Doing mazes

Doing mazes to practice patience ! My favorite….

It’s been a year since I became interested in providing activities for my child and clients or to adapt ordinary activities to help children to develop patience. Last night when I was drawing a simple maze for my 30-months-old daughter I put two gas station on the maze path for her to stop her small moving toy car and count to ten to fuel it symbolically in her pretend play . This activity is designed to develop patience because she needs to stop and count rather than rush through the maze. Although you may know that doing mazes without stopping to count develops fine motor control (as she avoids hitting her car on the lines) adding the gas stations and counting teaches her to work even more carefully and with patience.

I also love how mazes can be positioned vertically in order to develop upper-extremity stability strength and the fine motor control required for future hand-writing skills. While sequencing steps to the maze, the child should think, plan & then move her finger, in-hand object or crayon. This is a great way to develop problem solving, an aspect of executive functioning.
What is more it’s fun & entertaining.

Patience with illness !

A new topic for writing comes to my mind since I have a surgery tomorrow morning !

It’s about a month that I felt something is not working well inside my body, I went to have a complete health checkup & found the reasons behind all my pains.

These kind of things happen for each and every one of us. As Life has it’s ups and downs, you and your body may need to rest once in a while maybe to be more thankful and thoughtful more for your health and the hidden blessing of you illness.

when you face a difficulty like being ill and you were a kind of person who have started practicing patience long ago this mental practice will let you tolerate your pains in a better way.

Be safe, be healthy
Sending your kind prayers my way 🙂

Pinwheel

My daughter, Mitra

Goal-oriented Breathing techniques like blowing to a pinwheel ARE therapeutic. it is a way to increase or guide your child to have a good self-regulation, especially when inhale slowly and deeply then release it to move the wheels. It has perceptual-motor benefits when learning how to blow, in which direction or even when trying to make a pinwheel. It’s also good for building a good oral-motor when blowing on the wheels to develop oral muscles. It can be helpful to reduce anxiety. Above all and to my interest it’s also good to make and then play with a pinwheel, the whole process, for practicing patience, From an early age. I have two clients that due to their disabilities they became impulsive, so it’s good to suggest and introduce this very functional activity to them 🙂
Yeah play to practice patience !

here is a creative activity !

you can make your own similar activity while enjoy your time with kids
this is JUST because i am an Occupational Therapist 🙂

Silence

In the name of the most high

i was thinking about a practice to give to my blog readers in order to be more patient. I don’t know if you see this anywhere else or even if you like it.

To me trying not to talk can be a strategy to calm down your busy mind. This could be appropriate for those who used to react verbally and too emotionally to a stimulus whatever it could be.

Or if you find it logical but hard to practice, instead of silence, at least you can pause before any reaction.

If I wanted to bring you an example, I can refer to my religion, as Muslims have something they call it ” fasting for tongue “.

In Surah Maryam (19:26) we can read ” So eat and drink and refresh your eye; and if you meet any mortal, say: ‘Verily I have vowed a fast to the Beneficent (God), so never shall I speak today with any human being’.”

The verses show that Mary was held to a vow of silence and, by the command of Allah, she refrained from speaking to the people for a particular duration until her child, Jesus, began speaking and defended her chastity. This state was more appropriate and effective from all respects.

The verse indicates that the vow of silence was a familiar habit for those people and as such they did not object to it from her.

This kind of fasting, however, is not lawful in the religion of Islam.

Imam Sadiq (a.s.) in a tradition has said: “Verily fasting is not merely to restrain oneself from eating and drinking alone. Surely Mary said: ‘Verily I have vowed a fast to the Beneficent (God)’, i.e. the silence. Therefore (when you are in fasting) protect your tongue, restrain your eyes from whatever is sin, be not envious of each other, and do not get into conflict.”

To me it’s like a wise prevention, when you keep your tongue from saying something that would be a regret in future then by your silence you prevent from a negative feeling to happen again.

So If you find it boring try to make it fun for your mind’s active participation, for instance you can listen to a happy & positive music while you are practicing silence to your inner regulation.

Merry Christmas & happy holiday seasons to friends who celebrate!

Attentional Control !

In the name of the most high

Attentional control (AC:) “The ability to focus on task-relevant stimuli and ignore task-irrelevant stimuli. The ability to regulate intentionality and direct cognitive processing. Sometimes referred to as spotlight or focal attention, focus, control of attention, executive controlled attention or executive attention”(McGrew, LaForte, & Schrank, 2014; WJ IV technical manual).

