Emotion is a Universal Language: The "I Am" Project in Haiti

Thoughts swirl in my mind as the clouds below. I watch as the landscape unfolds through the plane's window. My eyes take in Haiti as a grand, yet somehow delicate work of art. Its majestic mountains ripen to vibrant shades of green and red, and rise from turquoise waters that lap silently at sandy shores. I am nervous, and yet I feel oddly serene. I have come here to teach an "I Am" workshop to two 7th grade classes at Ecole Nouvelle Zoranje. The school exists thanks to PRODEV Haiti, an organization whose mission is to provide accessible education to undeserved communities, and to nurture generations that can build a stronger and more just society. When I land, I feel oddly at home - as though I have been here before, and am returning after a long time away.

This moment is significant for me. Firstly, it is an opportunity to share self-care tools that I have learned, taught, and developed with students in The United States through The "I Am" Project. Secondly, it is an opportunity to expand the conversation on how caring for ourselves is, indeed, caring for our communities and to be able to bring with me something that may open a new avenue of healing. I am not sure how the kids will take to the "I Am" tools, and whether they will connect, but I feel a truth deep within me: every person can benefit from accessing the important, and often elusive, dialogue with their bodies. I have brought with me what my life has taught me, and what I have tried to show others  - strength and success lie within us all, and we can access it by nurturing a conversation with ourselves. Learning to talk to our own bodies to understand our emotions and needs, helps us access healing, guidance, and innate strength.

When I arrive at Ecole Nouvelle Zoranje, I am first led through the primary school, where groups of young children wearing bright yellow uniform shirts and smiling faces file out towards their lunch hour in  la cantine, the lunch room. I am swept up by their openness, their positive energy, their eagerness to reach out and touch my hand. Their voices ring out in a chorus of Bonjou! Bonjou! Hello! Miss! Hello! Deputy director Blaise-François Aridou and Project Director Tatiana Liautaud lead me through the campus starting with the primary school - I am introduced to bright classrooms, where student artwork and daily lessons are posted on the walls.

Although simple, the message emerging from every classroom is clear - here we nurture education. As Blaise leads me through the rest of the school, I get a chance to meet some of the teachers and support staff, and I feel connected to their mission - we speak of stronger students, a more unified community, and new ways that the kids and help and support each other - and themselves. The campus sprawls over land where students are taught to grow their own food, participate in teamwork activities, and support each other through their education. Each classroom has about 25 students, and each one of them is taught to listen, learn, and respect.

Prior to starting the class, I have a chance to speak with the Principal, the Nurse, The Athletic teachers and to get a sense of how the students view the stress in their lives, and how it shows up during school. Blaise gives me a detailed and informative history of Haiti - through the eyes of the people who work tirelessly to unite it. Blaise tells me that hardship in Haiti predates the earthquake, and that families struggle to survive, and often kids are left to fend for themselves - both physically and emotionally. I hear of the fears that young girls have, the violence that these students know as part of their lives, and the stresses unique to living in a culture that has known so much oppression and poverty.

As we speak, I feel connected to the kids - though I don't know them, and they have grown up in ways vastly different than I have - I connect to how fear, violence, and struggle work to shape their view of themselves, and how they must exist in the world. Though the paths that have brought us to this moment of meeting cross different landscapes, we share an undeniable truth - we are human: we feel, we need, and we grow through connections that nurture us.

I am going to teach my lessons in French, a language that connects to my childhood, but that I have not yet used to express these tools. When I step into my first classroom, everything I know about teaching that I have seen in New York and Philadelphia stays outside the door. I face a class of faces both eager to learn and poised to challenge what I have brought. I notice a palpable difference between the younger kids I met in the morning, and these students sitting in front of me now. Although they are 11 and 12 years old, these children have grown much faster than their years. I sense their apprehension as I start to speak of emotion, connecting to the body, and meeting our needs. At this stage, it is simply not what their days are filled with. At this stage, they are learning the skills they need to survive.

