The student health center at Cerritos College offers Mindfulness Mondays, a drop in Zoom meeting for students to take a moment to breathe and learn how to detach from challenging thoughts and emotions.

Cerritos College’s psychologist, Dr.Humberto Hernandez, is one of the therapists that attends Mindfulness Monday’s zoom meetings and describes how it has been going for him and his team so far.

“Lately we’ve been slow. We average a couple of students every Monday, but the students that we’ve talked to, Mindfulness Mondays have been helpful for them.”

Mindfulness Monday’s first started this fall on Sep.14th as a way for students to apply mindfulness to their daily lives according to Dr. Hernandez.

“We want to teach students how to stay in the presence and learn to accept things along with being less self-critical,” Dr.Hernandez said.

For students, we’ve all faced and are still continuing to face challenges in our lives during this pandemic.

For Dr.Hernandez, it has taught him a sense of flexibility.

He believes that by attending Mindfulness Mondays, we can learn to adjust, adapt, and overcome our problems and learn how to make the most of our opportunities that come our way.

Dr.Hernandez went on to explain that every Tuesday and Thursday at 10am, Student Health provides a support group called Virtual Coffee Hour which is similar yet different from Mindfulness Mondays.

Virtual Coffee Hours focuses on the difficulties students have with managing anxiety, coping with physical distancing, and loneliness in the time of the COVID-19.

The possibility of the two workshops collaborating could be something to look into according to Dr.Hernandez.

“We can explore that. I think it would be good to spend time with our other group offerings.”

Once the pandemic is over, Dr. Hernandez would like for Mindfulness Mondays and the other workshops to continue to grow and thrive.

“We want to continue this once everything goes back to normal so we can get off the ground and start doing in-person groups instead.

It was something we started this semester and it is something we hope to continue for semesters to come.”

For more information regarding Mindfulness Mondays and Virtual Coffee Hours, visit Student Health at Cerritos.edu.