March 27th, 2020
Recognizing the collective anxiety and the stress induced by the uncertainty the current global pandemic has brought on, ACEI has set out to host a weekly or bi-weekly webchat for co-workers, colleagues, and friends. We will offer these webchats until no longer needed. On Wednesday, March 25, 2019, we hosted our first “Mindful Minutes with ACEI – Safe Space, Virtual Place.”
Creating a platform where we can engage, share our personal experiences and discuss how we can help one another is the impetus behind ACEI’s Mindful Minutes. We are not discussing credential evaluation issues or how to recruit students or emerging markets in international education. We are dealing with real-time, real life issues and providing ourselves the space to talk about how we’re coping and what we’re doing to make these turbulent times manageable through mindful exercises.
Our entire team at ACEI has quickly transitioned to working online and remotely since last Thursday. We continue to assure our applicants and institutional clients of our availability to service their needs and answer their questions. We realize that this is the current paradigm for many who are not classified as essential workers. Creating our home offices and making spaces that allow us to continue doing our work as seamlessly as possible while remaining alert and vigilante to the ongoing news updates can be daunting to say the least. Adjusting to this new routine, especially for parents of young children who now require home schooling is bringing on new levels of stress that if unchecked can affect our overall wellness.
The response to our first Mindful Minutes webinar has been overwhelmingly positive. Our next Mindful Minutes with ACEI will be on Wednesday, April 1st. You can register here.
We recorded our webchat of March 25th and including the link
Recording password: 6Pcfj4t2
We encourage any questions or further discussion, please feel free to contact our presenters by email: acei@acei-global.org.
We would like to leave you with a message from the author Elizabeth Gilbert which was shared in the March 25th webinar called “Facing Fear With Compassion:”
Facing Fear With Compassion
From Elizabeth Gilbert, Author
Human beings are incredibly resourceful, creative and resilient both as individuals and as a species. We have survived unbelievable hardships.
If you’re looking for courage in the face of catastrophe, try to remember this:
Every single one of us is the direct genetic descendant of ancestors who survived unthinkable hardships. That is where we come from – survivors – that’s what we’re made of, thousands and thousands of generations of people before us who survived. If they didn’t exist and survive, we wouldn’t be here.
Resilience is our birthright and survival is our shared history.
If you are afraid for yourself, others, future of humanity, take a moment and remember our ancestors and recall what they faced and what they went through.
As Winston Churchill said, we have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across mountains, across the prairies because we are made of sugar candy. Resilience is our shared inheritance. Resourcefulness is the very hallmark of our species.
We are creative, we are adaptive, and history has shown that humanity sometimes always finds a way, even when it appears that there is no way.
We are strong. You have probably survived a great deal in life, emotionally, physically, financially. You have gotten this far. You may have resources that have helped you get this far and you may not even be aware you have them.
If you’ve had a spiritual practice, or something similar, this is what you’ve been preparing for. Spiritual practices are exercises to prepare us for these exact times, when things are difficult and incomprehensible. You’re stronger than you know.
As one soldier may tell another soldier before going into battle, “remember your training, buddy!” This is what we came here for and this is what we’ve been practicing for, and this is when it counts.
Listen to the voice inside, and remember these words of infinite kindness that love is within us:
I’m right here
I’ve got you
I love you
and, I’m not going anywhere.
If you wish to receive alerts of our future Mindful Minutes webchats, please send us an email at acei@acei-global.org and include “Mindful Minutes News” in the subject line.
Be well and stay safe.
The Academic Credentials Evaluation Institute, Inc. (ACEI), was founded in 1994 and is based in Los Angeles, CA, USA. ACEI provides a number of services that include evaluations of international academic credentials for U.S. educational equivalence, translation, verification, and professional training programs. ACEI is a Charter and Endorsed Member of the Association of International Credential Evaluators. For more information, visit www.acei-global.org.