The Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska (BHECN) is offering online virtual yoga and meditation to help Nebraska’s health care providers manage stress during the current COVID-19 pandemic.
The inaugural free sessions, called The BHECN Serenity Project, will be available on BHECN’s website today, with successive new offerings appearing online each day this week.
 |
Instructor Mary Clare Sweet of Lotus House of Omaha |
Last year, in the wake of Nebraska’s historic floods, BHECN provided a series of webinars on grief, anxiety, provider burnout and compassion fatigue. This new initiative is the latest in BHECN’s commitment to “heal the healers,” said BHECN director Marley Doyle, M.D.
“BHECN is dedicated to the behavioral health of all Nebraskans,” Dr. Doyle said, “and especially behavioral health providers and frontline responders. It is important to give these courageous men and women the tools they need to manage the high stress they meet daily.”
The BHECN Serenity Project video series will be available online 24/7. Consumers, including Nebraska’s rural providers, will be able to access it anywhere they are –“Before their shift, during their shift or when they get home,” Dr. Doyle said.
Dr. Doyle said she hopes by having new content dropping each day, participants will find the series morale-boosting: “Everybody doing the same thing on the same day.”
Mary Clare Sweet, instructor and the founder of Lotus House of Yoga, promises beginners and first-timers will feel welcomed, not intimidated.
“We’ve designed the sessions to be super accessible to everybody, no matter who you are,” she said.
Sweet has been teaching yoga virtually for years. “When all of this,” meaning social distancing during an infectious-disease pandemic, “went down, we already had the platform and the experience,” she said.
Sweet has learned the best way to keep an online class engaged is to keep the yoga to between 12 and 20 minutes. “That 20-minute mark is mentally manageable,” she said.
The meditation sessions will have a short video file to explain the techniques, but the meditation itself is audio-only. “We want people closing their eyes,” Sweet said.
Though designed for health professionals at UNMC and Nebraska Medicine, anyone who discovers the BHECN Serenity Project is welcome to take part in the sessions and share them on social media.
“Even if you were to begin with these simple breath practices, it would make you feel better,” Sweet said.