Spartan Resilience Education offers a weekly, on-line support session for any Spartan experiencing grief related to the death of a loved one, friend, pet, co-worker, neighbor, or other significant person in their life.

Sessions are held via zoom on Tuesdays 4:00 - 5:30 pm

Once you register you will be sent an email with information for accessing the sessions.

When we experience the loss of someone we love, it can be very difficult to process and make meaning out of what has happened.

The emotional, psychological, and physical strain of grieving can temporarily make it hard to navigate our personal and professional responsibilities.

While the journey is different for everyone, some skills and strategies can help you move through the process with more ease, self-compassion, resilience, and effectiveness.

Being part of a community of grievers can provide invaluable support and allow you to learn from the experience of others who are also on a journey of healing and transformation following a significant, life-changing loss.

Joining our trauma-informed, healing-centered community will give you the opportunity to:

• Share your unique grief journey.
• Receive empathy and non-judgmental support.
• Ask questions and learn about resources to support healthy grieving.
• Gain basic education re: grief, ambiguous loss, task of mourning, and transformational grief practices.
• Learn core resilience skills and strategies to help you tend to your loss and navigate your personal and professional life.

Sessions are drop in and free of charge, come when you need to.

Sessions facilitated by Licensed Grief Counselors

For more information contact Spartan Resilience Education

This learning community is a healing-centered, peer support space for anyone who has attended at least one Spartan Resilience Education Course and wishes to continue their learning, ask questions, raise topics, and build community with other learners from across the MSU community.

The community meets in a zoom meeting space, the second and fourth Thursdays of each month, from 12:30-1:30.

Sessions are facilitated by Lisa Laughman, Coordinator of Spartan Resilience Education

Lisa offers music, somatic grounding practices, timely topics, new skill building concepts, and often shares her most recent personal insights about emotional wellness and psychological flexibility in the context of social justice education.

Lisa also facilitates community discussions using the zoom chat function and verbal sharing from participants.

To amplify the importance of resilience skill-building for all members of our university community, Spartan Resilience Education has created an opportunity for Spartans to earn a certificate in resilience education.

The Spartan Resilience Education Certificate demonstrates your commitment to developing a wide range of skills to support wise, value guided action in your personal and professional life. To enroll in the certificate program register here:  https://msu.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dp90Vyaor3aBpBQ)

Once you are enrolled in the Spartan Resilience Certificate program you will still need to sign up for each course individually. 

You can attend the live webinar or participate off-line by watching the recorded sessions. Once you have attended/watched all sessions in a given course you will need to complete the participant survey for that course which will prompt you to send an email to Spartanresilience@msu.edu indicating you have completed the course.

Supervisors are encouraged to support employee attendance in Spartan Resilience Education Courses by allowing additional time for lunch and/or providing release time for course work completion.

If you have questions contact, Lisa Laughman, Coordinator Spartan Resilience Education laughman@msu.edu

The Snippet Project brings resilience education directly to the learning and working spaces Spartans are already engaged in.  

The series of 15 brief videos and the companion user guide are intended to be shared with groups of students, faculty, staff, and leaders.  Groups will be led by peer facilitators including student organization leaders, classroom instructors, administrative assistants, academic advisors, coaches, team leaders, etc.

The videos series covers topics such as: how to increase your psychological flexibility; learn healthy emotional expression, develop grounding practices; interrupt unhelpful thought habits that get in the way of happiness, wellbeing, and success. 

Mindful STATE is an emerging university-wide, collaborative initiative to help Spartans learn the benefits of mindfulness and access resources to develop or strengthen their mindfulness practices. 

Introductory mindfulness courses

Check for upcoming mindfulness courses here  (link to Spartan Resilience courses)

Spartans Voices

Recorded meditations offered by fellow Spartans can be accessed on MSU Media Space in the Mindful STATE channel

Coming Soon!

Community healing-centered meditation events

Spartans gathering to create healing-centered spaces for meditation, reflection, and somatic healing practices.

Spartans teaching Spartans

Recorded demonstrations of breath work and grounding practices –

Mindful STATE Map

Visit beautiful spaces in and around the MSU Campus and listen to recorded messages and meditations from fellow Spartans by utilizing a QR code

Like other institutions of higher education, the demand for counseling services at MSU is greater than our current capacity to meet that demand. The level of stress, anxiety, depression, burnout, trauma, and secondary trauma being experienced by our community can be seen and felt across the University. This is true across all populations: undergraduate, graduate, faculty, staff, and leaders.

