The Breathing Space is a three-minute meditation that can be used to bring more mindfulness to your normal daily activities.
There are three steps to the Breathing Space:
1. Awareness
Deliberately adopt an erect and dignified posture. Close your eyes. Ask yourself: “What is happening around me? What thoughts am I experiencing? What feelings? What bodily sensations?”
2. Gathering
Gently narrow your attention to your breathing. Observe each in-breath and each out-breath. Use your breath as an anchor, to bring you into and hold you in the present moment.
3. Expanding
Now expand your attention from you breathing back out to include a sense of your body as a whole, your posture, your facial expression. Slowly and gently expand your awareness to include thoughts, emotions, and what is happening in the world around you.
It can be very helpful to practice the Breathing Space three times a day, at scheduled times. Because it is so short, it can be done nearly anywhere, making this is an achievable goal.
The Breathing Space can be extremely helpful in times of stress for bringing awareness back to the present moment, to avoid responding to challenges in automatic, self-defeating ways.
