A note from Sean Fargo
Founder, Mindfulness Exercises · Former Buddhist monk · Mindfulness Teacher for Google, Tesla, Red Cross & the EPA
When I was teaching meditation at a healthcare company, it occurred to me that it would be nice to have a script. I mentioned the idea to a senior teacher who had taken me under his wing after I left the monastery, and he said that's not really how it works. Maybe not. But I wrote a few for myself anyway, and they were useful. Years later I thought: what if we made a bunch and shared them?
That's what this page is. Every script here is free. Read them for your own practice, or use them with the people you work with.
How to use a guided meditation script
My own preference is that you don't read these word for word. People can usually tell. The spirit of a script is a general framework. You find your own words inside it.
What I'd suggest instead: read the script a few times, slowly, and feel into it as much as you can. Then write down the bullet points the way you understand the flow, in language that fits your style and your intuition. Change the pacing, change the images, and relate it to the specific people in your room, whoever they turn out to be. The script is there so you don't have to remember exact language, because trying to get the words exactly right tends to make us nervous, and people feel that too.
Scripts for your own practice
You don't have to be a teacher to use these. Reading a script slowly to yourself, pausing where it pauses, works fine without a recording. You set the pace. You can stop after three breaths or stay for twenty minutes.
If you're new to this, start small. Not a 200-pound barbell on the first day. Here's a five-pound weight: three mindful breaths, or a five-minute practice.
Free scripts for mindfulness teachers
Many people use these scripts with someone else: a client, a yoga class, a classroom, a team at work, a partner at home, or a recording. The scripts work in all of those places.
The way I sense into guiding a meditation, it's more about standing alongside people than in front of them. If I say "sensing into the belly as we breathe," I'm doing that too. Maybe eighty percent of the time I'm practicing right along with the room.
The other thing I try to remember is that this isn't about us. It isn't even about mindfulness, really. It's about people's struggles, people's pain, people's challenges. We're not here to fix anyone or convince anyone of anything. We're here to offer a few things that may be helpful, and a script is one of them.
A few things I've learned about guiding others
- Pick for the people in front of you. A room of healthcare workers between shifts and a Saturday retreat want different scripts. When in doubt, a simple breathing script.
- Read it several times before you lead it. Notice where you want more silence and what you'd say differently. After a few reads it starts to sound like you.
- Speak from the heart, not the head. If we speak from an analytical place, people feel it. One of the main reasons we guide meditation at all is to help people find the courage to open to their experience without judgment, and there's a lot of heart in that.
- Ground, then open, then wish well. I tend to start by grounding into the body, open up to the breath or whatever the core focus is, segue into wishing ourselves and others well, and re-ground at the end. Most scripts here follow some version of that shape.
- Don't rush the silence. Extended periods of silence are not dangerous. They're not anything to be afraid of. They can be quite beautiful, and they give people room to unwind and learn how to just be. If nerves come up while you wait, Tara Brach's phrase helps me: tend and befriend. You don't have to like the nervousness. Just let it be here.
More free resources
If you want something to hand people before or after a practice, our free mindfulness worksheets are the usual pairing. If you prefer imagery, there's a separate collection of visualization scripts. And if you'd like to hear how a guided meditation sounds before you lead one, the free guided meditations in our library are a good place to start.
For whatever it's worth, we also run a Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification for people who want to go deeper into guiding others. The scripts here are yours either way.
