When you bring mindfulness to the breath, do you include your whole body and all your senses? Mindfulness of breathing can involve more than the thinking that happens in the head.
In this guided meditation, Sean Fargo, founder of Mindfulness Exercises, invites us to observe our breathing using the body itself. This way of embodying awareness connects us to the here and now.
Please listen in a safe, quiet place where you can be relatively free from distraction. Practice with eyes opened or closed, in a posture that balances comfort with alertness. May this meditation be of benefit to you in your practice.
Sponsored by the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification MindfulnessExercises.com/Certification
We’re accustomed to navigating the world with our heads, thinking our way through life. When we’re only in our heads, we miss what the rest of our senses have to offer. On this view, by the time information reaches the brain, it may already have gathered bias, judgment or story. So, how do we know that it’s true?
Practicing mindfulness meditation encourages us to incorporate the body and all the senses for a more direct experience of our world. Sensing our world through the body, or embodying awareness, is a way to stay grounded and present.
Mindfulness and meditation instructors often speak of embodying awareness, but it’s not always clear what that means. To be embodied is to experience the world through the body itself, and not just the brain. Some teachers hold that the mind is not just in the head, and that the body as a whole has an intelligence that extends throughout our physical form, including the heart.
This meditation introduces multiple methods that can help us become more embodied. As we settle into the practice, we’re invited to wiggle, to play with small side-to-side movements. This engages proprioception, awareness of where the body is in space.
Sean then guides us from proprioception to interoception, awareness of what’s happening inside the body. To turn our attention inward, we follow the breath. Observing our breath as it moves through the body can strengthen interoceptive awareness, especially if we ‘observe’ not with the eyes or the brain, but with the whole body itself.
By opening to sensation in the body, and allowing our experience to unfold as it wants to, we may notice how disconnected we can be when our experience is obscured by thoughts, emotions and our past history.
In this approach, embodiment is the foundation of mindfulness and a way into genuine presence.
Learn more about embodied awareness, including how to practice and teach it, with these additional free mindfulness resources:
- Guided Meditation Script: Notice and Accept Your Body in the Present Moment
- Guided Meditation Script: Whole Body Breathing Meditation
- Mindfulness Worksheet: Grounding through Body Awareness
- Podcast: Sean Fargo on The Power of Breath Awareness
- Podcast: Connecting With Emotions Through the Body, with Sean Fargo
- Podcast: Appreciating a Moment of Body Awareness, A Meditation with Sean Fargo
- Podcast: Tending to the Body, A Meditation with Sean Fargo
- Podcast: Anchoring In Breath And Body: Meditation With Sean Fargo
- Podcast: Why Sean Fargo Recommends Mindfulness of Breathing
- Video: Embodying Stillness with Eckhart Tolle
- Video: What Does It Mean to Be Embodied During Meditation
- Video: What Does It Mean to Be Embodied?
- Video: Fully Embodied Presence, Guided Meditation With Sean Fargo
About Sean Fargo:
Sean Fargo is a former Buddhist monk who founded Mindfulness Exercises and leads the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification.
