Students get creative for our Mindfulness and Resilience week

This week students and staff across the School have been taking part in Mindfulness and Resilience week.

During registration each day our students have tried a different mindfulness technique; from calming colouring to origami. There have also been ‘Gratitude Trees’ at both sites, where students and staff have written tags to share the things they are thankful for.

The week culminated in workshops aimed at helping students to learn better resilience, led by clinical psychologist Dr Hazel Harrison from ThinkAvellana. During her workshop, Dr Harrison highlighted the words of choreographer Charlotte Edmonds (an alumna of The Royal Ballet School) who said:‘…there should be no shame in admitting you don’t feel you can keep your head above the water.’ Charlotte recently choreographed Sink or Swim, a dance film shot partly underwater, which explores what it is like living with depression.

Students’ mental health and well-being is an integral part of the School’s Healthy Dancer Programme. The week was organised by our PSHE Coordinators Farida Affalouad and Vicky Philips together with our School Counsellors Chavi Sufrin and Ellen Hage. Ellen Hage explained what mindfulness and resilience means and why it is so important for our students.

She said: ‘Mindfulness is about accepting what is in your mind at the present moment without judgement or evaluation.

‘This practice helps us to learn about ourselves and how we interact with our environment, making it a helpful tool in understanding and regulating our emotional health. By taking a moment to pause, we can uncover both helpful and unhelpful patterns and make conscious decisions on how to move forward.

‘Resilience is our ability to recover quickly from challenges in our life. We can build our resilience by getting to know our mind and body; recognising early signs of stress and finding strategies to manage that stress.

‘It is important for everyone to practise self-care, but our students have additional pressures alongside navigating their adolescent years which makes it a very important part of their journey at The Royal Ballet School.’

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