Welcome to your Live Mindfully meditation.
You can count on your breath.
This practice will provide you with a great introduction to mindfulness and will be the beginning of your formal brain training to support you to live with more clarity,
Calm and connection.
I'll invite you now to get into a comfortable position,
Either sitting in a chair or in a cushion on the floor.
We can allow the back to become straight but not rigid and perhaps moving slightly away from any back support you may have.
You might like to tuck the chin slightly to lengthen the back of the neck and you could allow the shoulders to soften down.
Place your hands wherever they feel most comfortable,
Either on your lap or on your knees.
If you feel comfortable with it,
You might like to now softly close down the eyes or simply allow your gaze to rest unfocused on a spot in front of you.
Now gently bring your attention to the body,
Resting here.
You might like to attend specifically to the feet,
Feeling into the feet and noticing the sensations that are there.
Bringing your attention now up your legs,
Moving over the arms and hands,
Attending to the neck and the head.
Slowly dancing the attention across the face,
Sensing into the lower jaw,
Noticing how this part of the body is feeling and whether there's any tension there.
If so,
Allowing that to soften down if possible.
I'll invite you now to move your attention to rest within your torso,
Into the chest and the belly,
Noticing the way the torso moves effortlessly with the flow of your natural breath.
Having the breath to become the most interesting thing in your world at the moment as it rises and falls.
Letting go of the tendency we may have to want to change or control the breath and simply allowing the breath to be as it already is in the body.
Just this breath.
Pretty soon we may start to notice the chatter of our beautiful mind.
Perhaps providing us with a running commentary of our present moment experience or replaying old stories from the past or anticipating what is yet to come in the future.
Remember this is all okay.
This is just what the mind does.
Just as it is the eyes job to see and the ears job to hear,
It is the mind's job to think.
It's a thought machine.
The opportunity we have during this formal mindfulness practice is to change the relationship we have with our thinking mind.
We can do this by observing the thinking,
By unhooking our attention from the thinking and gently and kindly redirecting our attention to the breath.
Just this breath.
It can be helpful to practice this by using a breath counting technique where we focus just on the exhalation.
Let's count 10 exhalations together allowing the inhalations to take care of themselves.
On your next exhalation silently count to yourself 1.
Allow the inhalation to come and on the next exhalation count 2.
Continue this way on your own all the way up until 10.
If you get to 10 or lose count simply start again at 1.
If you would like to gently letting go of the counting wherever you are now and simply following the breath with your open and curious attention.
Following the rise and fall of the natural breath.
Our breath is a useful anchor for our mindfulness practice as it is only ever happening in the present moment and therefore it can help us to become present and aware of where we are at any given time in our lives.
Outside of our meditation practice and in our daily life our breath can be our island of sanity as we go about our day.
One full breath can help us to shift from react to respond and support us to live all of our moments with a greater degree of clarity calm and connection.
So as this formal practice comes to an end I'll invite you to sense once again back into the body allowing the attention to rest at the top of the head and then trickle down over the whole body like warm water until your attention is resting once again with the feet on the floor.
In a moment you'll hear the sound of the bell to complete the practice.
I'll invite you to keep your eyes closed until you can no longer hear the ringing and then you can slowly open your eyes and transition consciously back into your day where you can choose to live mindfully.
