Meditation & Coffee - Short + Sweet Stress Relief

We don’t always have time for a long and detailed “formal” meditation session. Sometimes we need a way to feel mindful, calm and focused in the heat of the moment, when our anxiety is high and overwhelming. Today is slightly shorter session dor this reason! Try this simple technique to make your life more mindful - whenever and whenever!

Transcript

Hello!

You are listening to Meditation and Coffee,

The weekday meditation podcast that helps you start your day off calm,

Aware,

Intentional,

Focused and most importantly,

Awake.

Because did you know that the word Buddha actually means awakened one?

I'm Hannah,

Your host and founder of the online meditation community Breathe Like a Badass,

And I am obsessed with starting the day with good coffee and seriously simple meditation.

As a trained meditation teacher and a female entrepreneur,

My mission is to help anxious yet ambitious women cut through overwhelmed,

Negative self-talk,

Constant comparison and fear,

So they can get the calm,

Clarity and focus that they need to build happy,

Fulfilling,

Freedom-filled businesses and lives.

Meditation is not magic,

But it's a pretty good place to start.

So whether your coffee is a shot of espresso,

A latte decaf or even a tea or a chai,

I invite you to join me every weekday to start your day off right.

FYI,

These sessions are recorded live on my Instagram page at BreatheLikeABadass,

So if you'd prefer to join in and watch them live,

You can do so there every weekday morning between 8 and 8.

30am London time.

The videos are also available after the lives on my IGTV page.

And now,

On to the meditation and coffee.

Good morning,

Good morning,

Good morning.

We are live.

How's everyone doing?

Today's Wednesday.

Which feels a bit crazy to me,

Like I feel like I say this a lot,

But it feels a bit crazy to me that it's Wednesday,

Like it literally feels like the week just started,

It was literally just Monday,

What's going on?

Anyway,

Picking up my coffee,

Taking my first sip of the day,

I invite you to join me as usual.

Where are you?

What are you drinking?

Let me know.

I love to always know who's joining me for my coffee sessions.

Now we've got that very important thing over with.

Hello,

Hello,

Thank you for being here.

Today's meditation is literally just short and sweet.

It's about bringing your meditation,

Your intention to be a mindful,

Meditative person into your normal life.

The meditation teacher Jeff Warren has this phrase and I'm going to butcher it because I normally do.

I love quotes and then I never actually remember them properly when I say them.

But anyway,

The gist of the quote is we don't want to live our lives,

No we don't want to just meditate when we're meditating.

We don't want to just sit down during the formal meditation and be super mindful and really meditative during those sessions and then in the rest of our lives forget that we ever did that session.

The practice is actually about making the rest of our life more meditative.

Which sounds really great and that is true and the more that we practice,

The more that we find that we're able to be more mindful and happier and stress free and bring ourselves back to the present in our everyday lives.

That is true but sometimes I think that we need a little bit of help and sometimes it feels like oh yeah that sounds great but actually in practice,

In the heat of the moment,

When I'm feeling stressed,

When I'm feeling worried or anxious,

That's actually not that helpful.

Today's meditation technique is going to be honestly one of the shortest ones that I've ever done.

I usually try to keep these sessions to 20 minutes,

Sometimes some of them creep over to about 25 or 30.

But basically this is a really great exercise that you can take with you whether you just have time to sit down and do a very short formal meditation where you're able to sit down and take a few minutes out of your day or you're going about the rest of your life and you need a bit of a reminder to help you to be that mindful person that you know you really want to be underneath all the stress and the anxiety.

So as we are sitting down in formal meditation,

As usual,

I invite you for this technique to get comfortable just for the purposes of now but as I say in future when we do this technique and you do it in the rest of your life you can do it whatever you're doing,

At your desk,

Waiting for your dinner to cook,

Whatever it might be.

So I do invite you to come into a balanced position where you feel comfortable and allow your shoulders to drop and if you can,

Taking some deep breaths in to allow the tension to drop,

Allowing your shoulders to relax and the skin around your eyes and your face and your neck to relax and doing this by inhaling gently,

Noticing the air going into your lungs and filling your body with clean air and allowing yourself to breathe out very gently,

Allowing the muscles in your body and your face to relax and coming into a position where you are right now,

Giving yourself this time and space to be.

And the reason why this technique is useful is because it allows us to interrupt any thoughts that are stressing us out,

A particularly stressful moment,

Maybe we feel like we're on the edge of an anxiety attack or a panic attack and I invite you to,

In that case,

Remember that you can use your five senses to interrupt that feeling of panic or that feeling of rising anxiety.

So what we're going to do is we're going to notice those feelings that we have and literally I want you to think of one thing that you can feel that feels solid and secure.

One thing,

Notice it.

So we're going to go through the five senses.

So one thing that you can feel,

Your feet on the floor perhaps,

Your seat on the chair and notice it,

Allow your attention to zoom into it.

Okay,

Great.

Now I'd like you to open your eyes if you have them closed and notice one thing that you can see in your immediate environment that feels grounding,

That feels interesting enough that it's going to interrupt that train of panic or anxiety thoughts.

So for me,

I'm looking at the trees outside and they're looking at the green leaves.

Yeah,

That's enough for me to notice that thing that I'm looking at and interrupt that train of thought and bring me back to the present.

So we've done feel,

We've done sight.

Now I'd like for you to notice if you can smell anything.

Maybe not.

I can smell the moisturiser cream that I have on my hands.

Smells quite nice.

Okay,

Yeah.

I can smell it.

I notice it.

It's on my hands.

It's bringing me back to the present.

Maybe you can't smell anything.

I can also kind of smell my coffee that I've got here.

Then taste.

Can you taste anything?

