Your Healing Space: Things are Warming Up

Wellness @ Columbia

Your Healing Space is embracing a new, longer-form format to share more detailed information with the Columbia community. This month's edition is focused on staying centered while the semester winds up and the world continues to shake us.

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As we’ve entered meteorological spring and Daylight Savings Time starts this weekend (set your clocks), the streets are looking less slushy, and we’ve even had a few days that haven’t demanded a coat. Along with the change in seasons, we’re entering a change in the pace of the semester and experiencing changes globally that may impact the way we center ourselves and our focus. This month’s W@C brings you some tips on staying centered, a highlight on Kindness Week, and encouragement to get yourself back into the world now the ground has (mostly) thawed.

Staying Centered

Last month, we encouraged you to ground yourself, de-stress, and listen to your internal cues.  We hope you have taken some of those tips and are incorporating them into your daily life. While things are heating up academically, environmentally, socially, and globally, we want to share a tool called the circle of control.

We share this with you to encourage you to take a moment, notice the things stressing you out, and place them in one of these domains.

• Control – These are things that you can impact more or less directly. A few examples might be your homework, whether you are getting enough sleep, what you choose to do with your time, and how you interact with others.
• Influence – These are the things that you cannot directly impact, but have some sway over. These might be whether your groupmates are working on the project, or how tidy the apartment you share with roommates is.
• Concern – These are things that may impact you but over which you have little to no influence or control. These can be anything from nature’s influence (will it rain today?) to broader systems of power (geopolitics).

Once you’ve identified the location of your stress in the circle, we encourage you to center yourself and your actions with knowledge of your power and impact. For instance, if your roommates aren’t cleaning up after themselves, you can’t control your roommates, but you can influence them with conversations. Similarly, you can’t control what happens on a global scale, but you can control how you respond personally and decide to act towards influencing those systems that are closer to your circle of control.

The idea here is to make the most of your agency by focusing your energies on things that are actionable, whether that’s doing something to take care of yourself or creating something to exercise your influence. Doomscrolling leads to more doomscrolling; inaction to inaction. Take some time to reflect on how you are exercising your agency and if you are correctly aligning your efforts within the circle of control.

Kindness Week

This month, we encourage you to find inspiration and community on campus and in the city. Below are some recommended sites to help you find events in the city:

Block Club Chicago - One of our local, independent news sites that also weekly publishes events happening throughout the city.

Chicago Reader - Ever notice these free papers around the city? This is a great place to find local music, theater, and visual art events. 

DO 312 - DO 312 is a promotional website that can link you to all sorts of events happening throughout the city. Click on "Free Stuff" to find cover-free events and shows.

Highlighted Events This Month

Events