This simple but powerful mindfulness of breath meditation helps you disengage from the endless cycle of automatic thoughts and emotions that trap you in overthinking and reactivity. It allows you to anchor your attention in the present moment upon your breath. This frees you from stress, rumination, reactivity, and distraction, enabling you to enter a more resourceful, focused, and spiritually receptive state.
The mindfulness of breath meditation is a key foundational technique for increasing mindfulness, strengthening your centre, and opening to spiritual awareness. If you practise it daily over a number of weeks, it will rewire your brain, making you more mindful and more able to enter a metacognitive state that provides greater freedom, empowerment, and the space to connect with and explore your true self.
Using the Mindfulness of Breath Meditation to Disengage from Overthinking
Have you ever found yourself getting on with everyday activities only to realise that you’ve spent all your time caught up in never-ending spirals of overthinking and reactivity, without actually being present to those activities, perhaps missing all the blessings that could have accompanied those activities? And have you ever caught yourself snapping at others because of the stressful thoughts in your head that have nothing to do with the people you are irritable with?
We can all fall prey to the mind’s tendency to trap us in reactive thoughts that hijack our attention. It can diminish our presence, clarity of awareness, and sense of empowerment. Mindfulness—the practice of consciously directing your attention in the present moment without reactivity or judgement—is the key to reducing this tendency. Mindfulness helps you disengage from the events of the mind that hijack your attention. By doing so, it promotes greater presence, awareness, and empowerment within you.
The Mindfulness of Breath Meditation is Universally Used
The mindfulness of breath meditation is perhaps the most universal basic meditation used by beginners and experienced meditators alike. It uses the breath as the anchor for present-moment attention, facilitating a metacognitive state. The mindfulness of breath meditation is the core practice in most mindfulness training courses and serves as an essential component of mindfulness-based stress reduction (Kabat-Zinn, 1990), mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (Segal, Williams, and Teasdale, 2002), and my own mindfulness-based self-development.
The Mindfulness of Breath Meditation Can Facilitate Self-Development
The mindfulness of breath meditation not only equips you to be more mindful and less reactive but, with the right strategy, can also prepare you for integrating your life around your centre, where you exist as observer in a space of pure being and awareness. In this sense, this mindfulness of breath meditation, when used within the context of your self-development, can go beyond conventional mindfulness meditations that are just devoted to coming back to the present moment and entering a calm space.
At the centre of us all is a state of consciousness not often talked about and frequently overlooked. It is the key to your authentic self-development and spiritual self-realisation. Think about it. Who are you deep down? Who are you beyond your makeshift personality and automatic thinking? Who are you beyond your arbitrary identifications? Who are you in your centre? This mindfulness of breath meditation is your first powerful step to answering these questions!
How to Practise the Mindfulness of Breath Meditation
To practise the mindfulness of breath meditation, focus your attention on your breath in the present moment as you breathe in and out. Just allow yourself to be with the breath, giving it your full attention as you follow it for its whole duration. If you find that your attention is distracted by your thoughts or emotions, notice this and gently bring it back to your breath without judgement. Start to experience the space of pure awareness and being as you breathe from the centre of your being. Here you are a centre of pure awareness and being. Allow yourself to be more present here as you breathe in and out, keeping your attention on your breath.
You may like to practise this meditation using the audio recording below.
Next Step: for help using mindfulness and metacognitive states to develop yourself and journey to greater health, happiness and spiritual empowerment, make a call to awakening within yourself, and book an empowering Guidance Call with me.
References
Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. Delacorte Press.
Segal, Z., Williams, M., & Teasdale, J. (2002). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy for depression: A new approach to preventing relapse. Guilford Publications.
Teasdale, J. D. (1999). Metacognition, mindfulness and the modification of mood disorders. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy, 6(2), 146-155. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0879(199905)6:2%3C146::AID-CPP195%3E3.0.CO;2-E
