Month of Resilience, Empowerment, and Connection

In these difficult and complex times, there may be one thing that can connect us all, in the pursuit of a common goal: enhancing our personal and community resilience. What should we do with this resilience? To each their own, however, resilience built on the strength of the connection to others and to the group is in everyone’s best interest.

We would like to offer our community of students, academic staff, and administrative staff a month devoted to empowerment, resilience, and connection, in which we will not just talk – but also do. You are invited to join us for 4 weeks of exercise that will guide us to be closer to our bodies, our consciousness, our values, our emotions, our thoughts, and to others. We will try to get this project off the ground together, to practice and share with others around us, to initiate a process of empowerment and connection in an atmosphere of sharing and support. We will center on the values we wish to nourish and learn and practice how to do that. We will send the exercises via email to those who register, and they will begin on April 30, 2023.

You can practice at any time and place, at your convenience. During this month we will offer interim exercises on Zoom with Prof. Nava Levit-Binnun and with students supervised by her and Prof. Danny Hamiel, from Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology.

Week #1, April 30: During the first week our exercises will focus on paying attention to our consciousness, our physical sensations, as well as our automatic internal and external speech. We will try to see where we can identify this ‘automatic pilot’, so that we can pause and open up to the possibility of choosing our response. If necessary, we will also learn regulation exercises to facilitate this process.
Interim exercises via Zoom: Attention and gratitude.

Week #2, May 7: We will continue with what we did the previous week and focus on intensive application of a certain value. We will offer a list of values and methods of motivation, using our improved ability to be mindful of the automatic reaction that we sometimes want to stop. We will pay attention to the feelings that arise together with the desire to act automatically, we will name them – both to regulate them and to help us choose the course of action, in accordance with our values. Everyone will work on this in their own way.
Interim exercises via Zoom: Attention exercises and the point of choice between soothing an emotion and choosing a value and a tool – “being with an unpleasant emotion.”

Week #3, May 14: We will continue with what we did in the previous weeks and focus on developing assertive listening that reveals the ability to be present and express ourselves clearly and directly while at the same time seeing others and their points of view deeply. We will practice these abilities with people who are close to us and in the framework of the school.
Interim exercises via Zoom: Loving-kindness meditation and Toning.

Week #4, May 21: We will continue with what we did in the previous weeks and practice the division between positive and negative thinking, framing negative thinking and focusing attention on the positive, and creating it. During this week we will also practice self-compassion.
Interim exercises via Zoom: Self-compassion, compassion for others, and gratitude.

If you are interested, we invite you to register via the link below: https://idc.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3ICrGJfmuB0er5Q

During the month, you are invited to evaluate each week the intensity of your involvement in that week’s exercises – on a scale of 0 (I didn’t do anything) to 4 (I exercised intensively). You can, of course, choose not to fill in the table.
Under ‘comments’ we would appreciate any insights from the weekly exercises (optional).

At the end of the intervention month, we will convene those who are interested in participating for a summary meeting, in which we will try to understand the value of the intervention, both personally and in terms of the connection between us. And maybe we can also create a positive impact during these difficult times on our surroundings and on the process of connection, which is needed.

For any questions and clarifications about the intervention, please contact us via email: empowerment.and.connection@gmail.com

Sincerely,
Dean of Student Affairs and Baruch Ivcher School of Psychology