Making space for you and a little bit of self-kindness
Gentle reflective practices and guided exercises drawn from the books
Please do not use meditations when operating machinery or driving.
Creating a Compassionate Breath Work
This breathing exercise may support a sense of calm and safety.
It’s not unusual for relaxation practices to feel unfamiliar or even awkward at first—especially if they are new to you. With gentle and consistent practice, even just for a few minutes a day, your brain and body may begin to associate this calm space with feelings of comfort and reassurance.
When we are under stress, it can be more difficult to access supportive strategies, especially if they are not yet familiar. Practising calming techniques, such as breathwork, outside of moments of high distress can help increase your ability to use them more effectively when you need them most.
Breathwork can be viewed as a preventative mental wellbeing practice—similar to building a skill like learning an instrument or exercising regularly. Just one or two minutes a day is enough to begin. You do not need to commit to long or intensive meditation sessions.
You might try this practice before getting out of bed, while settling in at night, or during a quiet moment in your day. You can also adapt it for use during everyday activities that do not require your full attention—such as washing the dishes or taking a short walk (please remember not to close your eyes while walking).
Over time, regular use of this simple technique may help you respond to yourself and others with greater self-compassion and emotional steadiness.
Just Being Breathing Meditation
This breathing exercise is designed to gently support your wellbeing through self-compassion. It may be a helpful starting point for grounding and calming yourself, particularly during emotionally difficult moments. You can return to this technique as needed, using it as a simple and unobtrusive way to care for yourself.
Witnessing Breathing Exercise
This centering breathwork exercise is intended to support emotional regulation and self-awareness. By gently observing your breath, you may begin to develop the ability to notice your thoughts and behaviours with more perspective. This can help create a pause before reacting, allowing space to respond with greater clarity rather than being led solely by fear.
Sitting with Pain Meditation
A way out of overthinking could be to sit and feel your feelings. It’s not necessarily pleasant or easy to do, but it could be an opportunity to change the pattern. We can become so adept at dissociating from our feelings and be so out of our body and stuck in the rabbit warren of self-defeatism that we may completely convince ourselves that we do not feel anything and cannot do anything. Or we may just feel so plain terrified of feeling our feelings that we cannot even start the process.
Learning to sit with our feelings, practicing holding them and then releasing them is challenging. But it can be a healing process that may allow us to soften the experience of uncomfortable emotions by letting them be felt and then released. Feelings do lessen, things can change.
Maybe consider taking this exercise to a professional therapist, counsellor, psychologist, or a trusted friend and work through the steps in a safe and supported environment. This is a deep reflective exercise that may not be appropriate to undertake without support, please consider use of this carefully in accordance with your own history and circumstances.
Meeting with Surrender
This exercise is about gently familiarising yourself with the act of conscious surrender by sitting and feeling into your inner world of emotions without any kind of engagement or distraction, leaning into whatever feeling arises for you and holding that until you can feel it lessening. Consider starting with positive emotions, or small challenges, minor irritations or less intense uncomfortable feelings to begin with and see how the exercise feels before progressing to using it for bigger experiences or stronger emotions.
You may choose to do this exercise with a professional therapist or some active support around you, consider your situation and history carefully, before undertaking this exercise.
Presence and Emotional Release Meditation
One of the ways in which we can improve our capacity to access the skill of mindfulness is by learning how to bring both body and mind fully into the present, connecting clearly to both. In doing this we may be more available to identify thoughts, feelings and beliefs that are being expressed or experienced.
By practicing this meditation often, you might support your brain in being more comfortable and capable of shifting into a present or witness mode, and this in turn may help you access the tool of mindfulness to support and guide you in life and engage in reflexive thinking.