USY Mental Health

Our 6th-12th graders are invited to join our year of mental health workshops. This program will consist of four Sunday afternoons.

Mental health and wellness is not simply a matter of personal practices, it involves our interactions with others, our friendships, and the other relationships with people that sustain us. The self is not separate from the community. Yet when the idea of mental health and wellness is taught to our teens, it is often spoken about with the individualizing terms of self: mind, body, and soul. This is incomplete, yet as teens grow they integrate it as if it is complete. This sets them up to be isolated and separate, and perhaps forgetting the wellness power of cultivating a community through sharing spaces and creating relationships. Our program seeks to promote wellness of this whole self by helping teens come to understand how our personal wellness and our community wellness are not separate. A four part outdoor and technology-free program will focus on each facet of the self and what wellness means for each; mind, body, soul, and community. By addressing each facet, both separately through focused topic sessions and together within each topic session, we will enhance the learning process and ensure that each teen comes away with an understanding of the importance of wellness of the whole self that is deeply connected and inseparable from our community.

Our “Mind” session will include; a Sound Bath Meditation with a transition to a licensed therapist facilitating a mental health discussion with a brief art therapy project.

Our “Body” session will include; goat yoga to limber up, a hike to connect us to nature and our bodies, transitioning to a nutritionist who will discuss Mindful Eating and Food & Mood involving what our bodies need to grow and how nutrition needs change with age.

Our “Soul” session will include; a Musical workshop and drum circle to show us the power of music as a healing tool, and transition to a Clergy workshop to show us how the Torah/Jewish texts give us advice on how to cure our souls, uplift us, and nurture ourselves.

Our “Community” session will be facilitated through a partnership with the company WolfTribe. The organization facilitates youth team-building workshops and wolf encounters to give examples of the benefits of being part of the pack.