Day Twelve: Mindfulness We have come full circle, congratulations on your mindfulness meditation practice!  Enjoy this mindfulness meditation to complete your  experience. Admittedly, I’m a yoga teacher and we often exaggerate timing and reps (especially in plank) lol! This meditation is actually 6 minutes, but I think you’re ready for it.

Day Eleven: Mantra We have our physical sensations, our breath, our thoughts, and our loving kindness techniques. Let’s gently usher ourselves into the idea of using mantra (a word, phrase, or feeling) to anchor our practice.

Day Ten: Touch Touch can be powerful. In this practice you will need a simple hand-held object of your choice to focus your attention. Again, we don’t want to overthink the object itself because it’s the practice that means something. 

Day Nine: Sight Continuing our exploration of the senses, let’s try something a little more unusual; keeping our eyes open and inviting sight into our practice. Don’t over-think your focal point, the meaning is in the technique not the object. (Often, a meaningful object can provide distraction).

Day Eight: Sound Let’s guide ourselves gently towards the sensation of sound. One might find that sound can be a distraction to meditation, but what if we used it as a tool to connect to the moment?

Day Seven: Walking We grounded last practice, and so today I’d like us to try taking that technique in a new direction; walking meditation. Using our skills of observation, tune into the feeling, quality, and sensations of gentle walking.

Day Six: Grounding After the hustle and bustle of holidays, we return to our sensations to re-group. Connect (literally) to the earth below. Often, a physically grounding practice can help to quiet a busy mind.

Day Five: Observing Thoughts The mind will do what it is designed to do–think. Mindfulness practices ask us to allow those thoughts without getting entangled with them. This technique gives us a place to put thoughts as the arise so you can return to the moment at hand.

We move towards the realm of the mind and heart space with a Loving Kindness (Metta) meditation. This is where we cultivate warmth and intention towards ourselves and the people around us.