Seven ways to practise mindfulness of breathing

1. Focus on your out-breath
 As you breathe, give your main attention to your out-breath. Sometimes it feels as though the breath is going right down through your feet and into the floor. The out-breath tends to be particularly calming.

2. Find your anchor point
 This is the point at which you are most aware of your breathing – typically your nostrils, chest, tummy, throat. Bringing your attention to the anchor point can return you to mindfulness straight away. If you don't have a particular anchor point, you can establish one by, for instance, focusing for a while on the sensation of the breath at the tip of your nose.

3. Count each cycle of breathing
 Count your first in-breath and out-breath as one, the next as two, the next as three and so on up to seven. When you get to seven return to one again. If you become distracted and lose your place, return to one and start again.

4. Observe without managing
 Observe your breathing without trying to change it in any way. This is actually almost impossible to do but making the attempt means you really have to pay attention.

5. Visualise
 Imagine you're standing on a beach in your bare feet. The water is coming in very slowly, touching your toes, and then going out slowly again. Try to match the water coming in with your in-breath, then a pause, then the water going out with your out-breath.

6. Cool in, warm out
 As you breathe, notice that the air is cooler as you breathe than when you breathe out. Keep returning your attention to this change in temperature.

7. 5/7 breathing
 Make each in-breath last for a count of 5 and each out-breath for a count of seven.  A variation is to breathe in to a count of 7 and out to a count of 11. If you find that too much, use 5/7 instead.

You'll find a Mindfulness of Breathing audio at the link below:

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Drop the drama - using mindful acceptance to replace exaggerated emotional reactions

Mindful acceptance of situations means dropping the exaggerations and drama we generate almost by reflex. This allows us to deal with the reality of the situation which, usually, is easier to handle when we don't exaggerate.

So let's say you're waiting for the bus on a rainy night. The bus sails by without stopping. This is outrageous, you tell yourself, I have been treated with complete contempt. Actually, it's very, very annoying and inconvenient but it isn't outrageous. And you have been treated carelessly and not with "complete contempt." We are also tempted to use words like "outrageous" when we are kept waiting in a queue at a call centre. Once again, what's happening is annoying and frustrating but hardly outrageous.

Mindful acceptance means you pause, silence the drama in your head and connect with the reality of situations. To help you with this, you can bring your awareness back to your breath or  to your body, for instance to your feet.  In other words return to awareness and invite your mind to remain silent for a while.

We tend to exaggerate our emotions almost by reflex and helping us to step out of our exaggerations is one of the ways in which the practice of mindfulness safeguards our emotional wellbeing.

This and other aspects of mindfulness will feature in my 6-week Mindful Living course in Dublin this spring and also in my online Mindfulness without Meditation mindfulness course in February.

It's well worth your while to work with acceptance which is at least as important, as a mindfulness practice, as "being in the now". 

From awareness to thoughts and back again

Sometimes you "know" thing for a long time before it finally clicks. For me, the thing I knew is that in mindfulness practice we learn to distinguish, as we go, between awareness and our thoughts about what we are aware of - then we continually move out of our thoughts and back to awareness.

Let's say I am aware that a dog is mooching along the street. As soon as I become aware my thoughts start up. These can include memories of dogs I have owned, wondering where the owner of the dog is, an opinion that people who have fierce dogs ought to muzzle them in public as the law requires, and so on. If I practice mindfulness, then when I spot these thoughts buzzing around like flies  I  return to awareness which is simply awareness of the dog.

So you begin with awareness, move automatically into thoughts and then move deliberately back to awareness again. You would be surprised at how much unnecessary stress this simple practice can remove from your life. Yesterday I drove to the wrong terminal at Dublin airport. The error would mean leaving the airport and coming back again to get to the right terminal.  While staying with the awareness of what had happened and of what I needed to do next, I was able to spend only microseconds in thoughts about how inconvenient it was, how unfair it was, blah blah. Even when I discovered along the way, but too late, that I could still have got to the correct terminal without leaving the airport, I was able to stay with the awareness of that, including awareness of the fact that I didn't like having missed that particular turnoff. But I stayed out of the storm of thoughts that my mind wanted to kick off so badly it was practically jumping up and down. I was quite surprised by the complete absence of stress in the whole experience thanks to that simple mindfulness practice.

So the method is awareness, realising that you have moved from awareness into thoughts and then returning to awareness again. You could think of it as awareness-thoughts-awareness. Or ATA.

 As I said, this is something I always knew or at least always knew since I began to practice mindfulness a long time ago but it really clicked for me when I read about the distinction between awareness and thoughts in Dan Harris's book 10% Happier,  a witty and very useful look at his journey into mindfulness and Buddhism.

Mindful walking from The Irish Times

Journalist Anna Carey quoted me in her New Year's Eve article on walking in The Irish Times. The article disappears behind a paywall in a few months' time but it's well worth a read meanwhile. Here are the two paragraphs on mindful walking:

Walking is also a good way of practising mindfulness, which has been shown to have a positive effect on mental health. “Mindful walking means bringing your attention back to your walking as you go along,” says Padraig O’Morain, whose book Mindfulness on the Go will be out in May. “Mindfulness really can be seen as returning your attention again and again from the wandering mind to the present moment. Mindful walking is one way of doing that. If you’re a person who enjoys walking along and thinking about everything and anything, that’s fine. Just try to give the first 10 minutes or so to walking with awareness.”