Is there something that you can do in that moment where you're feeling the rising anxiety,

Where you can interrupt that thought pattern with just whatever you happen to be doing?

Maybe you're in the middle of eating lunch.

Maybe you've got a coffee on the go like me.

Take that time to zone your attention very mindfully into that sense of taste.

And it's bringing me back into the present already.

And the last thing,

And this one can be very,

Very helpful,

Is just notice what you can hear.

Is there anything you can hear that you can bring into your consciousness and your attention right now?

I can hear the birds outside.

So this is a great exercise,

Like I say,

For if you're in the middle of your day and you want to feel more mindful,

But you're finding that your thoughts are spiralling or that you're getting anxious or worried or tense.

And you can be going about your day literally in the kitchen making food or about to get on a train or just sitting at your desk working and feeling the tasks piling up.

And you can think,

No,

Okay,

Balanced,

Grounded,

Drop my shoulders,

Take a deep breath and notice my senses.

There's no rules,

You can do it in order if you want.

You can do feel,

See,

Smell,

Taste or hearing.

Or you can do whatever works for you.

Sometimes for me,

It's enough for me to just feel my feet on the floor.

I remind myself,

Oh yeah,

Can feel my feet on the floor,

Bringing my attention back into the present.

That's enough.

That's enough for me to take a breath,

Reset,

Get some space and perspective on my anxiety and my thoughts that are making me feel scared or afraid or panicked or anxious.

Okay,

Feel my feet,

Solid,

Secure,

Right.

And then you're good to go and you can carry on with your day or whatever it is that you're doing.

It's just a great way of reminding yourself the tools and techniques that we practice in meditation can be applied to the rest of our lives,

Even if in that particular moment we don't have time to sit down and do like a whole 10 minutes practice or a whole 20 minute practice.

Once you've done the five senses,

If you still feel that you need a bit of a pause,

That's absolutely fine.

And then I invite you to take five to 10 good breaths,

Perhaps closing your eyes if wherever you are is safe.

And a few sessions ago I did some counting breaths,

Which can be very helpful in this situation.

And I'm just going to do five breaths with you now.

So if you want to close your eyes,

You can,

But you can practice doing this with your eyes open if that helps.

And you can inhale through the nose for one.

Exhale for one.

Inhale for two.

Exhale for two.

Inhale for three.

Allowing your spine to lift slightly and your chest to open with the air that you inhale.

Exhale for three,

Allowing your shoulders to relax even more,

Your muscles to melt down.

And for you to notice how it feels to be here today,

Breathing just in your body as you are.

In for four.

Out for four.

And even as you inhale,

Remembering to drop your shoulders and stay relaxed.

When we inhale,

We don't want to bring any more tension.

So inhaling for five.

Exhaling for five.

And if you had your eyes closed,

You can open them.

And this is an exercise that you can repeat whenever you need.

So maybe you want to carry on breathing up to ten.

Maybe you want to just do one good deep breath and count that.

And that's enough to bring you back out of that state of panic and overwhelm.

So whatever it is,

You can use those different techniques just to remind yourself that we're bringing it back to the present.

We can be mindful in the moment.

We are good.

We are safe.

We are grounded.

We are balanced.

And that we can apply a lot of the mindfulness techniques that we practice in our formal,

In inverted commas,

Meditation sessions and we can bring them into the rest of our lives and help them,

Help us,

Sorry,

To be a more mindful,

Grounded person so that we can respond rather than react to the situations and stresses and thoughts and feelings that arise that are around us.

That's it for today.

I wanted to keep it shorter than normal.

I wanted to just explore some ways that you can bring your mindfulness techniques into the rest of your life.

Let me know if that's useful for you.

Let me know if you find yourself doing it in the rest of your day or the weeks to come.

And also let me know if there are any other feelings that you deal with during your day that you'd like me to address or any hacks.

I don't like using the word hack,

But for want of a better word,

Any hacks that we can apply to our day,

To our thought patterns so that we can interrupt the negative thought patterns and the panic and the stress and the anxiety and bring ourselves back to the present and remind ourselves that we are in fact safe.

So that's it for today.

Thanks so much for joining me for another session of meditation and coffee.

I hope that you have a great day.

Let me know.

Let me know how it goes.

As usual,

These sessions are free.

So if you'd like to buy me a coffee and help support the meditation and coffee sessions so that I can continue giving them for free,

That would be hugely appreciated.

You can head over to PayPal.

Me forward slash,

Breathe like a bad ass,

Or you can,

Uh,

Yeah,

Give me a donation over on insight timer.

Cause all of these meditations I do later upload to insight timer.

So if you're listening on insight timer,

You can donate there too.

Buy me a coffee and let's have more coffee and meditation.

That's what we want,

Right?

It's all good.

Thank you so much for being here and I'll,

Uh,

Yeah,

I'll hopefully see you for a future session.

Thanks so much.

Bye bye bye.

That's it for today.

Thanks so much for listening and spending your morning with me.

If you like this podcast and you are as obsessed with coffee and maybe meditation as I am,

Please go ahead and leave a rating and a review on Apple podcasts or whatever you normally listen as it helps spread the word and get the message out to more brilliant women just like us who need it.

You can also share with your friends on Instagram tagging me at breathe like a bad ass.

I always love to see you there.

If you like this and you'd like to hear more from me and breathe like a bad ass on how to use meditation to get the calm,

Clarity and focus you need to build a happy,

Fulfilling,

Freedom filled business and life head on over to my other full length interview style podcast.

Just search breathe like a bad ass anywhere that you normally listen to podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening and I will see you for the next one.

Reviews

I’m hooked! I will simply do some grounding today in between sessions.
Thanks so much!

Beautiful! Thank you