Mindfulness practices are becoming more and more popular in our generation. Why? Simply because they can help us to get rid of any negative emotions, become better-functioning beings, and find the true joy of life.
And believe me when I tell you, to practice mindful awareness you do not need to find an isolated dark corner of your house. All you need is some friends or even strangers who share the passion with you.
Mindful activities for groups can help you to build better awareness and live life with more peace.
In this blog, I have shared the 7 best group mindfulness activities that you can organize within a group, and help everyone to reap the benefits of a more aware life.
1. Group Dance
There’s no better way to start a group mindfulness activity than a collective dance. It will help in breaking the ice and releasing the pent-up physical energy of participants.
But, how exactly to do this dance with present-moment awareness? Let’s find out.
- Ask all the members to form a circle – just make sure there’s enough space to freely dance.
- Assign one team leader for the group.
- Now, play the music. Ask the leader to name a member from the group. The named member has to initiate any random step. All other members have to follow the steps of the named member.
- After 5 to 6 seconds, the leader has to name another member randomly. Now this member must do a different step, which all other members have to follow. And it goes on this way.
- Ask the leader to progressively increase the time interval of naming the member. For instance, after 5 seconds, the leader has to name the next member at an interval of 10 seconds, then the next one after 15 seconds, and the next one after 30 seconds.
- Targeted aspect for this activity: Physical energy and body
- How it will help with mindfulness: In this mindful activity for groups, every group member has to be consciously aware, to copy the steps of another member. Initially, the short interval timings in naming members will help to provide quick shifts in stimuli that will keep the mind disengaged from thoughts. But, as the dance continues, the mind’s need for stimuli will decrease. It can then remain thoughtless even with large intervals when shifting the dance steps.
Apart from setting the tone for mindful awareness, this group dance will help the members build their initial bonds in a fun and engaging way.
2. Mindful Group Conversation
Group conversations are a wonderful way for mindfulness group activities. You should just make sure that such conversations are not done via the mind but through deep emotions. The best books on mindfulness can help you with skills for mindful and emotional communications instead of mental ones.
Let’s see how to do this conversation with present-moment awareness.
- Ask all team members to sit in a circle. Request them to adopt open body language postures.
- Now in a circle, you have to move a baton. Every time a member gets the baton, they have to speak about one event in which they felt some very strong emotion. This event could be either negative or positive.
- When a member finishes their story, the other members have to ask emotional questions with them. Make sure these questions are focussed on just being aware of one’s emotions, and not anything else. For instance, some of these questions could be:
- What emotions do you feel in this event?
- Where in your body do you feel each of your feelings?
- In which other events do you feel these same emotions?
- Do you think any of these emotions are linked to your childhood?
- What did you feel like doing at that moment?
- In this mindfulness group exercise, you may also ask all members to blindfold themselves. It will make it easy for them to become vulnerable and share their feelings.
- Targeted aspect for this activity: Emotional energy
- How it will help with mindfulness: Such deep sharing of emotions will help every member to become more aware of their feelings. It will also motivate them to have mindfulness in future events when a high emotional intensity is triggered.
It is one of those mindfulness games for groups that will help participants to pass through the stages of emotional healing. You just need to make sure that the environment feels safe to every member so that they can share their emotions freely.
3. Nature Walk
To practice mindfulness meditation, what’s better than a dark, closed room? Maybe, it is an open, green forest. If you feel that your group lies on a bit wild side, then you may try a nature walk therapy for them.
Let’s see how to do it.
- You can start by breaking your group into subgroups of 2 persons each.
- Choose a green area near you that is generally safe and is less visited by the others. It could be an isolated park, green field, or small forest area.
- Now in your subgroups, one member has to put on a blindfold, while the other has to put on earplugs.
- When they visit the green area, the member without a blindfold will have to support the other in walking.
- Those with blindfolds, have to mindfully hear all of the natural sounds. While those with earplugs will have to just focus on the view and not on hearing. It can also be used as among the useful mindfulness team building exercises for corporates.
- Towards the end of a trial, all members have to join and share their experiences – about everything they heard and saw.
- Targeted aspect for this activity: Visual and hearing senses
- How it will help with mindfulness: One of the best ways of mindful group activities is to focus on the workings of just one sense of the body. With this activity, the participants will learn to focus on one sense and let go of their mind’s activities.
With a group nature walk, the participants will learn to be in the present moment and thereby build the spiritual heart of a child.
4. Jabbering
Talking has its benefits, when it’s done with the right purpose. If you are a fan of Freud, you must have heard about his ‘free association’ technique. We will be using this technique in one of the fun mindful activities for groups.
You will need to follow the below steps for this practice.
- For this exercise, the group members have to pass along a baton in a circle.
