Mindfulness: a three-step breathing space

Following on from our previous blog about Mindfulness on the go, this is a blog post dedicated to one of the ‘formal’ mindfulness exercises that I personally find the most useful.

It can also be used briefly (traditionally it was called the ‘three-minute breathing space’), so it is a good one to have up your sleeve to use in those brief moments before you go into a stressful meeting, or when you notice you have been rushing around for days and are feeling tense.

It’s a great way to re-calibrate and re-direct attention back into the present moment.

What are the three stages?

STEP ONE – AWARENESS OF WHAT IS

The aim for this initial step is to simply ask yourself ‘what is my experience right now?’. Noting your experience of how you are in this moment (what your thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations are doing). It is important to note, that there is no need to change or alter your experience in anyway. Simply observe what you are experiencing in this moment with a non-judgemental attitude.

STEP TWO – GATHERING THE BREATH

Step two is about gathering and redirecting attention to the physical sensations of the breath in the body. You might want to pick a part of the breathing process where you feel the breath most vividly to focus on (like the pause between the in breath and the outbreath, or the sensation of the air as it passes through your nostrils.

The breath is there to anchor you into the present moment. If (/when!) the mind wonders, just gently redirect it to the sensations of breathing (without judging yourself!)

STEP THREE – EXPANDING AWARENESS TO THE BODY

In the third step, we widen the attention again to include the body as a whole, noticing any sensation that are present. Bringing awareness to posture, facial expressions, areas of tension/discomfort. Use the breath to breathe into these areas with a sense of softening and releasing on the outbreath.

Each step of the Three-Minute Breathing Space can be roughly one minute in length. If you want it to be longer that is of course fine!

Tips on how to remember the three-step breathing space

It can be helpful to think of the image of an hourglass in terms of the structure of the three steps. Step one is a wide focus of attention, step two narrows that focus of attention in by attending only to the breath, and step three expands awareness out again to the whole-body breathing.
Hopefully these tips will allow you to try this practice out while you are out and about as well.