Unfortunately, because of stigma, toxic positivity, emotional avoidance, and cultural conditioning, most people who are emotionally and psychologically struggling will not engage in counseling.

This leads us to a curious question:

What if we take the resilience training out of the counseling offices and bring skill-building opportunities directly into the learning, working, and social environments Spartans already engage in?

Through a variety of media and teaching formats, we seek to ensure that resilience education is accessible, inclusive, and ever-present as part of the "Spartan Experience."

Like most Big 10 university brand strategies, MSU has powerful images and messages about the excellence of our students, faculty, and staff. Who will solve real world problems? We will, of course, because of our Spartan Will.

We are expected to have "Uncommon Will" as if our students are magically different from other students, like the ones at the school down the road who are busy "hailing to the Victors." These messages inadvertently increase the performance pressure our students feel and can have unintended outcomes of increased stress, fear of failure, self-criticism, and imposter syndrome.

Spartan Resilience seeks to balance these messages by providing the skills building required to live at the intersection of healthy and high performing. We believe that "Uncommon Will" requires uncommon skills, and every Spartan deserves to have access to resilience training to help them meet the demands placed upon them.

Our goal is to infuse Spartan branding with wellness concepts, incorporating mindfulness and other grounding practices into the very fabric of how teaching, learning, and business happens at Michigan State University. Integrating resilience training into every aspect of life at Michigan State will best prepare Spartans to provide leadership for the common good in their personal and professional lives.

Spartan Resilience Education Program Priorities

• Scale resilience education to reach large numbers of students, faculty, staff, alumni, and leaders.

• Engage campus partners in creating healing-centered gatherings designed to increase social connection and healthy relationships between Spartans.

• In partnership with often marginalized communities, create healing-centered programming to increase social connection and combat the negative impact of discrimination and all forms of oppression.

• Build a critical mass of Spartans best prepared to navigate the emotional, psychological, and physiological strain of naming and dismantling systems of institutional and cultural oppression.

• Enhance culture change efforts related to DEI-B and RVSM, and develop a "culture of care" at MSU by actively supporting students, faculty, and staff engaged in these change efforts.

• Support the development of wise, daring leaders by incorporating resilience skill building into leadership development training at all levels of the organization. What Makes us Different- Change at Four Levels

What makes our model different from most resilience training programs is we don't just focus on the personal and interpersonal levels of change. We emphasize the importance of each person developing critical awareness of the impact systems of power, and privilege has on both our individual health and our collective health and wellbeing.

Spartan Resilience is dedicated to building a critical mass of Spartans who can serve as sustainable agents of institutional and cultural change, allowing us to build a culture that truly upholds our values and supports all our people.

Photo: Based on the work of Visions Incorporated

Consultation available for new programming in the following areas:

Department-Based Retreats/Workshops

Creating partnership programs to support people with one or more often marginalized identities

Spartan Resilience is interested in connecting resilience training with efforts to advance ket strategic plan goals such as:

• Increasing the psychological safety of individual work teams
• Improving the health and wellbeing culture at Michigan State University
• Reaching key goals related to Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and belonging
• Reducing incidents of Relationship Violence and Sexual Misconduct
• Supporting survivors and trauma informed care
• Developing wise, value guided leaders with increased capacity to lead for the common good.
• Strengthen Spartan capacity to impact complex global problems

If you have an idea for programming contact Spartanresilience@msu.edu

The Spartan Resilience Education Training Model introduces basic principles of healthy human functioning and incorporates skill-building from several well established clinical theories, including:

• Acceptance and Commitment Theory (ACT)
• Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)
• Mindful Self Compassion (MSC)
• Shame Resilience Theory (SRT)
• Emotional Intelligence (EI)
• PolyVagal Theory
• and other somatic healing practices.

Survey data from participants of our programming indicate that combining skills and concepts from this collection of theories and packaging the skill building in community-based training courses leads to significant improvement in the following areas:

• Psychological Flexibility and Learning Agility
• Emotional Literacy, Intelligence, and Resilience
• Empathy and Self Compassion
• Stress Reduction

Further testing of the impact of the Spartan Resilience Education Model is a current focus of our efforts.