- Whoever gets the baton will get the chance to talk.
- For each member, you can set a 10-minute time.
- The talking person must not filter any of their thoughts. They must speak (rather jabber) everything that comes to their mind. Even when their thoughts don’t match with each other, they must continuously speak without analyzing for the whole of their 10 minutes.
- Targeted aspect for this activity: The functioning of thoughts in the mind.
- How it will help with mindfulness: It is one of those group mindfulness activities that will help each member to look at their thoughts as a third person. This is the key principle of Vipassana meditation – to look at one’s thoughts without holding onto them.
Group jabbering is a wonderful way to build conscious awareness and understand how to feel feelings deeply. However, you need to provide each participant with a non-judgmental atmosphere for the success of this activity.
5. Energy Connection via Touch
Mindfulness is not just being aware of one’s body, thoughts, and emotions. It is also about being aware of the subconscious energies of oneself and others. Touching each other with awareness will help the members in building alertness about such energies.
To try this mindfulness exercise for groups you should follow the steps below.
- Blindfold all of the members of your group. Then, randomly make subgroups of 2 members each.
- Ask every member to sit in an easy pose while facing each other.
- Now request them to hold hands for over 10 minutes.
- During this time, they need to feel the energy of the other person. Ask them to feel the other’s emotions. Is it anger? Or are they feeling anxious? Is it some sadness?
- After 10 minutes, rearrange the seating of every member, and then ask them to open their blindfold.
- Now the group members must engage in discussion about what they felt about their partner.
- Targeted aspect for this activity: Subconscious energies of others
- How it will help with mindfulness: This activity will help the participants to be more aware of the energies in their surroundings. It will also help them to understand that what they feel is not always their own feeling but of someone close to them.
During this activity of mindfulness for groups, you must make sure that the partners do not know about each other. This will help to prevent their observations from being tainted by any mental judgment of the other. It will also help in maintaining confidentiality – which is essential for having an uninfluenced group discussion.
6. Check Tactile Senses
This one of the best mindful activities for groups will also involve touching each other – but with the help of certain objects. In the initial phase of learning present-moment awareness, focusing on tactile senses is a great way to do it.
Let’s find out how you can practice it in a group.
- Gather 30-35 objects of different materials. They could be anything – a cloth, paintbrush, plastic comb, and paper.
- Show all the participants all of these objects.
- Now put blindfolds on each of the participants.
- There should be one person without a blindfold who will use the objects. They have to touch the object lightly on each participant’s skin.
- The participant will then have to explain how the object feels on their skin. For instance, a metal can feel cold, a paintbrush may feel tickly, a nylon cloth may feel smooth, and a wood may feel coarse. Doesn’t it sound like one of the mindfulness activities for group therapy?
- Now ask each participant to go deeper into this sensation. Look further at how the object functions on their skin.
- In the end, ask them to name the object. The participant with the most correct answers will be the winner.
- Targeted aspect of this activity: Tactile sensation
- How it will help with mindfulness: At the moment when a participant is fully focussing on the activities on their skin, there will be an absence of thoughts. Such absence will help them to build conscious awareness in that moment.
Looking deeper into tactile sensations is not easy – it takes time and patience. Therefore during the activity, the leader must give time to the participants to go deeper and fully feel the mind-skin connection.
7. Mindful Music Listening
Creating something mindfully can help us a lot in emotional healing. It is one of the complex group mindfulness activities. This practice is designed to help the group members with their skills at creation. It will involve listening to music and creating a story around it.
Let us see the steps involved in this activity.
- Ask the group leader to choose some songs in ‘other language’ for this activity. Make sure that no group member knows this language.
- Now the leader has to play a song and ask the members to focus on the emotions in this song. These emotions could be anything – sadness, heartbreak, anger, or joy.
- It is important that every member listens so deeply that they can feel the feelings behind this song.
- Now stop the song and ask the members to write a story on this song. The focus of the story should be less on the facts, and more on the hidden emotions in the song.
- Towards the end of the story writing, the member whose story matches very closely to the song’s emotions will win the game.
- Targeted aspect of this activity: To engage in mindful creativity and understand what does feelings mean.
- How it will help with mindfulness: This one of the best mindfulness exercises for groups will help to build conscious awareness in two ways. First, it will help the members to become mindful enough to feel the emotions behind different-language music. Second, it will help them with mindful self-expression and creativity.
If done right this practice will help a great deal to build emotional awareness in the participants.
All in All
Trying mindful activities for groups is a wonderful way to learn an awareness-focused way of life.
Sometimes what feels difficult to learn alone, can be learned much better with a group.
The 7 best group mindfulness activities in this blog will help you to enjoy your spiritual journey with like-minded people in your circle.