A shared practice
Breathing, 10 Minutes
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Created bySean Fargo
From Sean's breathing collection — recorded in his own voice.
In Sean Fargo’s own voice10 min
Read along — the full script
Hi, I'm Sean Fargo. Mindfulness is simply the act of bringing awareness to our present moment experience without judgment. It's about bringing kind curiosity to our physical movements, to our thoughts, feelings, our intentions, and everything else that we experience right now.
It's not about belief or dogma. It's not about religion. It's simply the practice of being present for our experience. I'm glad to be able to share some mindfulness exercises with you that may help you relate to your life and your finances in an optimal way.
These mindfulness practices also have a wide range of health benefits, both in the body and the mind. The more we practice, the more the benefits will come to us. Science shows that even just practicing three days a week, ten minutes a day, is enough to institute change in our daily lives, to decrease stress and anxiety, to help us create a space between stimulus and response, between external experience and our reaction to it.
By increasing that space, we're able to choose our response, to choose a healthy response that best suits the situation. Mindfulness is about paying attention, to noticing what's really going on, and making the best decision possible without a sense of reactivity. One of the classic mindfulness practices is mindfulness of breathing, the practice of simply feeling the sensations of each inhale and each exhale without judging right or wrong, good or bad.
If you're in a safe space right now, and if you have a few minutes to practice, I invite you to put both feet flat on the ground, to sit upright, or to stand upright in a comfortable, relaxed position. Bring alertness to your body. Sensing into your body as you stand or sit.
Softening the belly. Dropping the shoulders. And loosen the muscles of your face and jaw. It can be helpful to sense into the weight of your body as it touches the chair or the ground. Sensing into the pull of gravity as you feel pressure on the bottoms of your feet or your sit bones.
And I invite you to take a deep breath in through the nose and out through the mouth. Deep breath with a soft belly. And just relaxing the body. Bringing your full awareness to each breath, to your inhale and exhale. Breathing in and out.
And with a relaxed belly, noticing your stomach rising and falling with each breath. Rising with each inhale and falling with each exhale. And just noticing what that feels like in the body. Your belly rising and falling with each breath moment by moment.
So we're bringing a kind sense of awareness to our breathing. If you'd like, you can notice your breath moving in and out through your nostrils, feeling the air go in and out of your nostrils. Perhaps noticing the temperature difference between the inhale and the exhale.
Maybe it's cooler on the inhale and the air is warmer on the exhale. Just simply noticing what it feels like to be breathing right now through the nose. And when the mind wanders, which it will, it's totally fine. No need to judge yourself as a bad meditator.
No need to think that you're doing this incorrectly. So with a sense of kind acknowledgement, we can choose to bring our awareness back to our breathing, whether it's in our nose or sensing the belly. Bring a sense of kindness as we choose to bring our awareness back to the act of breathing again, to each inhale and exhale, moment by moment.
Just noticing what it feels like with each breath. Wonderful. Great work. You've done a mindfulness of breathing exercise, which as you can see is very simple, but not always easy. I encourage you to try this from time to time throughout your day, because we're always breathing, but we don't always pay much attention to it.
This is a very helpful exercise to calm the body, calm the nervous system. And the longer you're able to stay with it, the stronger sense of clarity and connection arises with the moment, often leaving people with a sense of peace, warmth, and happiness. Thank you for doing this exercise with me today.
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