The Mindfulness of Breath Meditation is a simple yet powerful practice that helps you disengage from the cycle of automatic thoughts and emotions that lead to overthinking and reactivity, preventing you from being fully present in your life and diminishing your overall wellness.
By anchoring your attention on the breath, this meditation allows you to step out of the mental patterns that create stress, rumination, reactivity, and distraction, creating space for a more focused, present, and resourceful state of mind that supports your overall wellness.
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 can begin to change the brain, making you more mindful and better able to enter a Metacognitive State. Metacognition allows you to respond more consciously and non-reactively to events and develop a strong centre to connect with your True Self.
Using the Mindfulness of Breath Meditation to Disengage from Overthinking
Have you ever found yourself going through the motions of daily life only to realise that you have spent all your time caught up in never-ending spirals of overthinking and reactivity, without actually being present to 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 all fall into this trap at times, where reactive thoughts hijack our attention. It can diminish our presence, clarity of awareness, and sense of control over our responses.
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, helping facilitate a metacognitive state. The mindfulness of breath meditation is the core practice in many mindfulness training courses and 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 Help Facilitate Spiritual 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 spiritual development, can go beyond conventional mindfulness meditations that are just devoted to coming back to the present moment and entering a calm space.
This centre is the key to your spiritual development and self-realisation. Think about it. Who Are You Deep Down? Who are you beyond your personality and automatic thoughts? 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 and embarking on a path of Spiritual Awakening.
How to Practise the Mindfulness of Breath Meditation
To practise the mindfulness of breath meditation, follow these steps:
- Focus your attention on your breath in the present moment as you breathe in and out.
- Allow yourself to be with the breath, giving it your full attention as you follow it for its whole duration.
- If your attention is distracted by your thoughts or emotions, notice this and gently bring it back to your breath without judgement.
- Open to experiencing pure awareness and being as you breathe from the centre of your being.
- Allow yourself to be more present in this centre of pure awareness and being as you breathe in and out.
- In this space, start to explore your true spiritual self.
- When you are ready, return from your meditation and notice how differently you feel when you are more centred.
You may like to practise this meditation using the audio recording below.
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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