I don’t know if it is approved by any research study or not , but it could be a question to ask or I can think about it as a hypothesis. Dose AC has anything to do with human patience ?

I can just say that based on my personal experience focusing on what I love to do can shift my attention to be away from what is annoying in the environment, for example even in a traffic jam, listening to your favorite song can reduce the negative impact of being in an unwanted situation and what bothers you.

And our Attentional control is responsible for Ignoring what is against our patience, isn’t it ?

STOP blaming others !

In the name of the most high

After a big pause of not writing here because of a trip to the Capital Tehran to be present at the19th Iranian Occupational Therapy conference now I am here to think and write again about ” patience “.

To me discussion and awareness on this selected topic above is very life changing and it should be a key point for a good and peaceful relationship with anyone.

Whatever happens to you or better to say, whatever you feel when you are in a relationship , try not to accuse anyone of anything. NOW pause a minute to think about it.

accept that you are the only reason for the reaction of the person, may be because of your not sensible, impatience performance. Remember even a miracle comes from within.

If you don’t try to believe on this, you can’t calm your mind down and in this situation you have the potential to act impatiently again.

The definition

In the name of the most high

I am going to write a little about the definition of patience (Sabr) from our Muslim background and what it really means according to Quran. This might be the basic step toward responding to why I shift my focus on this topic.

Sabr is a virtue and to us it was mostly a spiritual term even before we know any psychological description about it.

It should be an important skill to know about, that the word sabr is used in Qur’an around seventy times.

To us Half part of faith is sabr, so when I know in my religion that it’s half part of faith, it should be in my focus of attention to learn more about it and to do my best to practice how to achieve this skill. Anything that is inside our religious commands is for us to live a better and wiser life, without any doubt.

Sabr is a trait of the almighty God, as God sent revelation to David (peace be upon him) and told: “habituate my temper and sabr is one of my characteristics”.

Sabr is the cause of religious stability against the cause of lust and this resistance belongs to human’s nature.

We believe that Sabr has two kinds:

One of them is sabr of body, like body suffering and tolerance for it forexample when doing hard works to make a living or like doing worship such as fasting in Ramadan.

The other one is sabr against temper desires and Capriciousness expedience.

People who follow sabr are of three kinds: first, repentant who quit complaining, second one is pious who is gratified with possibilities, third, the affection of master toward Him and this is the of honest people rank.

Sabr in the Qur’an is divided into three aspects: sabr upon doing religious tasks which we supposed to do in an organized way everyday maybe to teach our brain doing an activity in order to be organized, sabr upon prohibited ones to me it’s like we are working on our executive function and sabr upon the arrival of disaster.

cook pizza to practice patience !

In the name of the most high

Today I want to write a little more from an occupational therapy viewpoint about my favorite topic, patience 🙂

I have learned in OT that if you want somebody to participate actively in an activity you should provide them with what they like, that should be among their interests.

And one of the best activities a woman always does in her occupational everyday function & ADL is cooking.

For today I recommend cooking pizza, It has lots of skills in itself including: ideation, planning, execution, decision making, measuring, sensory inputs, sequencing, fine motor, attention, concentration & above all patience 🙂 yeah waiting is needed too.

For an emotionally sensitive woman who is also weak at the skill ” patience ” it’s right there & ready at home to practice patience indirectly.

I wrote in a post here in my weblog that if you want to be good at patience, you need to make yourself busy. Now make yourself busy with cooking.

Well, try to look at the cooking activity this way. We really need the awareness that we can start to develop our life-changing skills from our home where we live. For are family & children.

Private speech works!

In the name of the most high

Every Once in a while we really need to review our knowledge on patience, yesterday I was reading an article about gratitude on psychology today that I wanted to share part of it related to our topic with you here, it said : according to a researcher from the University of Toronto, “The longer that something is held in awareness and the more emotionally stimulating it is, the more neurons that fire and thus wire together, and the stronger the trace in memory.”
All we have to do is be aware (mindful) of good things as they occur and pause long enough to allow them to really soak into us. It’s like a mini-meditation on the run!

Here in my blog one of the posts is about the importance of an underlying root for being impatient that’s how emotionally sensitive a person is. So the weak point is in front of you and your job is to pause before any reaction in your everyday life and gradually making a sensible person out of yourself.

And your private speech is a very important factor to reach this goal. So try to use the word pause in your self-talks! One day soon you will be surprised on how the word pause unconsciously works for you and guide your performances of larger later !