3-Minute Breathing Space

This 3-minute mindfulness practice is about helping us gently exit from our auto-pilot mode and unstuck ourselves from our current challenging situation, whatever it may be, by bringing our attention to our breathing and our body.

It provides a structure for noting, grounding, and allowing in the middle of a challenging situation or whenever automatic pilot took over in our daily lives.  Due to our multitasking, or automatic routines, mostly our attention is not really available to us, and it’s not really being guided or directed by our intentionality.

Research indicates that most people enjoy this practice and find it very useful in many areas of life including relationships, business environment, leadership, education, etc., let alone improving our mental health. This is the kind of exercise you can do quickly in between the many other things in your busy day in three simple steps. The important thing is that if you do find it helpful too, you can just continue to practice it and figure out, maybe from the inside, how it continues to bring value and grounding in your own life.

To make us better comprehend this practice, an “Hourglass” metaphor is commonly used for instructions. This metaphor describes the movement of our attention, that is, our attention moves on a wide scale at the beginning, narrow in the middle and wide again at the end.

When John Teasdale, Mark Williams and Zindel Segal designed this practice as part of their 8-Week Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy program, they indented to create a sort of choreography of awareness that emphasized shifting attention, checking in, and moving on.

So, to begin, you adjust your posture to be sitting or standing in an alert manner. You may like to close your eyes or lower them, gently gazing on the floor ahead of you.

1.    The first step is the wide part and it is essentially your life at the beginning of this exercise. Here, you bring your attention to your experience in a wider and more open manner without any judgement or evaluating, but simply observing, like a scientist, your thoughts, feelings or sensations in the body which is always in the present moment. See if you can watch them from one moment to the next. In other words, we are attending our own experience, noting it, but without the need to change what is being observed. You simply hold and hang out there for about a minute. Basically, use this one minute to observe how things are inside you right now: Your thoughts, your body, your feelings and your mood. Only observe; do not change anything.

Any judgments? What thoughts are residing in your mind? Any feelings, emotions? What body sensations can you observe? Challenge the urge to make a judgment or assessment. Just allow whatever is there.

2.    In the second step, you gently let go of that wider sense of observing and to have a more concentrated, centered and narrower focus on breathing in one region of our bodies: Our breath. Where can you feel your breathing most clearly? Belly, the chest, or the nostrils, where ever you feel your breath more predominant. Here, we narrow the field of attention to a single, pointed focus on the breath in the body. Noticing the breath – all the way in and all the way out. With each new cycle, follow the breath completely in and completely out. It helps to anchor your awareness into your body and thus present moment. Maybe your anchor point is the movement in the chest as the chest expands and as it relaxes.

If the mind wanders, without judgment or criticism of yourself, bring your attention back to the breath, noticing the in-breath and the out-breath. Focus your attention on that spot for a minute.

3.    In the third step, you slowly expand your attention by allowing your breathing to go through your whole body. In other words, you attend to your body. You come into your body as a whole and any sensations that are present. This is again the wider and spacious container of attention for your experience. 

You allow the attention to expand from the breath to the body. Gently scan your awareness without judgment or expectation from the crown at the top of the head, down the face, the torso, arms, legs, right down to the surface of the feet, including the surface of the skin. Notice any sensations in order of the scan.  Resist jumping ahead or back at sensations that are capturing your attention like tingling or pain. Again, resist judging if you like or don’t like.  Notice and accept that they are the sensations you feel at this very moment.

When finishing the last part of the practice, you notice the area where you are sitting and the space around you, take it in with all your senses. Slowly become aware of the sounds in your environment and the air on your body. Notice the light around you and bring this sense of spaciousness in to the rest of the day.

At the end of the three minutes, when you open your eyes and continue with your life, you often feel different: more relaxed and alert, for example. Simply sitting down and allowing your attention to move in these different ways can be quite beneficial throughout the day.