Biigtigong Nishnaabeg Anishinaabekwe focuses on workplace and personal wellness during Nokiiwin Tribal Council’s virtual event

By Rick Garrick

THUNDER BAY — Biigtigong Nishnaabeg’s Nicole Richmond shared two presentations on mindfulness and meditation during Nokiiwin Tribal Council’s A Healthier You virtual wellness week, held Jan. 31-Feb. 4.

“Nokiiwin has a really big emphasis on workplace wellness and personal wellness and they asked me to give some presentations about emotional regulation and working through relationships with people,” says Richmond, a lawyer, wellness consultant and educator. “It’s all in view of the (COVID-19) pandemic, it’s how everybody is coping going through this because it’s been going on for such a long time.”

Richmond says her first presentation was on relational mindfulness.

“It was about paying attention to your emotions, paying attention to things that come into your awareness that help you make better decisions,” Richmond says. “So the key message is when things happen, it either is guiding you to make a different decision within yourself or sometimes you have to make a different decision about how you interact with others.”

Richmond says the presentation included some discussion and contemplation about emotional states and different emotional responses.

“That was a really good presentation, and the end part of the presentation talked about different personality types or challenges that we can run into in the workplace,” Richmond says. “The people were really engaged — this is something that people are very interested in. This idea of mindfulness has been in the news for a long time. Our people naturally had mindfulness practices, we do drumming, we do singing, we are meditators, we are prayers, so to integrate ideas about mindfulness into emotional well-being and into relationships is something that we’ve already done but we’re just kind of reinvigorating skills to help people understand these practices and what that looks like.”

Richmond says her second presentation was an intuitive guided meditation class.

“I’ve done all kinds of training but I started to teach in 2015 and went online with the pandemic,” Richmond says. “Sometimes I teach lawyers in law firms because I’m a lawyer and I often get invited to teach groups. So we just kind of went through a variety of practices like learning how to breathe, learning how to relax, learning how to just separate your thoughts from your mind and how to address thoughts that keep recurring in your mind.”

Richmond says they also went through a series of healing techniques looking at emotional blockages in the body.

“One of the teachings in the spiritual world is about chakras,” Richmond says. “This is an Indian from India teaching that there are seven energetic centres in the body. So we just spent probably four to five minutes looking at our chakras and thinking about our body and being aware of how we felt and where energy was running or not running in our bodies.”

Richmond says the main response to the presentation was about the need to start an introduction to meditation group.

“The big thing that is missing for people right now is a sense of connection and a sense of personal empowerment,” Richmond says. “I think people going through the pandemic really need support and they really need empowerment and they need each other.”

Richmond says she is planning to start a four-week introductory to meditation class in March.

“They can learn the skills, they can come to some of my more advanced groups after that if they want,” Richmond says. “I am available to facilitate for groups, I’m more than happy to do that.”