St. Teresa’s Institute of Education organized a three days’ workshop on ‘Heartfulness’ conducted by certified trainers Ms. Rakhi Arora and Ms.Poonam from Wonder, Wisdom Heartfulness Education Trust. 12th October 2022 was the final day of the workshop which lasted for about five hours. In this session the students of St. Teresa’s Institute of Education were taught about heartfulness that supports peace of mind and personal transformation. The session taught the students about relaxation, meditation, cleaning techniques and Rejuvenation techniques. The session was started by Ms. Rakhi with a small recap on the previous two sessions on heartfulness. She did a run-through on three important concepts taught earlier: Relaxation; Meditation and Rejuvenation.

Ms. Rakhi explained the importance of these three concepts and how practicing these would bring a positive change in a person’s life. She spoke about positive affirmations and how it would help people in day to day life. With the use of examples related to teachers she made it even easier to understand the idea. A small session of meditation was carried out for thirty minutes which gave the students an insight of how meditation works in simplest ways. After meditation, Ms. Rakhi introduced the students to ‘Essentials of Inner Connect’. In this, she explained how to make contact with your inner self so that you can become a better person through your own beliefs and attitude towards yourself. With her relevant examples she made it clear that the power is in our hands to unleash our inner potential. We just need to begin somewhere, stop hesitating and doubting ourselves.

After a break of fifteen minutes, the session was restarted by Ms. Poonam. She began by talking about Inspire and Inspired Living. To give the students an idea about the terms inspire, leader and vision Ms. Poonam showed the students a short video song called ‘Tum chale toh chale hindustan’. The video showed what leadership and leading the way should actually be. She also spoke about how teachers inspire their student’s every day. Students visualize their teacher as their role model. To talk about teacher student relationship in a classroom she illustrated the concept with a study conducted in a classroom setting by Rosenthal and Jacobson. The study named ‘Pygmalion in the Classroom’ gave the students an insight as to how even a teacher’s perception of a student can change his/her behavior in the classroom.

The session was again handed over to Ms. Rakhi Arora after a short break. Ms. Rakhi Arora started the last half of the session with the concept of heart centered education for life. With the help of the famous story of crow and jackal and with few modifications and evolutions added to it, she explained how people change in various ways because of time and experiences. She also enlightened the students about the four pillars of education by the International Commision for education for the 21st century advocates. Ms. Rakhi showed a few videos which spoke about how differences exist and it should not be a parameter on how we judge people. Everyone is alike. At the end she concluded the session with a few fun activities that students really enjoyed. The session was winded up with a Formal Vote of Thanks proposed by one of our peers. It was an amazing workshop for 3 days and we learnt a lot about ourselves and how we can improve and prove to be better teachers in the future.