At UVM we care about your health and wellbeing. Here is a list of some health and wellness
resources available to students and employees.
Health and Wellness Resources
Student Resources
Center for Health and Wellbeing
*request a mindfulness program
Free Health Coaching for CNHS First Year Students by UVM Health Coaching Students through
Campus Recreation
Gentle Yoga Free for students every Saturday at noon in the month of April
#PersonalDevelopmentJourney
Yoga Teacher Training – FREE Yoga classes Yoga DAY 4/17 from 10am-3pm
Identity and Faith Centers
Faculty and Staff Resources
Open Source Wellness for Employees
Free Health Coaching for Employees by UVM Health Coaching Students
Academic & Service Programs
Integrative Practitioners Network
Center on Disability and Community Inclusion
If you have additional resources you would like included on this list, please email
UVMIHInfo@med.uvm.edu.
Wellness Openers
Wellness Openers: Prepared by Susan Whitman and Karen Westervelt Integrative Health Faculty
Quick and easy ways to let your students know you care and to encourage them to be more
present in your class.
Ice-breaker or Centering Questions
Before launching into a lecture, check in with your students! Perhaps not just on what they are
doing in this class, but other areas as well. If you are teaching virtually, these are easy questions
for students to put into the chat box. Or have them turn to a neighbor in a live class to answer.
• What’s one thing you are looking forward to right now?
• What’s your biggest stressor right now?
• If you could describe your mood as a color, what would it be and why?
• If your day so far was a weather pattern, what would it be and why?
• What animal would describe your week so far and why?
• What is one thing that you are feeling grateful for right now?
• What is something that made you smile this week?
• If you could play any instrument, what would you want to play?
• If you could travel anywhere in the world right now, where would you go?
Or play with some of these more interactive questions:
• Show me on your fingers, how is your stress level right now on a scale of 1 (low) to 10
(high)?
• Point to the area in your body that is feeling most stressed right now. Point to an area
that is feeling most relaxed.
• Make a face that shows how you are really feeling in this moment.
• Write down all the thoughts, stressors and to-dos going on in your mind right now. Now
flip that upside down and set that paper aside for class. Give them permission to not
think about.
• Write down a rose/thorn/bud of your week (rose=something you are grateful for,
thorn=something that is challenging right now, bud=something you are looking forward
to).
• Write down your intention for the day / for the class.
Activities:
• Have some music playing in the classroom when students arrive
• Do the macarena or another fun dance
• 5-4-3-2-1 (look around and silently name to yourself 5 things you can see, name 4 things
you can feel, name 3 things you can smell, name 2 things that you can hear, name 1
thing you can taste right now)
• Breathing exercises:
o Pencil breathing – draw a line up while you breathe in, then down as you
breathe out so you end up with an exaggerated condensed sine wave
o Box breathing – breathe in for 3, hold for 3, out for 3, hold for 3, repeat (can
have the students trace a box in the air as they do this
o Finger breathing – trace up the side of a finger as you breathe in, and down the
other side as you breathe out, repeat on the next finger
• Coloring/Drawing
• Stretching
• Tapping
• Acupressure
• Self-massage (hands, shoulders)
• Writing exercises:
o Write a thoughtful note and share with a classmate – perhaps something you
appreciate about them
o Write a thoughtful note to yourself
o Write a self-affirmation for yourself – 3 things you like about yourself
o Write down one thing you are grateful for, one thing you find beauty in, one
thing you find joy in
• Read a poem to the class
• Share a photo of something you are grateful for to a classmate
You could model some of these openers for a few weeks and then hand it over to the students
to lead!