Areas › Your body
Your body
You cannot think your way out of a body that is braced. This area starts there: the breath, the ground under you, moving, eating, resting, and the small physical things that change how the rest of the day lands.
What works for this
Working from the body first
A body that has not slept, eaten or moved has less left over for holding itself steady. Changing the state you are in is often faster than changing the thoughts you are having, and it is more reliable when you are already worn out.
One move, today
A long slow out breath, longer than the in breath, three times. The out breath is the part that does the work.
What matches
32 practicesBefore inviting anyone to turn attention to their body, ask first. How do you feel about trying this now, and would you like to?
The asking is part of the practice, not the preamble to it. Someone whose body was once not theirs to control needs the choice handed back in small…
A long body practice is a teaching version. In real life, take one small piece: just the feet, just the hands, just a minute of noticing.
Long stretches of inward attention can tip into flooding or into drifting off, and neither leaves you better than you started. A minute done often…
You do not have to close your eyes. If keeping them open, soft and lowered, is what lets you stay in the room, that is the better version for you.
Closing your eyes takes away your ability to check the room, and for anyone whose body is used to watching, that costs more than it gives. Make it an…
Try going into the next few minutes without deciding in advance what will happen in them. Curiosity in place of prediction.
A mind used to danger plans constantly, because planning once kept you safe. Sitting somewhere ordinary and letting the next moment be unknown is…
The body answers in sensations, in pictures, in a mood that turns up without explanation. If no words come when you check in, nothing has gone wrong.
People often decide they are bad at this because they went looking for a sentence and found a tight jaw instead. The tight jaw is the answer. Take…
Picture what you feel as weather. A clear morning, a wind picking up, a storm sitting on the far hills. Weather is real, and weather moves.
The useful part is the distance. You are the field, not the storm. And every kind of weather in the picture is on its way somewhere, which quietly…
If something will not shift, pair it with the breath: 'I am' as you breathe in, 'letting go' as you breathe out. Let the out breath be the longer one.
Giving the mind two short phrases to hold occupies it just enough that it stops arguing with the feeling. Meanwhile the long exhale does its own…
Let the uncomfortable thing be uncomfortable, without arguing with it. People are often surprised by the relief that follows.
Much of what makes a bad feeling unbearable is the second layer: the objecting, the wishing it gone, the fear that it means something about you. Drop…
You are allowed to move. Wiggle your toes, rub one arm from shoulder to hand, put a palm on your chest. A body that is doing something is much easier to feel than one held still.
Sitting perfectly still and waiting for sensation is hard work if you are numb, and it often ends with the conclusion that you are broken at this.…
If a few quiet minutes with your body turn up an ache or a tightness you had not noticed before, the practice has not made things worse. It has shown you something that was already there.
This catches a lot of people out. They sit down hoping to feel calmer, meet a knot in the stomach instead, and decide the whole thing is not for…
If you keep falling asleep whenever you sit quietly, take it as news rather than as a failed attempt. Your body is telling you how tired it is.
Welcome the first few times. Being tired enough to drop off the moment nobody needs anything from you is worth knowing about, and the honest response…
If you are moving attention through the body, start at the feet and work up. Leave the throat, the chest and the face until last.
The far edges of the body carry less charge, so they are a gentle place to find your bearings. Include the back, which people tend to skip: attention…
There is a difference between watching your hand and being in your hand. See whether you can move from looking at a part of your body to living inside it.
Observing keeps a small distance, which is useful early on and can quietly become the whole practice. Inhabiting is the further step: filling the…
Sleeping until the middle of the afternoon, day after day, is usually not rest. It is closer to the body shutting down, and it tends to leave you flatter rather than restored.
The tell is how you feel on waking: real rest gives something back, while shutdown leaves the day already gone and you no better for it. Nudging the…
Four steps you can do in ten seconds in the middle of anything: stop, take one breath, look at what is actually happening, then carry on.
