By Avery Ballmann | Staff Writer
On Wednesday evening Active Minds, a national mental health organization, collaborated with Baylor FitWell to have a wellness yoga session in front of Rosenbalm Fountain.
Pflugerville graduate student Mikayla Stone, saw the event in a weekly newsletter and decided to go. With the pressure of her final weeks at Baylor coming to a close, she said she attended the event because she thought it would be relaxing.
“It’s a little stressful just because there’s been a lot of assignments and trying to find a job and our lease is almost up,” Stone said.
Stone isn’t the only student feeling these end of semester pressures. Plano senior Ritu Bhatt, president of Active Minds, has opened up conversations with members in their bi-weekly meetings on managing stress in healthy ways.
“Van Davis reached out to us about hosting a yoga event and they wanted to collaborate with us. We thought it was perfect,” Bhatt said. “In our last couple of meetings we’ve been talking about stress related to finals and everything like that, so this was a really great culmination of everything we’ve been talking about.”
Van Davis is the assistant director of wellness, fitness and nutrition at Baylor. FitWell hosts several wellness events throughout the semester and at this event they handed out pamphlets on how to tackle stress.
“I feel really good right now, especially just because there was relaxing music and also I could hear the water at the fountain going,” Stone said. “I really do feel like my body feels really relaxed right now, compared to how it was about an hour ago.”
In every meeting, Bhatt said she opens the floor to members to discuss what they need to talk about and focus on for their conversations. Bhatt’s favorite talk was when the Baylor Counseling Center came to their meeting and informed the group of their 24-hour telehealth initiative, offering around the clock counseling for Baylor students.
Not only did a healthy conversation emerge from that meeting, but Bhatt said she was also able to share her personal experience with counseling to the group.
Bhatt is passing the torch of presidency onto another club member, Katy senior Nicole Wire. Active Minds plans to start events in the fall semester with potential new meeting hours.
“It seemed to me that Active Minds has grown a lot this semester and it’s very emotional,” Bhatt said. “I have a very close emotional relationship with Active Minds’ purpose and mission which is basically put to destigmatize and normalize conversations about mental health, especially on a college campus.”