As I do in every class, I take a moment to meet every person in the room - learning his or her name, age, and one thing that makes them unique. I learn that many of the boys enjoy playing sports, that some of the girls like to dance and sing, and that a few of them even enjoy writing, drawing - one shy young woman who sat in the back of the second class shared with me that she writes her own poetry. We are curious about each other. I find myself being more open with them about my struggles and my past than I typically am with students their age.

They ask,  How did I learn to teach all this stuff? 

The "I Am" Project tools evolved from the practices I learned in my own healing journey. I have spent the past 8 years rebuilding my body by getting to know myself again on several levels. Physical and emotional trauma made me fearful of the world around me and mistrustful of my own mind and body. I began to heal by getting to know my thoughts, emotions, and accepting my body's basic needs as okay. When I connected physical movement, fitness, and strength training, I noticed how connecting with my body and working to get stronger allowed me to open space for meditation and reflection. I saw how the combination of practices helped me feel calmer and in that calm, I was able to make the necessary choices that helped me maintain my recovery and continue to heal. They respond by wanting to learn more, try more, practice more.

It is the meditation that changes the energy in the room - as it does in every classroom I have visited. With our eyes closed and our attention turned inward, the students feel safe noticing their breath and exploring their internal worlds. Their palms are open - they are willing to receive what messages their own spirits have for them through their bodies. I guide them through to listen, to ask their body how it feels, to take themselves to a place where they feel most strong, calm, and secure. I ask them to become witnesses to their own ways of thinking, feeling, being. We imagine a cloudy sky, and with every exhale, we clear out a worry. 

I ask,

How many of you take time to check in with yourselves?Not one hand goes up.

I ask,

What did that feel like for you?

and they answer,

Soulageant (calming), Relaxant (relaxing), Bien (good).

The sentiment echoes in both classes, as students emerge from meditation noticeably calmer, more open, and more eager to participate. They are less taken aback by the fact that I let them call out, that they can say how they feel.

Now, when I talk about emotions, they feel safer - they can share about feeling afraid (la peur), feeling sad (la tristèsse), and feeling angry (la fâche, la colère).

We talk about where these emotions live in our bodies, and what kind of stresses trigger them in us. We talk about violence, about the earthquake, and about living with so much uncertainty. Slowly but surely hand continue to go up and they start to share about their own experiences with these emotions and that no, they aren't aware of how their bodies respond.

We talk about rhythms - the rhythm of breathing, the heart beat, and how each one varies when we live in different emotions. With egg shakers to create the rhythm, they tap out their heart beat in fear, in sadness, in stress - and eventually in calm, in rest, and in moments of joy.

I notice the moments that I see in every class - when the tool starts to connect, when they feel safe enough to share, when they realize that they can do this every day.

 Some still stare at me with blank faces, and some are already hardened by what they have seen in their lives - violence, fear, death. They sit silently and absorb the lesson, participating less than the other students but still connected, wanting to know more.

We go through scenarios where they could use these tools, and I ask them if they think they'd be okay with it. They're not sure, but they want to try.That's all it takes - the willingness to try. Change of any kind takes practice and dedication, and these tools slip so easily into every day situations that they are easy to remember, accessible to practice.

At the end of each class, I ask them

How do you feel now?

They answer,

plus fort (stronger), plus calme (calmer), contente (happy).

Teaching at Ecoule Nouvelle Zoranje has deepened, for me, the mission behind my work and my own personal journey of healing. Never have I felt both further from and closer to my own humanity than I did while working with these students. Can a simple breathing exercise, a simple meditation and moment of reflection truly make a difference in these children's every day experience? I can still hear the voices of the students as they shared about their home life, their daily worries, and their own personal battles. From my own battles, I know that taking small moments to connect my self and access my emotions has created momentous change. From getting to know our basic needs - thirst, hunger, sleep, comfort - to diving deeper into the nuances in our emotions, having the ability to connect is what makes us human.

I believe emotion is a universal language - anyone can look at a picture of mourning and see anguish on the person's face. Regardless of background, origin, education - we can all connect on our basic humanity. In Haiti, I was with people - teachers, students, staff - who opened themselves to the possibility of deeper connection. In a mission towards creating unity, justice, and a stronger nation, we must ask ourselves - how can we create all of those first within ourselves.

