it helps us to know what's around us. And it's really helpful when our senses are working together, because when they work together, then we know what to do when we one of our senses is activated, like we touch a hot stove, ow, you need to take your finger away right away. We don't always think about that, but we want our body to react in that moment to keep us safe. Okay? Or maybe we want to take a walk and just enjoy the smell of some flowers, or listening to the wind blow in the trees. Sometimes our minds can be so busy that we begin to ignore all of the other things that are around us, regardless of whether or not we're paying attention, our senses are always taking in information. Sometimes we can enjoy that more though when we pay attention to our senses in that way. Okay, and so, that is it. Thank you so much. Rosa McAllister 18:42 Thank you, Ginny, so much - and Lauren for helping us get started today. And for each of these Muck to Mojos, this is Rosa McAllister from Networks for Training and Development, just jumping in here. And wanting to give a big thank you to Northumberland County Trauma Committee, to everyone who has helped make this happen. This is our last - our sixth recording of Muck to Mojo. We've done these - we decided to do this in January 2021. We started it with the idea of thinking that maybe we all needed a little extra help coming out of 2020 and coming into 2021, which has been a year to remember - a year and a half to remember, shall we say. At the very least, we thought that maybe we all needed to try to find ways to climb out of the muck that has been around us and maybe in us and find ways to re-find or grab on to or build up our Mojo. And I hope and I think that we've done that. So we did monthly recordings from January until now June. Today is June 28 2021. It's the end of our fiscal year kind of our almost our New Year's Eve celebration in the nonprofit world. Many of us start a New Year, a new calendar, a new beginning on July 1. And so we're all about to do that. So from all of us, all of you here today, as well as those listening in later, our thanks to you, we hope you find much, much mojo, even though there's always a bit of muck around us. Thanks to everyone. OUTRO 20:22 Thank you for listening. We hope the information provided was helpful. Don't forget to stop by our website and take advantage of all we have to offer. If you want to be kept informed of upcoming events, subscribe to our channel to be kept up to date on our future programs. Click on the link provided in the description if you wish to receive emails about upcoming events and offerings. Transcribed by https://otter.ai