Practice Circle: Three Minute Breathing Space

Several of us in the SBA are participating in the Mindfulness Summit, a free online program of interviews with leaders in contemplative practice. You can learn more about it in my interview with Melli O’Brien, the founder of the program, also known as Mrs. Mindfulness.

The first of those interviews was with Professor Mark Williams of the Oxford Mindfulness Centre, who led a brief Three Minute Breathing Space meditation. Mark is a wonderful speaker, you can watch him deliver a lecture on the science of mindfulness:

The Three Minute Breathing Space is a meditation developed that is extremely versatile, as it is accessible and beneficial to the novice and experienced meditator alike. Also called the Three Step Breathing Space, the meditation comes in three parts:

1. Become Aware — lightly checking in with inner experience of thoughts, emotions, and sensations.
2. Gather and Focus — narrowing attention to one spot on the body, typically the anapanasati spot, or place you feel the sensation of breathing the most vividly.
3. Expand — expanding awareness to encompass a felt sense of the entire body, gently aware of each breath.

This can be done over the course of several minutes as the name implies, but can also be practiced over a longer formal meditation, or only in a matter of moments informally during waking hours. Three Step Breathing Space is a handy way to refresh attending to the present moment experience, exercising mindful awareness of subtle transitions and inter-related influences on how we present in the world. This is done more by exercising awareness in several ways, not just bringing it to bear and keeping it in place, but by also warming it up, moving it, and shaping it through the various phases of the practice.

This Sunday, October 25th, 2015, Practice Circle will gather to practice working with attention in the Three Minute Breathing Space. If you’d like to join us, you can find out more here.