Guided Meditations with Outdoor Visualization to Reduce Anxiety

Students enrolled in PAH 150A3 "The Greater Outdoors: Improving Health, Wellness, and Creativity by Living Life Outside" get the opportunity to imagine design, implement, and evaluate their own public-facing applied project, creatively connecting what they learn in class with how they understand and value the great outdoors. For her applied project, Emily Abraham developed two guided meditations with outdoor visualization to reduce anxiety. In her words: "Meditation is a way to practice mindfulness, which is a known strategy for combating anxiety. Going outside regularly is also linked to a reduction in stress levels and better wellbeing overall. Combining these ideas together amplifies the anxiety reducing effect. As we've learned in this class, sometimes just viewing nature is enough for people to experience a calming effect, so the first meditation is designed to help people call asleep and capitalizes on this idea while also using traditional breathing and mindfulness techniques in meditation to help relax listeners overall. The second meditation directly encourages both going outside and becoming more aware of it, which can help restore attention and creativity by giving the mind a break to just observe. The purpose of this project is to inspire people to give their minds a break and use the outdoors as a way to do so." The first meditation can be found here and the second here. Emily's work to create these meditations highlights her creativity, project management, and problem-solving skills as she conceptualized the project, wrote the meditation scripts, solicited feedback from peers, and used technical skills to create the final products.