A Good Practice Option That Leads to Many Others
How mindful awareness of breathing equips you to design other attention exercises.
Noticing your breath is not the only way to develop mindful awareness.
Here are four attributes that make the breathing cycle a popular focus option. They provide clues about exploring the liberating versatility of mindfulness practice by applying them to other sensations and perceptions.
1) Readily available in the background
Deciding to observe real-time sensations or perceptions closely is the essence of mindful awareness practice.
What makes the breath such a powerful focus builder is that it functions effectively without your conscious interference. Your body can manage this process perfectly without you needing to micromanage it.
Anything in the periphery of your awareness can be invited to take center stage temporarily.
sights
sounds
flavors and fragrances
other body sensations not directly related to breathing
2) Plenty of movement to play with
When we try to observe specific perceptions, our attention gets easily drawn to making sense of them. It’s incredible how quickly we find ourselves caught up in thinking, remembering, predicting, and evaluating rather than focusing on the raw sensory data we’re trying to focus on.
Luckily, dynamic perceptions tend to capture our attention more effectively than those that remain unchanged while we attend to them. Noticing the touch of clothing on your skin is subtle; worrying about the worst-case scenarios is not.
The dynamic segments of the breathing cycle are always present, but being on the lookout for other changing perceptions can be a surprisingly enlivening activity.
Hearing the sound of the next car or airplane that passes.
Watching your dog or cat breathe while it sleeps.
Tasting flavors appear and fade as you eat.
Watching tree branches sway in the breeze.
Feeling physical relaxation appear or spread.
Noticing an emotional feeling get stronger or weaker.
Letting yourself be fascinated by naturally occurring movement is a great way to make cultivating mindful habits more enjoyable and sustainable.
3) A series of brief opportunities
Most mindfulness exercises involve collecting repetitions of direct awareness. Even when you intentionally deepen or extend them, inhaling and exhaling only lasts a few seconds, which makes them the ideal duration for sustaining attention.
Formal practice, often referred to as meditation, involves stringing together as many repetitions as possible for a set period of time. Informal mindfulness can be integrated into everyday activities by sneaking in one or a few repetitions.
Formal practice is akin to spending time working out at the gym, while informal efforts resemble taking steps whenever possible throughout the day. Both are built on all the brief actions you take to strengthen your attentional fitness over time.
Some tasks are suitable for exploring both.
Listen to ambient sounds while you warm something up in the microwave.
Savor the aroma of your coffee as you brew and drink it.
Notice sounds and smells for the time it takes to chop vegetables or knead bread.
Notice sounds and emotional feelings for the length of a musical phrase, a whole song, or an entire album.
Bring some of your attention to body sensations while you read a paragraph, page, or chapter.
Explore the frustration in your body as you wait for podcast commercials to end, the dog to stop barking, or an itch to subside.
Taste one or more bites of a snack or throughout a meal.
4) A soothing rhythm
All focused awareness exercises depend on an underlying rhythm. The breath can serve as a non-mechanical metronome to help you navigate time effectively, but it's not the only way.
If you're sitting still or lying down, you might mark time by counting your heartbeats. If you're walking, you can count footsteps. You can also maintain your own steady pace internally, observing one body sensation at a time while counting mentally. You might even be able to find a natural pace without needing to count.
With all of these options, you'll want to experiment to find the number of pulses or steps that equal a manageable duration challenge. If repetitions are too short, you might feel agitated. If they're too long, you'll find your attention wandering into mental storytelling and losing track of the exercise. You can use the duration of the breathing cycle to help calibrate your pace without tying it directly to the breath.
Observing the breath is a great way to ground your mindfulness practice in the body, but some people report that it can induce anxious feelings.
The most effective attention exercises are the ones you practice consistently, so give yourself permission to experiment and find what works best for you. Letting your natural breathing rhythm inform your exploration can help you engage more fully with your other senses, inviting greater awareness into your life.