By Sean Colvin Staff writer
Rosalie Rodriguez, director of multicultural student services at Bucknell University, held a workshop on Feb. 7 in Degenstein Campus Center called “Standing Tall: Building Resilience, Strengthening Roots.”
The workshop was a 90-minute seminar aimed at mainly minority students but open to all.
The main idea of the workshop was laid out in a Ted Talk video by a Penn State professor, Jeannine Staples, who said that every day we die different kinds of “deaths” when we face adversity: the everyday, the someday, the any day and the one day-type.
An everyday type death might include getting called on by a professor without knowing the material or getting a parking ticket.
Then there are someday type deaths, like receiving a poor grade or getting diagnosed with an illness. An any day type death is the kind that you see coming, like when you know someone is ill and dying and then finally passes away. The one day-type death refers to actual death.
Staples’ point was that the three former “deaths” are ways in which everyday life can cut you down if you let it, and Rodriguez’s workshop was about finding ways to “die peacefully,” that is, to respond to these “deaths” rather than react to them, so as to gather strength from them.
Rodriquez and Susquehanna students dissected instances of adversity in their lives and identified feelings associated with those traumatic events. These negative feelings were deeply rooted, Rodriguez pointed out, in our insecurities and feelings about ourselves.
An example is if someone was to call you stupid, you might feel hurt because something inside you identifies with the idea that you may in fact be dumb, but if someone calls you a tree, you wouldn’t have any reaction, because no part of you thinks you are a tree.
This is vital for people to understand because it means that our negative feelings are mostly a product of meeting our bullies halfway.
If we never had those thoughts in our heads, we wouldn’t feel a reaction, so one part of the workshop involved students writing down insecurities or “core beliefs” and replacing them with a new, positive core belief.
Rodriguez also offered students an exercise to help reduce stress that involves awareness of one’s direct surroundings.
Rodriguez had the audience think of five things you can see, four things you can hear, three things you can touch, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste.
The purpose of this exercise is to ground the user in their immediate reality instead of in the abstract thoughts in which their trauma exists, in which they are suffering.
Rodriguez said that she is a practicing Buddhist and said that a lot of what she teaches is tied to the Buddhist religion.
She made many allusions to trees, which are symbolic in the sense that they must grow their roots and branches equivocally in order for them to withstand bad weather.
Mary Markle, an administration assistant in the Office of Leadership and Engagement, attended the event.
Markle said, “It seems like this year has been harder on everybody for a lot of reasons both at the university and in the country and the world, so I probably got more out of it than I maybe would have at another time.”
She added, “I think connecting the dots from an incident to emotions to physical effects is a connection that I’d never actively made before.”
