Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Breath
My relationship with my meditation practice has changed - and will continue to change.
Today, my formal meditation practice feels like a gift, not a to-do. But I know this experience, like all experiences, will change and morph. So, I’m grateful for it today. I also know the feeling when meditation feels like something I need to do, versus want to do and I have ways I work with that.
But most of all, I can recall feeling like I would explode if I sat still one more second. It was a strong, almost visceral, reaction I would have.
The reality is that meditation is a form of training. Just if we were weight training, we wouldn’t stop because the weights felt heavy. We wouldn’t tell ourselves we didn’t need the training because the weights were a workout - we’d know that in the process, we were getting stronger. Even if (perhaps particularly if) the weights felt heavy that day.
That might be a way for us to think about our mental training. For most of our lives, we’ve allowed our attention to become distracted. A research study says that the typical attention span of a human is less than 6 seconds.
When we sit and practice keeping our attention on one object, we build our focus and concentration. When we notice we are distracted and bring our attention back, we are building our muscle of concentration and focus.
Similar to a rep in weight lifting, in a concentration meditation, we can view the rep of Recognize => Release => Return. We recognize we are distracted, we release the thought and we return to our focus. We do this again and again and, in each repetition, we are building our mental strength of focus and concentration.
Now to the research….Dr Amishi Jha recently published Peak Mind: Find Your Focus, Own Your Attention, Invest 12 Minutes a Day. Her research was based on years of training mindfulness to the military and other high-stress occupations. For her goals - which were to maintain focus and concentration in areas of high-stress - she found that 12 minutes of day for 5 days a week, was the minimum necessary to have meaningful progress against those goals. That translates to a total of 60 minutes across a 7-day week. That certainly feels like something that most of us can do!
The breath is a great place to practice anchoring your attention. As I say in my introductory class, it’s accessible, its changing and many times it can be pleasant. So for many people, it’s a really great anchor in meditation.
In light of that, I’m happy to share a mindfulness of breath meditation here. Guided for 12 minutes for my friends who are looking for specificity :-)
Here’s to building your mental reps!
