Simple Breathing Meditation

I am so excited to lead you in a relaxing ten-minute breathing practice that we can use to deepen our awareness of our breath and remain present. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoy and benefit from this practice. It is suitable for repeated listening.

Transcript

Hi,

My name is Dan and welcome to my channel.

Now this little video is for all you busy people out there that can't find the time to put in 20 minutes of meditation.

And so we're going to jump straight into it.

No need for warm-ups in this,

But right where you are,

All I want you to do,

I just want you to get yourself comfortable.

If that means sitting back on the chair,

Lying down on the couch,

Heading out into the garden and laying down in the grass,

Whatever you want to do.

When you've got yourself comfortable,

Just bringing some of that attention into the body,

What we call embodiment.

So this embodiment process,

Bringing this focus,

Bringing our awareness into what we can feel.

And the most wonderful place to start is what we call the more physical sensations.

So noticing your feet.

If I was to ask you a question,

How would you know that you had feet?

Feeling the sensations there.

You don't need to do anything,

Maybe wiggling your toes a little bit,

But just noticing.

And then from your feet,

What I'm going to invite you to do is just bring your awareness up into your hands.

Can you feel the sensations in your hands?

Can you just maybe hold your attention,

Hold this awareness,

Hold the feelings that you are recognizing,

Or what we call hands,

Just for a few moments?

Maybe you can feel warmth.

If they're on top of each other,

Maybe there's a sense of pressure,

Feeling of being helped.

And I just invite you just to hold your attention there just a little bit longer,

Doing your best.

And by holding your attention,

You're just continuing to feel the sensations,

Not allowing yourself to get distracted,

Just trying to hold your attention just in the feeling of hands just a few moments longer.

And then from the hands,

I just invite you to bring some attention up into the shoulders.

Can you notice your shoulders?

How do you know that they're there?

Maybe you can feel the clothes that you're wearing.

Maybe there's a sense of weight,

Sense of pressure.

Maybe you're holding a little bit of stress in your shoulders and you can feel the tension.

And again,

In the same way,

We just held some of our attention in our hands,

I'm going to invite you just to keep this attention in your shoulders.

How do they feel?

What do you notice?

And just like we can feel these sensations,

We can also relax.

And with that same attention,

That same focus,

I'd like to see if you can bring it onto the movement of the breath in the same way that we could feel our feet,

As the same way we could feel our shoulders,

As the same way we could feel our hands.

We can also feel the movement of our breath.

I invite you just to place your attention just at the tip of the nose,

Just at the nostrils,

Maybe around sort of the nostril and lip area.

I just want you to see what you can feel.

It doesn't matter how much or how little we can feel.

Right now the most important thing is the noticing.

Maybe you can feel coolness,

Maybe you can feel warmth,

Maybe it's just the feeling of movement as the air passes into and out of the body.

Now the mind loves to try and control things,

It loves to change things,

And it forgets that it breathes something like 20,

000 breaths a day.

All on its own,

It didn't need any of your help,

And maybe it begins to shorten your breath,

Maybe it begins to lengthen your breath,

Maybe you're noticing that change in breath which is wonderful,

It's an element of mindfulness that's there,

This change.

But ultimately all we're trying to do,

This is a practice in awareness,

And we're just trying to feel the sensations,

Just like you felt your toes and your hands and your shoulders,

Exactly the same way.

We're just resting our attention on our breath.

And wonderfully what a lot of the science says,

A lot of what the evidence says,

Is that when we bring our attention away from our thoughts and onto our breath in this way,

It begins to calm the mind down.

Can you continue to feel the breath?

Can you continue to feel that movement,

That change?

And it doesn't matter how well you're going or how poorly you're going,

Remembering all we're doing here is practicing,

That's all we're doing.

Just like you'd be practicing to learn how to do anything else,

This is practicing how to manage our mind.

What a wonderful gift.

And we start just by watching the movement of our breath,

Watching the flow,

Watching the change.

And now one of the most important points of this practice is the noticing the failure within it,

That you couldn't hold your focus at the nose,

You couldn't focus.

All of a sudden you remembered you've got emails to send.

All of a sudden you realize you've got to pick up some fruit for the kids' lunches tomorrow.

All of a sudden you remember all these things that you didn't need to know five minutes ago,

But all of a sudden you do now.

And none of them right just in this moment,

Unless of course it is very important,

But everything else,

I just want you to see them as a thought.

Not good,

Not bad,

Not more important or less important,

Any thought that rises is just a thought,

Just for the next couple of minutes.

Even the sounds as you're sort of holding your attention on your nose and all of a sudden you hear a car going past,

Maybe the kids talking in the background,

Whatever it is,

Whatever has distracted you and you've moved your attention away from the nose.

And you're just going to notice that movement,

Notice the movement into thought,

Into sounds,

Into other sensations and I just invite you just to gently bring your attention back to your nose again.

Really it doesn't matter how bad you're doing or how good you're doing,

Right now this is just practice,

That's all you're doing,

Training.

Wonderfully the side effect of this training can be calmness,

Sense of compassion.

Every time the mind wanders you just gently bring it back as often as you can,

Whenever you recognise,

Oh that's me listening to a bird and then hearing your narrator voice advising you of listening to a bird and you just gently come back to the movement of the nose again and just seeing how many breaths you can just hold your attention there before it flutters again.

And then just to finish,

Just allowing your eyes to open.

And I still want you to hold that attention at the nostrils,

Just keep holding it there.

Just a couple more breaths,

You're doing amazing.

And the last thing we do together as you breathe in this time,

I want a big deep breath in,

Breathing in and you're just going to say in your thoughts the word calm,

So you're going to breathe in,

Calm and as you breathe out this time,

Big deep breath out,

All the way to the end so you're almost straining,

I want you to say peace and breathing out.

All the way to the end.

And that's it.

I hope you enjoyed the video.

I'd love to hear your comments,

Your thoughts,

What did you take from it?

Obviously if you could share or like,

Subscribe,

Whatever you want to do,

It would be kindly appreciated but have an amazing rest of your day and I look forward to seeing you maybe on the next video.

Thanks very much.

Reviews

This was amazingly helpful in its simplicity. I’ve been feeling resistant to and even alienated from my practice recently. And this was a lovely reintroduction. Thank you.

Very nice thank you!