This is a quick and easy exercise to do during your day. It has two benefits:
1. It helps punctuate your day and with practice it becomes more automatic.
2. It’s useful under pressure when life feels overwhelming.
Here are the three steps:
Become Aware
What thoughts are going through your mind?
What feelings are present?
What body sensations are here right now?
Gather and Focus Your Attention
Then direct all your focus and attention on to the breath, becoming aware of all the sensations of breathing. Staying with the in-breath for as long as possible and then with the out-breath, as if riding the waves of your own breathing. Using the breath to bring you into the present moment.
Expand Your Attention
Now expand your awareness to include all your physical sensations. Become aware of any sensations of discomfort, tension, or straining and breathe into these areas, to help you accept them and stay with them instead of trying to push or change them. These sensations have a trajectory of their own and with practice you can learn to stay with them as long as required.
Notice how the exercise follows an hourglass pattern where you start with an:
Expanded Awareness
followed by a
Focused
Attention
and back into an
Expanded Awareness
This is why the practice requires both the ability to focus (concentration exercises) and the ability to be self-aware (insight exercises).
* Adapted from Mindfulness: Finding Peace in Frantic World ,Website for the Book, by danny, July 28, 2011