Strength TogetHER 9- Session 5

13 February, 2021.

On 13th february 2021, there was a virtual meet via zoom. We around 25 girls gathered together at 11:00 am in order to discuss about the different emotions we face in our day to day life. All of us were really pleased to have our generous Miss Rosy karna as our moderator.

Ms. Rosy karna completed her undergraduate and master's in biology at stanford University California, USA. She is currently pursuing her doctorate degree in clinical psychology at the PGSP pys.D.consortium program.As an inspiring clinical psychologist her dream is to utilize her clinical knowledge in establishing a better mental health care centre in Nepal.

Facilitated by ‘Lokopakar’ youth organization which focuses on the development of youth personally or professionally in Nepal, 'Strength togetHER' virtual program is created specially for girls and young women of different mindsets and backgrounds. During the sessions, they all come together to share various views, ideas, perspectives, experiences, and stories. This space helps them to grow as individuals by creating a platform to be themselves, talk about their issues, and find solutions to their problems.

We had some participants sharing their story on the topic "Emotions" so the rest of us could relate and customize the stories.

• Our first speaker shared her story of the time when she felt sad by seeing a small child begging in the road. Although she helped him with some food, the guilt of not being able to rescue him was still there.

• Our second speaker felt happiness when an unknown child waved at her and she waved back.This brought sweet smile in her face.

• Our third speaker said that she had a guilt for misjudging one of her online friend.She thought that her friend had an easy life as he was born in a developed country with all the facilities.When she realized the fact that happiness doesn't come from worldly pleasure she had a huge guilt within herself.

After listening to everyone's story we were asked to write down all the emotions we were experiencing at that particular moment of time in a paper. After a silence of two minutes, each of us shared our written things.

Each of us had almost the same experience- in a sense that most of us were blank when told to do so.When we gradually started to do the task we had a huge flood of emotion within us.Thousands of thoughts were running in our mind. In those two minutes we had the emotion of happiness , sadness , fear , anxiety, confusion , guilt and many more. After expressing those emotion in a piece of paper and sharing it with each other we felt a bit relaxed and comfortable.

The 90 minutes discussion brought us to some conclusions.

1) Its OKAY to feel all sort of emotion.

2) Feeling happiness always is not a win.You should go through all other sort of emotion like sadness, fear , guilt etc.

3)When you feel emptiness just feel it cause its natural.

4)We can control how we react to emotions but not emotions.

5)Emotion is not fully affected by hormone.

6)Seeing something or our surrounding sometimes trigger our emotion.

7) If there is no sadness in life we can't experience happiness.

8) Experiencing all kinds of emotion is necessary.

9) Don' t let the emotion be extreme.

10) We can control emotion by:

       •SELF REGULATIONS

       •BREATHING

       •WRITING

       •DEVELOPING COPING SKILLS

       •SKETCHING

       •TAKING HELP OF SQUEEZY BALL

11)Meditation can be followed by letting all the emotion to flow.

12) Respect the emotion, feel it as it will bring 360° turn in your life.

At last, we took a screenshot to cherish the moment we had spent together.At 12:30 pm we ended the session with the positive energy to deal with every sort of emotion we face in our life. It was a really productive session and we logged out happily.

Written by: Sakshi wagle (Cohort Coordinator)