Hello and welcome to this 10 minute meditation on labelling thought patterns.
Let's begin by focusing on the points of contact between the body and whatever it rests on.
So feeling feet on floor,
Body on seat,
Perhaps body on bed or on floor.
Whatever position you're in,
Just feeling where your body touches whatever's supporting it.
And focusing your attention on the physical sensations there.
And when you feel ready,
Tuning into the breath.
So starting to feel the sensations of breathing wherever in the body you choose to.
Just feeling the breath.
And whenever your mind wanders,
As it surely will,
Just bringing your attention back to the breath.
And when you realise that your mind's wandered,
Perhaps you might notice where it went.
Maybe it went into the past,
Remembering.
Maybe into the future,
Planning or worrying.
Maybe you were having a conversation with someone in your mind or talking to yourself.
When the mind wanders,
Just notice what it's doing before coming back to the breath.
And when you notice that the mind's wandered and you notice what it's doing,
Perhaps you could give a one-word label to that thought pattern.
So if you've been caught up in memories,
You might say to yourself,
Remembering,
Before you reconnect with the breath.
Or if you were caught up in worries,
You might say to yourself,
Worrying,
Before you reconnect with the breath.
And so on.
So whatever your mind is doing when you realise you're lost in thought,
See if you can label that thought pattern silently and then come back to feeling the breath.
Don't worry if you can't think of just the right label for your thought pattern.
There's no right or wrong labels here.
Just think of something,
Anything at all,
That roughly describes what your mind was doing.
And use that label.
Focusing on the breath as best you can.
And when you realise your mind's wandered off into thought,
Noticing what you're thinking about,
Labelling the thought pattern,
And then coming back to the breath.
It's okay if you keep getting distracted.
We're not trying to make thoughts stop.
We're just trying to notice when we're distracted and label the thought patterns before we come back to the breath.
If you get distracted often,
That's fine.
The more you get distracted,
The more opportunities you have to notice where your mind's gone and label the thought pattern before you come back to the breath.
Again and again and again,
We notice that the mind's wandered,
We notice where it went,
We label it,
And we come back.
Staying with the breath as best you can,
Labelling thought patterns when you can't.
And now for the final minute of the meditation,
I'll leave you in silence to continue practising this on your own.
And now we can bring this meditation to an end.
