Walking through the door on Tuesday into the classroom right on time and then finding the nearest beanbag to sit in to get situated for the class. Once I got seated, the class started right away. We jumped right into the discussion of mindfulness and sharing with the class of what we found online about mindfulness. Everyone in class kind told a little of what they found, but it did not seem that the teacher was satisfied enough with what we were telling her. She went on to tell us that mindfulness is taking thought into everything you do like motives, desires, wants, and actions. If we do not have mindfulness then that leads to major consumption on things we may not need. 

We then settled into the beanbags to do meditation. I thought it would be a waste of time and nothing was going to come out of it. I decided to still give it a try. I followed the teacher’s instructions to sit up straight, stair at the green dot in front of me, focus on my breath, and just try to relax. I feel like I’m always on the go trying to get everything done and never taking a breath. It was hard at first to not have all these things I had in my mind like errands I had to run, what homework I had to do, and so on, fixate in my mind. I found a way to let it all go for the moment after a bit of time. I had never felt that good in such a long time. I realized I needed to do this more often and put it in my everyday life. One the teacher told us that we would need to do everyday for class, I had more of an incentive to do it. I definitely need to take a breath and meditate once a day.

Then we got an article over mindfulness to read. We were put into pairs and assigned a paragraph to read. My partner and I got the paragraph that focuses on why we should put emphasis on our well-being. The main points in the paragraph are it helps you and others, it affects how we approach sustainable behaviors, and we will not think of taking care of ourselves and the world as a luxury. The other groups touched on that you need to live in the present, mindfulness can make people happier, it can help with depression and anxiety, passion and empathy is heightened, and relations with others can be improved. Mindfulness can allow people to know themselves, their goals, and values better. It also shows that you need more longing happiness and not temporary happiness with materialistic things. It seemed so odvise, but I never really actually took this all into account. The class ended. I felt fresh and ready for the rest of my day.

Thursday came around and walked into class and the room was separated with by if you had read the yes or no article. I had read the no article, so went to the no side of the room. The first thing did was start off with a meditation. It was so nice to start off the class by trying to de-stress and do my best to just be in the present. We then broke into pairs, and we talked about if anything confused us about the article. My partner both talked about how we thought the author had good ideas, but it would be very hard or not possible to make everyone do what he wanted them to do. We thought his idea was to try to make everyone cut down on their consumption as much as possible. We thought this was not possible or it would just take a very long time to go into full effect. People would have to change their way of life almost completely.

After talking to my partner the teacher opened it to the whole room  for discussion and the yes team started off first. Their author seemed very confusing. He thought that to get to the top you had to be destructive. Then once you have it all work on making the world better and be sustainable. I think when you are already used to doing something it is very hard to break habits. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. After The yes group was done talking, I was very happy that I got to read the no article instead of the yes.

The no side then went to tell the things they may have been confused about, but we were not nearly as confused as the yes side. I told the teacher about how I thought his idea was not obtainable. I soon came to understand that the authors of both articles both just saw this their ways as an ideal way for people to try and better the world if they could just control everything. As a class we looked at things that are happening in the world, but we had to figure out how we thought our author from the article we read would view it. One example how all fashion brands took notice that people are starting to read more into companies. Some companies donate money, try to use recycled material, and more. One thing I notice that I thought the no author would not like how most of them did not really have to do with sustainability, but more social justice. He would be happy in the fact that people are not just buying stuff without thought, but they should keep sustainability in their minds more. Mindfulness is something I know I need to work on, and believe if others did this as well we could get somewhere with how to treat the earth better. We have to help ourselves first before we can help others.