This is the five minute mindfulness of breath practice.
Letting your body settle into a comfortable position.
It can be helpful to have both feet flat on the floor with your legs uncrusted.
And feeling the weight of your body supported by the chair.
And sitting in a way so that your spine can be comfortable rising up with its natural curve.
Where your body can be supported and relaxed.
And feeling as though the crown of your head is reaching towards the ceiling.
And with that natural rising up of the body,
Intentionally softening all of the muscles and the organs around that structure.
And when you're ready,
We'll move our attention to the part of the body where we notice the breath most distinctly.
And I'll guide you through feeling the sensations at three different parts of the body.
And then we'll settle on the one where you notice the breath most vividly.
So first of all,
Bringing your attention to the nostrils.
And feeling the movement of the air in and out of the nostrils.
Noticing what that feels like,
Whether there's a tingling sensation or not might be different for you.
And then shifting your attention to feel the movement of the breath in the region of the chest.
You might feel an expansion and contraction of the rib cage.
Or maybe you feel it as a rising and a falling of the chest.
And the third place we'll shift our attention to is in the region of the belly,
Feeling the movement of the abdominal wall with each in-breath and out-breath.
And then choosing one of those three places as the place that could be a home base for you,
Somewhere where we anchor our attention and return to it when we've experienced distractions.
And with a curiosity,
Feeling the sensations that are created in that part of the body by the movement of the breath.
Perhaps by now you've noticed that your mind has taken you away somewhere.
Or you've been distracted by something else,
A sound or a sensation in the body,
Perhaps.
And that's perfectly fine.
That doesn't mean that you can't do this or that it's not working.
It just simply means that you're human.
You've got a mind that's designed to think,
Just as our eyes see and our ears hear.
And whenever you notice that you've got distracted by one thing or another,
You can simply unhook from that by returning your attention back to the place that you chose in the body as the home base,
Feeling the movement of the breath in and out of the body.
We're letting the breath breathe itself.
We don't need to intervene in any way.
We're simply noticing those sensations,
Feeling the breath,
The full cycle of the breath,
The in breath and the out breath,
And any gaps between those two half cycles.
And it doesn't matter how many times you get distracted.
The noticing and returning to the breath is the practice.
To finish the practice,
You're welcome to gently open your eyes and continue with your day.
