One-Minute Mindfulness Practice With Fingers Touching

I like to refer to these contemplative practices as active pause as opposed to meditation. There is so much baggage about what meditation is or is not. Putting a different name on it inspires me to have more of an experimental attitude. So today I'm going to describe to you a simple one-minute practice.

Serge Prengel has been exploring creative approaches to mindfulness: how to live with an embodied sense of meaning and purpose.

Transcript

Today I'm going to describe to you a one-minute practice. Now when I say one minute it could be 50 seconds or it could be five minutes. We're not timing it. You sit on a bench or a chair with your feet touching the ground. If you are on a chair your back is not touching the back of the chair. Your hands are in front of you. You touch the fingers to each other so that each finger in one hand is touching the corresponding fingers on the other hand. You rest your arms on your lap with the fingers facing forward and the thumbs facing up. You close your eyes. As you gently breathe you feel the fingers touching each other with a gentle pressure. As you feel this gentle pressure you feel the elbows moving away from each other. You keep gently breathing as you do this. You notice that as you gently push the fingers together and move the elbows away from each other your spine will probably have a tendency to gently straighten up, To gently elongate and you may also notice that your shoulders might have a tendency to gently open up and make more room in your chest. As you stay with this you notice the quality of allowing as opposed to forcing. When it feels right you stop. Often the kinds of things you notice as you're doing this or afterwards are very subtle and that's what a pause does. It's a slowing down and getting into a different rhythm which includes noticing things that we would not necessarily notice when we're not in a pause mode. But we're also talking about noticing and that quality together with the allowing is what makes the pause active. It's not just an interruption it's an active pause. You can do it once a day you can do it many times throughout the day. I'm inviting you to play with it with an attitude of curiosity and to notice what happens moment by moment and over time as you experiment with this practice.

Reviews

Thank you I noticed the sensations and I heard the owls too. Beautiful.

What a cool concept to experiment with!! My first experience with it, I was lying down, feeling the heartbeat thru my fingers. Thank you!!

This will be a simple but lovely practice for me 🙏

This is wonderful 😊 Thank you!