If I think of an ideal time to decide to participate in an Erasmus training project focused on mental health, it probably doesn’t exist. There is no ideal time, precisely because any moment in life is the right one to participate in it. Whether you feel calm, satisfied, serene, or you are going through a difficult time with anxiety, a sense of loss, or depression, trying to have more tools to better understand and manage your emotions is an opportunity that should not be missed. 

If I think back to the moments spent at the Mõedaku spordibaas hostel, in a beautiful sunny meadow in the middle of the Estonian woods, I can only do it with a smile on my face, despite the emotions experienced there were not always “positive” … But is it right to talk about positive emotions? Not really, as I was able to learn during this ten-day training! 

That’s right, just as it’s not right to talk about positive emotions, it’s also not right to talk about “negative” emotions, those that we tend to reject, chase away, remove from our awareness, with the result of magnifying them and making us even more vulnerable to their inevitable return.

 So, the first great lesson of the training was to accept and validate all the emotions I felt during the experience, and thanks to activities such as art-therapy, meditation, dance and free body movements, externalize and recognize them, befriend them and let them accompany me in my daily life. 

This experience also revealed sides of myself that had been buried for so long that I thought I had completely lost: the pleasure of traveling alone, discovering that I was able to get by in an unknown context, making friends with new people and trying to dig inside yourself in front of strangers… without ever feeling uncomfortable. Yes, because these strangers, it didn’t take long for me to understand, were nothing more than human beings like myself, with behind them their baggage of traumas, experiences and experiences that made them as fragile and strong as I was, and in the end this group of Italians, Poles and Estonians turned out to be much more united than the linguistic and cultural differences could have led one to imagine. 

How can you truly grow, evolve and love yourself as a person without learning the art of mindfulness and compassion for yourself? It’s probably impossible, and every time I feel I need it, my mind will go back to this little piece of Baltic country where I finally, for once, felt understood.