Twila Prunty, Nick Crnokrak and Myra Woelfel

The team’s innovative teaching project, “Mindful Strides,” involves installing a labyrinth. Used for more than 4,000 years, labyrinths are a meditative tool. Unlike a maze that has dead ends, is complex and requires left-brain thinking and logic, a labyrinth’s single path has numerous 180 degree turns that shifts awareness from right brain to left brain. According to the team, the shifts balance the brain’s two hemispheres resulting in a meditative state linked to physical and emotional healing. They say the benefits of walking a labyrinth are calming, centering and help with increased focus, self-awareness, de-stressing, problem solving, conflict resolution, being thankful/grateful, reflecting, releasing tension, practicing mindfulness, lowering blood pressure, lowering breathing rates, reducing insomnia/increasing better sleep and decreasing amounts of disciplinary actions. The teachers hope that by creating a labyrinth, current and future students’ overall social emotional well-being as well as their self-esteem will increase, thus improving the community at large. The Voya grant will be used to purchase a 22-foot by four-inch labyrinth template, rope, J-hooks and a flowerpot for the centerpiece.