One of the most common concerns for people trying to develop a meditation practice is time. As in, I simply don’t have 10, 15, whatever minutes to sit down and meditate every day. Naturally, it’s a question of commitment; for if you really want to practise meditation, you will make the required time no matter how busy your life.
But here’s an alternative: short moments, many times. Instead of a longer daily sit, a number of brief ones scattered through your day. The three-minute breathing space – a modern mindfulness classic – does the job well.
You sit – or stand, or lie down – and take a minute to observe the fluctuations of your mind, feel whatever sensations are arising in your body, experiencing it all without judgment; then you draw your awareness in to focus on the movements of your breath for a minute; and finally, you allow your awareness to expand out, taking in the whole body, sounds, the space around you… before returning to your affairs.
If you’re interested, try my guided three-minute breathing space meditation here. If it appeals, it’ll only take a handful of tries with guidance before you’re familiar enough with the process to fly solo out there in the wild.
These three minutes can have a powerful effect, helping you to calmly centre yourself in awareness by breaking the spell of flying through your life on autopilot. It’s worth finding opportunities here are there to practise like this: on the tube to work, on a park bench, in a workplace, even if it means sitting in the loo for three minutes…
Those three-minute meditations – short moments, many times – soon add up to a mindfulness practice that could help you find more ease in your life. They might even inspire you eventually to try longer sits; these aren’t for everyone but there’s nothing like spending a good stretch of time observing the fluctuations of your mind to start understanding its nature.
It’s a long-term project, for sure; one, in fact, with no end goal other than some insight into who you really are.
- Martin Yelverton is a mindfulness, yoga and Pilates teacher based in East London, currently offering classes online or one-to-one in person. Details at yogayelvy.com
Bardo Burner 