Walking, says O’Morain, “is very conducive to practising mindfulness – if you are a person who finds it difficult to sit and be mindful of your breathing, for instance. But it’s also a really good mindfulness practice if you’re feeling agitated. I think the rhythm of walking is helpful. Also when you’re walking mindfully you can, if you prefer, try to be aware of movement in your field of vision. This could be birds in the sky, cars on the road, ripples in the river. Or you could be aware of the feeling of the breeze against your face or hands.”

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A mindful approach to regret

’No regrets’ may be a fine name for a song but it won’t work in real life. To live is to accumulate regrets. What gives regrets their sharp edges is the belief that we could have made things work out differently if we had made different choices and it’s too late now. If I had made this choice I could have spared that person some pain; if I had made another choice I could have brought myself more happiness; if I had thought to say ‘No’ or ‘Yes” back then, everything would have been different and so on and on.

Since regrets are inevitable, how can mindfulness help us to deal with them in our lives? First, we accept the pain we have to accept; second we drop the tendency to re-experience the pain; third, we accept that regret is a fact of everybody’s life.

Regret is made up of physical sensations, memories, recurring thoughts (“how could I have been so foolish, blind etc.”)  and fantasies (what might have been). When I take a mindful approach I am willing to experience the physical sensations (for instance a tightening of the stomach, a shortening of the breath) but I allow the memories recurring thoughts and fantasies to pass by. They may arise but I don’t follow them, I return to that physical sensation and allow them to pass.

Think of the old Buddhist metaphor of the two arrows. If you were struck by an arrow you would be in pain, no doubt about it. But if you dwell on that experience by going over and over it in your memory or by entertaining revenge fantasies for years afterwards, then you are shooting a second arrow into yourself.

That sudden awareness of regret, that comes now and then - maybe very often - is the first arrow. Wallowing in memories, fantasies and recurring thoughts about the regret is the suffering we add on.

Finding your anchor point

If you practice noticing your breathing for a few minutes at a time you will also notice that you are particularly aware of the breath at a particular place in your body. Typical points of awareness are the tip of your nostrils,  just inside your nostrils, in your chest, your diaphragm (between rib-cage and tummy) or your tummy.

When you find this place you can think of it as an anchor point that can "anchor" you to awareness for short periods of time. If your attention is a boat drifting on the water or  tossed around by the waves, mindfulness can be the anchor that holds you in place. You can get straight into mindfulness by going to your anchor point.  

In a busy office, a crowded street, a noisy kitchen - whatever the circumstances - bringing your awareness to your anchor point will give you a sense of presence of mind, a steadiness, in the swirl of events, emotions and thoughts.

A mindful space doesn't have to be quiet or secluded - the kitchen works fine

Choosing a mindful space in your environment is a really good way to remember to stay aware. What's a space you are in every day? Kitchen? Bathroom? Bedroom? The great thing about a mindful space is that it doesn't have to be secluded and it doesn't matter if you can't light candles or burn incense in there. For most of us, for instance, the kitchen is none of these things but because we are in and out of the kitchen many times a day - including first thing in the morning - it makes a really good mindful place.

How does it work? You simply decide that whenever you're in the kitchen you'll be mindful. You will not be a million miles away in your head. Whatever you are doing, you will do in awareness. Even if you have to work fast to prepare food or to wash up afterwards, you won't work so fast that you cannot be mindful. You will work at a speed that allows you to be aware of what you're doing.

Apart from providing a frequent reminder to be mindful, any space you designate as a mindful place might just end up being tidier and more user friendly. But the main benefit is that the kitchen, in this case, will become the room in which you get relief from the endless spinning of your mind. And if you don't have a separate kitchen maybe you have a kitchen space in your apartment.

But the mindful space doesn't have to be the kitchen. It could be the bathroom. It could be the bedroom. It could be your garden or even your window box.

Whatever your circumstances, just designate an everyday physical space as your mindful place and see how that works for you.

Mindfulness of breathing - guidance from Pema Chödrön

I have been exploring mindfulness of breathing and my search brought me to an article called What is True Mindfulness? on Pema Chödrön' shambala.org website and I thoroughly recommend it to anybody interested in this practice. Here are three instructions from the article and between them they contain what you need to know about mindfulness of breathing:

"The key thing here is, try not to watch the breath, but try feeling it go in and out, so you feel one with the breath. Just see if from the beginning you can minimize that sense of heavy-duty watching it, and just feel the breath going in and out."

"Then start to emphasize the outwardness and the space that the breath goes into, and emphasize that more and more. And then just see if you can let that sense of outwardness and space begin to pervade the whole practice more and more."

"... the other part of our meditation instruction is to label any thoughts we have as thinking and just let go of them and come back to the outbreath. That instruction encourages us to interrupt the constant barrage of talking to ourselves."

(In the first two paragraphs she is reporting the words of Trungpa Rinpoche.)

There are a lot of other good things in the article  which I would recommend to anybody interested in mindfulness to read at this link.