Building Our Bundle I: Video Content

Program Overview

Season one of Building Our Bundle focused on supporting Indigenous young people to get active in their mental and spiritual health journeys. Each week, video sessions were delivered online sharing a teaching and activity for participants to do on their own time. Weekly photo challenges enabled us to connect with one another across the distance that separates us and share our thoughts and feelings in creative ways. The program ran during the summer of 2020.

Meet the FOPT team

Learn more about what FOPT is and meet the team

EPISODE 1: Building Our Bundle

Welcome to week 1 of Building Our Bundle! This week, we are talking about bundles and grounding tokens. After watching the teaching video, we want you to practice a technique called grounding by finding and connecting with a grounding token. Your photo challenge this week is to share a picture or image that represents a place where you can be your true self!

EPISODE 2: Honouring Our Values

This week we are talking about values and how they affect our choices and our relationships. Watch our teaching video where we explore the Seven Grandfather Teachings (Niishwaswi Mishomiisaag) and what they can mean for us in our journeys. Then, start sorting your values through our guided reflection activity. Use these exercises to really think about how you can start focusing on the values that are most important to you. Then, show us those values/teachings in this week’s photo challenge.

EPISODE 3: We Are All Stars

This week’s session is called We Are All Stars and explores traditional Anishinaabe stories of our origins from Sky World. We are talking about the stars as a way to explore our own identities and relationships to help us better understand where we’ve come from, where we are, and where we can go. We want you to spend some time this week thinking about the relationships you have in your life and what they mean to you by mapping your own relational constellation. Explore the stars yourself and share your own version of a constellation in this week’s photo challenge.

EPISODE 4: We Are All Connected

This week we are talking about the concept of community and what it can mean to us in our lives. As part of our bundle, community allows us to have a security system that we can go to when we need to, as well as a place where we can share our learning and gifts. As we explore through our different perspectives of community, we want to encourage you to practice relationality with all of creation in this week's photo scavenger hunt activity! Get out there and start embracing all of the members of our communities, whether they be people, plants, animals, or spirits who we have in our environments. Share your photos with us by creating a community collage and sharing one word that describes what community means to you in this week's photo challenge.

EPISODE 5: Talking Back & Talking Forward

We are taking this week to reflect inward on the relationship we have with our inner self. Our minds are a part of our bundle; it’s the way we experience this physical and spiritual world. But sometimes, our mind can seem like our enemy rather than our friend, particularly when we’ve internalized negative statements we’ve heard from others. This session invites you to spend some time learning to identify those negative messages we tell ourselves so we can learn to talk back and stand up for ourselves. When we find that power within us to talk to ourselves in a kind way, we are able to support others around us and talk forward by sharing positivity with our community. Participate in a reflective storytelling activity, and share a positive message in this week’s photo challenge!

EPISODE 6: We All Have Gifts To Share

This week is about our gifts and how we can bring them out in ourselves and in others. We know that every one of us is a gift from creation, who brings with them power, purpose, and value. But sometimes, we have difficulty seeing our gifts because of our inner beliefs and feelings about ourselves, or because we have not yet had the opportunity to develop them. It’s usually easier for us to see the gifts others have. We want to encourage you to connect with one of the most powerful items in your bundle; your gift. Spend some time this week thinking of what your gift is and how you can help others you care about to start seeing theirs as well. This week is kind of like a show and tell: show off your talents and uniqueness by sharing your gift in an image or video in this week's photo challenge.

EPISODE 7: Our Future Is Ours To Make

This session is for those of you who are ready to take the next step in your journey of self-healing and discovery. In this session we talk about a tool that can help us to be able to pick up our bundle; that is the ability to let go. Letting go can be a tough thing to talk about but is often necessary for us to heal and move forward in a good way. Letting go requires self-reflection, radical acceptance, and faith. We know that many of us have experienced things that have harmed our bodies, minds, and spirits and it is up to us how we allow those experiences to define our futures. Letting go allows us to find our power and to make our futures our own.

Season Summary

This program will continue to live on in many different forms and we hope you continue to follow along and join in! This video honours our amazing participants through showcasing all the beautiful photos sent in for each weeks photo challenge. We want to say a CHI MIIGWETCH to everyone that participated, followed along, shared our videos and content and to all those that supported this program. Without you this would have not been such a success! We hope to continue to work with all of you! We look forward to having more opportunities to run the Building Our Bundle program in the future and to connect with all of you! Please do not hesitate to reach out if you are looking for support and resources.