CHANDIGARH SHG MEET # 11 REPORT

Ishan, Dhruv, Varun and myself ( JP ) met at sector 33 park yesterday for the 11th meet of Chandigarh SHG! Ishan and myself were the first ones to reach the venue and since we had sometime before others joined, we started discussing a few things and i recorded Ishan’s video while he was talking to me! Soon others joined and we started with laughter session (this is a good way to start with positive energy and happy faces :-). Next we did 15 minute meditation! After that we had a round of introductions where we had to introduce ourselves and at the end had to use a randomly selected sentence from a pool and fill in the blanks! Some of the sentences that came out were –
1. If I could throw caution to the winds and really risk, I would. . . . .
2. I like to imagine I’m the cartoon character _____________ because . . . . .
3. School for me was(is) ________________

After that I introduced pausing which all of us were aware but don’t use! Pausing is a wonderful tool to get your breathing right and more importantly gives you time to plan and organize your thoughts. So we did an exercise of question answers where anyone of us could ask a question to anyone else and the other person would have to eat one piece of wafer from a packet that we had and then only answer the question! It can be a bit uncomfortable to take your time and then answer the question but it was worth it! The exercise makes us aware about our right to take our time, we can take 5 – 10 seconds to think about our answer! We laos tried to maintain eye contact whenever we spoke.

Next was Ishan’s prepared speech. He talked about his journey as a child and a teenager who stammers! It was an honest talk direct from his heart and he communicated in an excellent manner! I again recorded his speech.

Next we moved to the tea stall to have a hot piece of bread pakoda and tea! Chai wala inquired about Mr Jasbir. (Actually Mr Jasbir couldn’t come as he was not aware about the meet! And surely all of us including chaiwala, missed him for his humour and b-b-bouncing!) Next we reviewed Ishan’s video and did some general discussions on this method of recording your videos, reviewing them, cataloging you stammer and then trying to reproduce your own stammer voluntarily and how it helps to work on the seconday behaviour and a lot of other things! Since the recorded files took some time to get transferred from my phone to Ishan’s phone, both of us went for a long walk and discussed a few things going on in both of our lives!

P.S. Dhruv was on his mission to do voluntary stuttering 70 times and he will write a separate post about his experiences