Mindfulness Activities

The Three Minute Breathing Space

Unlike meditations or a body scan, this exercise is quick to perform and easy to get started with a mindfulness practice in your busy life or that of your clients. With meditations and the body scan thoughts often pop up and keeping a quiet and clear head can be a challenge.

This last exercise of Three Minute Breathing Space can be the perfect technique for those with busy lives and minds. The exercise is broken into three sections, one per minute, and works as follows:

1. The first minute is spent on answering the question, “how am I doing right now?”, while focusing on the feelings, thoughts, and sensations that arise and trying to give these words and phrases.
2. The second minute is spent on keeping awareness on the breath.
3. The last minute is used for an expansion of attention from solely focusing on the breath, feeling the in’s and out’s and how they affect the rest of the body.

This exercise can be rather challenging for keeping a quiet mind and often thoughts can pop up. The idea is not to block them, but rather just let them come into your mind and then disappear back out again. Try to just observe them.

All the exercises mentioned above can be used for the benefit of yourself, individual clients and even in group settings. They are beneficial to all client groups; however, some will be better suited than others so a method of open-minded trial and error can often be necessary.

The most important part of mindfulness is to recognize that it is training of the mind, and like any exercise will take some time to see the benefits and for the mind to get used to a new way of thinking. The trick is to persevere, approach the process with self-compassion and allow for reflection, change and flexibility between different techniques and interventions.