I believe it starts with our youth - with the students who spend every day learning material that molds them into citizens of the world. With The "I Am" Project teaming up with PRODEV Haiti, we can nurture a growing generation that along with history, mathematics, and civics also learns - compassion, empathy, communication, strength, and self-care. 

They ask me, Will you come back?

I tell them - Je reviendrai.   I will. 

Yali Szulanski for The "I Am" Project

Ending The Nightmare: Helping Kids When They Are Stressed Out

In the meditation portion of my last class, I asked my class of 6th graders to take a dive with me under the ocean – to imagine that they have the magical ability to breathe fully under water. They ocean they are diving into is the way they feel right now, it is what their body answers when, with their breath, they ask it “How are you feeling today?” I asked them to see their inner ocean as their canvas, their movie screen – their place to really see the emotional reality in which they’re in right now.

When we emerged, the majority of my students had surfaced from some of the scariest places I’ve ever heard of:

“I saw myself diving into a dark hole, and I couldn’t find my way out – there was no way up, and no way down. When I got the bottom of it, there were sharp rocks and so many dead bodies there, but they held on to my legs and pulled me down every time I tried to swim away.” C, age 11

“I saw myself being eaten limb by limb by a shark, and I kept asking it to let go and it wouldn’t.” R, age 12

“I couldn’t breathe – even when you told us that we could breathe, I couldn’t breathe. My body didn’t have enough space for me to breathe in – so I just drowned” D, age 11

Now have no fear – I did not leave my students in these gloomy underwater universes. The second portion of the meditation had them diving back in, walking through their worlds, and with guided music consciously altering what they saw by breathing affirmations into their body, by practicing “I Am” tools as they walked, and by creating a reality where they could help themselves. On the other end, I thankfully witnessed a class of resilient students who found ways to protect themselves in their previously dreary environments.

This particular class of 6th graders was on the last day of what was a full week’s worth of state mandated testing. In addition, in the weeks leading up to this, teachers were asked to shelve their curriculums in order to properly prep their students for these tests. Classrooms that may have, just a month ago, been abuzz with discussions about science experiments, ancient Greece, or how current events reflect history were shushed into practice exams and proper procedures for filling in those endless multiple choice questions. Knowing that I would be working with 47 stressed out and tired 11 and 12 year olds, I decided to give them imagination and play as a tool to relieve their stress.

The lesson is called “Creating My Reality” and it typically comes later on in the year, but what I witnessed and heard from my students in the check-in, compelled me to push it up a few weeks. I simply asked my students:

“What is reality to you?”

Some of their answers had me floored:

“The bad stuff of life”

“What I have to deal with”

“The stuff that you don’t want to happen”

“When you get a reality check”

“When you wake up from being a child”“

The harsh truth”

Eager to discuss with each other what reality is, a raucous debate emerged with one clear theme – Reality is something that holds a lot of stress. What they saw as a game of imagination and pretend, I saw as a very real reflection of how stress is affecting my students.

One visit to The American Institute of Stress website (appropriately, www.stress.org) is enough to make anyone want to crawl under a blanket and melt into a puddle of tears. The homepage alone lists “50 common signs and symptoms of stress” which range from the physical: neck ache, back pain, muscle spasms; to the emotional: increased anger, frustration hostility; to the psychological: sudden attacks of life threatening panic. Of course, nowhere does it mention what prolonged periods of stress can do the spiritual self –but we’ll get there. These symptoms focus on the adult reaction to stress – emotions and physical reactions in the body translated into actions and behaviors that we recognize as “stress-induced”. As educated and socialized adults, we understand that stress has these effects on us.

What about our kids then? How do they interpret and understand stress? If all 50 things on the sings and symptoms are happening simultaneously – and often, many of them are, how can someone still developing their basic understanding of self and foundation properly identify an overwhelming physical, emotional, and psychological reaction as “Stress”. Even more pressing, how can they actually cope with it?