It fits inside an argument, a shopping queue, the second before you send a message you will regret. The value is not the breath itself, it is the…
Say it plainly whenever you teach anything: the way I am showing you this is not the way it has to be done. Change it until it works for you.
Anyone who has failed at the standard version of something several times will not try again unless they are told clearly that adapting it is allowed.…
If your attention has no filter, everything in the room arrives at once, and you are tired before the day's actual work begins. That is not laziness, it is a bill coming due.
Two things drain you at the same time: the unfiltered noise itself, and the effort of holding yourself together in spite of it. That is why the…
The benefit of a settling practice is cumulative. A fortnight of it now and then does little; the people who get most out of it are the ones who kept going for years.
This cuts both ways, and both are worth knowing. Two weeks of daily practice with no obvious result is not proof that it will not work for you. And…
Your mind wandering off during meditation is not you failing at it. Noticing that it went, and coming back, is the whole exercise.
People with restless attention often try meditation, find their head full of noise, decide they are uniquely bad at it and never go back. Nobody…
Think of your thoughts as traffic on a road. Practice thins the traffic. It does not close the road, and nobody has ever managed to close it.
This is a more useful target than clearing your mind, because you can tell whether it is happening. Some days it is bumper to bumper and the practice…
Practise with the noise on, at least some of the time. The quiet room is not where you are going to need the skill.
A calm that only exists in a silent house is not much use in an open plan office or a kitchen at teatime. Once you can settle in the quiet, do a…
Once a day, go from head to feet and notice what is there. A good deal of what you find will be plain need: thirsty, hungry, needing the loo, needing to stand up.
When you get absorbed in something these signals go unheard for hours, and then you wonder why you feel dreadful by four o'clock. The scan is dull,…
Brain imaging does show that practice changes something. Be careful with anyone who tells you a great deal more than that.
It genuinely helps to know that sitting and breathing is not nothing, particularly if you have been told your whole life to just try harder. It also…
Five minutes chosen for the state you are actually in beats twenty minutes of open sitting. Pick the one labelled stressed, or cannot sleep, or about to walk into work.
Two things end a practice early: it was longer than the attention you had that day, and you had to decide what to do before you could start. Short…
If you have spent thirty years being told you are careless, lazy or too much, no attention technique will touch that. Kindness practice, aimed at yourself, is the part that does.
It usually feels absurd at first, and slightly embarrassing, which is worth expecting rather than reading as a sign that it is not for you. Start…
In muscle relaxation you are usually told to let go slowly. If slow leaves you fidgeting, let go all at once. The version you will keep doing is the better version.
The standard sequence is to tense a muscle group, hold it, then release gradually, and for some people that long release is unbearable to sit…
If sitting still with your eyes closed has never worked, do it moving. Walking, washing up, gardening: the exercise is the same, and there is something to hold on to.
Sitting meditation asks for the hardest possible version of the task, sustained inward attention with nothing outside to grip. Attach attention to…
Walk somewhere at a deliberately slower pace than normal. Stop now and then to look at something properly, and let your breathing settle into the pace.
Choosing to go slower is itself the exercise, because it is a small piece of holding back that you can actually feel. Ten minutes is plenty. Outdoors…
If your child is learning to settle, learn it alongside them rather than supervising. Parents who practise report less stress of their own and less flying off the handle.
Attention difficulties run in families, so the adult in the room is often working with much the same wiring at the end of a longer day. Practising…
If your imagination runs away with you, use it rather than fight it. Guided imagery gives a vivid mind somewhere to go.
Being able to disappear into a scene is a real ability, even when it has mostly got you into trouble at school and in meetings. A recording that…
If you are going to try a mindfulness course, give it the full eight weeks before deciding. Expect a real but moderate change rather than a different life.
Courses of this length help a good number of people and do very little for others, which is worth knowing at the start so that being in the second…
Attention problems often travel with anxiety or low mood, and those two eat working memory as well. Settling that layer can make everything else look quite different.
If you are anxious most of the day you will lose track of things, forget what you came into the room for and struggle to hold a plan, whether or not…