In the “I Am Here” Workshop – the first one that any class interested in The “I Am” Project workshops or curriculum gets, I ask the students to tell me about a situation that stresses them out. Many of them have a basic understanding of where stress can come from – homework, fights with their siblings, over-scheduled lives. In some of the schools I go to, the stressors are a little bit different - knowing that I’m alone when I get home, having to take care of my younger sibling, walking home and getting there safely. They know that stress comes from parts in their lives that make them feel uncomfortable, anxious, and that prompt them to be more alert than usual.

When I ask them, “What actually IS stress?” – I get a lot of blank stares. They know where it comes from, but they’re not quite sure what it is. When I press them, I get a lot of answers that basically end up meaning - “It’s really bad.”

So before we continue, what actually is stress?

According to the same American Institute of Stress, stress is defined as “ a normal physical response to events that make you feel threatened or upset your balance in some way.” Truthfully, when your body’s stress response is working properly, it is your body’s way of telling you that something needs to be addressed – it shows you that something is off balance. Our modern response to stress is the same as our ancestral one – it triggers the “fight or flight or freeze” response. When you’re stressed out you can either do something about it, avoid it, or get overwhelmed by it. Even as adults we struggle with how to actually deal with stress.

In the three years I have been working with kids 11-19 in their natural habitats – classrooms – I have witnessed stress levels rising in their lives without any accompanying relief. I find that every year, I need to adapt and deepen the practices that I teach them in order to access their stressors at their deepest roots. Kids are facing demands in school, at home, and in their communities that reach a dramatic pitch in a world of increased competition, constantly advancing technology, and an unrestricted access to information. When I was 11, I was still learning fractions and probabilities. Now, these 11 year olds are behind if they’re not learning how to code.

The “I Am” practices that my students learn are tiny – but effective - tools that enable students to become agents in restoring their own balance. It’s too easy for younger generations now to access unhealthy means of “coping”- and who would blame them if these nightmarish scenarios reflect what they feel within them every day. The key is communication – talking about stress with others, but most importantly understanding how it affects them day-to-day. In becoming aware of their own bodies and how they interpret and express emotions, they are able to stat the root cause of what stresses them out – and how they may need help to address it. Plain and simple – if our students are going to be subjected to endless testing, heightened competition, and increased pressure – they need to learn tools that can help them cope, and they need to practice them every single day.

There is hope yet – in the same school, another 6th grade class that I’ve been working with reportedly asked their teacher to allow them to meditate before starting every test. The teacher reported calmer students, a quieter classroom, and – at the end of the week – more smiles than she’d expected.

Be Kind To Your Inner Critic

 Try to picture the last time your work, your passion, or perhaps even you, were put before judgment.

Take a second to close your eyes and ask your body to remember what it felt like as you were gathering your material. 

What were your hands experiencing as they typed furiously, shuffled through papers and put together a presentation that could perhaps determine your future?

What did your legs feel like as you walked toward the office of the person whose opinion of you, in that moment, really mattered?

How loudly was your heart thundering in your chest as you watched the time on the clock approach your hour of judgment?

Many of us, in this situation, forget everything we’ve been taught about being kind to ourselves. We pick up our tweezers and scalpels and begin to dissect ourselves.

I should have worked harder…

I should have stayed later….

I should have made better lessons…

I should have practiced more…

I shouldn’t have said that…

I should have been smarter….

I should have proof read…

I should have used my damn brain!

Even before we walk into the room, we have already set ourselves up for failure. There is nothing we can do right, and if praise does appear in our review, we scarcely register it as we are digging for the morsels that will help us excavate ourselves even more.

For most of us, our inner critic is far harsher than any review, any complaint and any confrontation we may have.

We are experts in judging ourselves, for who is there to defend us when the opposing voices live inside of us?

There is always some reason to feel not good enough. This is especially enhanced when someone is criticizing us. The truth is, we all make mistakes. We live our lives to the best of our ability, based on our own experiences. Sometimes our best falls short of what is needed—and that’s okay.

Yet, very few of us hold ourselves with compassion—in fact, we loathe ourselves for who we are in that moment.

We label ourselves in ways that stick to us and cross all the boundaries in our lives. When the outer critic and the self-critic start to work together, we face a monster from the leagues of the most vicious horror stories. We are not only eviscerated, but decapitated, violated and cannibalized.

How are we supposed to cope?

We cope by cultivating a dialogue of compassion and forgiveness within ourselves.What keeps us out of that connection to ourselves is the fear that we are not worthy of being in it. It is the fear to honestly face ourselves and the wounds we carry that keep us in those wounds. The struggle to love ourselves is perhaps the most difficult one we will encounter in our lives.

In moments of panic, shame and disappointment with ourselves, we tend to exist in the very confined world of what exists in our own heads. Our thoughts are loud, hence they are right.

No, they are not right.

Let’s repeat that: just because our thoughts are loud, does not mean they are right.

We actually can cultivate an atmosphere of compassion within ourselves. Yes, it takes a lot of hard work and a sometimes super-human amount of patience. Those who have that a sense of love and belonging in their minds are able to convince their bodies, their hearts and their souls that they are worth it—that they are good enough. 

It takes a daily practice of telling ourselves that we are good, that we are smart, that we are good enough to actually have it permeate into our lives.

Of course, we must all live within the lines of reality. Not all of us are superstars, but all of us do have unique talents and abilities that set us apart from others and that we can be proud of. There is a reason that each one of us is in the position that we are in, creating the mark that we leave in the world.

It is an every day task, looking in the mirror and saying:

Today, I am strong.

Today, I am beautiful.

Today , I am worth it.

Perhaps it is with sticky notes or inspirational statements or constant reminders to breathe, release and move through our pain.

Stopping the negative flow in our minds sometimes feels like attempting to fix a leaky faucet with Q-tips. Yet, if we keep trying, eventually, those Q-tips come together and absorb the water.

Similarly, our daily attempts to reverse that self-talk start to yield results—we see ourselves smiling more, we believe in ourselves and we can even face moments of outside criticism with courage.

Hearing, ‘you are wrong’ does not define you, rather it can be a beautiful opportunity for you to discover new ways in which you can grow, in which you can learn, in which you can take the next step with confident and determined power in your feet. 

Learning To Talk Again

This week I begin to speak about my recovery in front of audiences for the first time in my life. Though in the past, I have spoken about violence and using my narrative as a healing tool, I have never stood up in front of an audience and fully owned my life and my journey as my own. This particular speech is designed to teach young adults and teens about mental illness and reduce the stigma around it - essentially saying, "Anyone can be going through something at any point. Mental illness looks like all of us, and we all struggle in our own ways." I have been given this unique opportunity through my work with The Minding Your Mind Foundation, which has embraced The "I Am" Project and my personal story of recovery as part of their repertoire - their toolkit for spreading healing through personal journeys. 

Last night, I practiced my speech in front of an audience that consisted of my husband and my friends, one of whom is a teacher that has greatly influenced me in my own healing. I felt very nervous. I'd shared this speech before with my sister, with my speech coach, and with one of my friends - but this was my first step into opening it out further into the world. When people ask me about what I've gone through, I always try to gloss over the details, to protect them from the pain, the terror, and the suffering in my story. I especially am weary of speaking in front of my husband, who has lived part of the story with me, and has witnessed the pain. Whenever I speak in front of a teacher, I am aware of my own vulnerability and the truth which is quite simply - my recovery is ongoing. It is a hard reality to stand if for me, as I have spent most of my life creating two realities - the "good" external reality and the inner turmoil that I lived with day to day. 

I take my audience on a ride through moments of my life where I learned and practiced negative coping mechanisms, where I learned to know myself as "bad" and learned to swallow my emotions. The ride is a roller coaster with steep climbs out of difficult situations and deep drops into relapse, anguish, and despair. At the end, I bring them to the story of recovery, and how I have learned practices that now guide me and strengthen me through every day. After I finished speaking last night, I got perhaps the most useful feedback I've gotten so far - 

"But you don't tell us HOW these tools helped you heal. Why was yoga helpful? What did boxing do for you? How did you start meditating? What exactly about Zumba actually got you over the threshold towards better self-care?" 

They were right. Though I go into detail about the pain, the suffering, the anxiety - I don't tell my audience how I found each tool, and how I incorporated it into my life.  When I tell people about The "I Am" Project workshops and the types of tools I guide my students through, they often ask me, How did you decide to do this and how do you know it actually works? 

In addition to the growing research about the benefits of meditation and mindful practices in every day life, the tools that I use in the workshops have emerged specifically from my own journey. I tried many keys to burst open the locks on my heart, to free up the pain that was held in my body, and the one that finally started to twist held one word - help. 

Recovery began, like many do, on a couch. In my case, I had to sit on a series of couches before I found the one where across from me sits someone who teaches me to talk to myself with kindness and compassion. The first step in my journey was learning how to talk again - learning how to use words to treat myself kindly, rather than using them to berate myself and judge myself for my pain, my anxiety, and my need for help and healing. I learned the notion of "positive self talk" through exercises that allowed me to shift the perspective through which I talked about myself. 

For example, instead of saying 

"I want to be a good person but I am struggling and still engaging in my eating disorder - I can't get through the moments where I feel triggered." 

I began to say, 

"I believe that I am a good person, and I am still struggling with how I cope with pain in my life. I am learning how to be gentle with myself in the moments where I feel triggered." 

Infusing the language of compassion into my mind was, and sometimes still is, a challenging practice. I have held so many negative beliefs about myself and my body for such a long time, that learning to view myself as a work-in-progress became a challenge, and an important step. My writing has accompanied me through every practice in the process.  In 2008, I started to give my story a voice. I put pen to paper and my fingers to the keyboard and allowed the words to flow into memories, images, and eventually chapters that told my story of struggle with mental illness, abuse, and eventually my path towards recovery. This is is how writing, a tool that I'd turned to during my whole life truly blossomed into a healing tool. Every word that poured out of me created space in my body where I'd previously been holding the memories of pain, sadness, and a lot of fear. I felt very empty without these words taking space in my muscles - and really started to feel how I had been using my physical body as an envelope for pain and self-harm. 

So here's the question - how did these practices begin to help me?

By 2008, I had already been practicing yoga for a few years and had found my first type of meditation in the diving world. When I found myself completely embraced by the silence of being under water - hearing only my breath going in and out, I had my first encounter with a moment of piece. What changed then? What made these turn into true healing tools?  I began to write about them. I wrote  about every dive, and wrote about yoga class and began to notice that I was even starting to narrate my own emotions to myself during class. In one such narrative, I heard myself saying

"wow, my body actually has the strength to hold me up in this pose. That's amazing."

Connecting with my physical body has allowed me to access more moments of healing - but more importantly, self-understanding. Carrying a pen and notebook, I entered the boxing gym and wrote about each step, each punch, each exercise and how feeling present in myself during a 60 minute class translated into maintaining that sensation throughout the day - and especially during moments of struggle. When I entered the dance studio, I found myself faced with another tool that terrified me - the mirror. Not only would I have to be conscious of the way I spoke to myself in class, how I moved, but now I would have to witness my body's awkward journey as well. Every step of the way, I wrote about it. I wrote about every moment of awkwardness, and pain, and fear, and frustration, and the desire to give up -  but finding within me the energy and strength to continue. As I continue my journey in healing through my practices and my teaching, it is a thrill share it through The "I Am" Project classes and the blog. 

By speaking, I am accessing more parts of myself that have needed healing, and that have not been heard. As part of her feedback, my teacher told me that I still appear affected by some of the story I am telling - and in truth, I still am. The emotions that young me felt - the fear and shame - the crushing self judgement - are very hard to admit to myself, let alone to a crowd of people. The more I speak, the more I am able to access the true "HOW" of how every tool came to be, and why it matters to me to teach it to my students. I hope to, as I start to speak in schools and continue to to teach, to also write more about each tool. It is exciting for me to step through this door into a world I haven't yet explored - yes I know the tools have helped me, but now, I really, finally get to talk about how.