Commit to another short easy meditation sitting tomorrow morning.

Read through the following instructions before you begin. This session is all about awareness of your breath.
Prepare yourself and your space just as you did before your last sitting.
You might like to check my previous instructions for posture and for following the breath.

As you focus on your breath, be aware of its movement in and out of your body. When we are stressed or anxious we tend to breathe from the upper chest in short staccato or chuffy truncated breaths.

When we are relaxed, our breathing comes ‘from the abdomen’ and tends to be full and smooth and tidal.

As you settle into your sitting, place your focus on your abdomen and ‘feel’ your breath from here.
As you inspire your abdomen expands, and it is as if your breath pours down into it.

Then, as the inspiration continues the chest rises and the lungs are also filled.

As you expire, air is not forced out of the lungs, but rather, it naturally flows out as the abdomen and chest return to their resting position.

There may be a pause before the next breath. Or the next breath may follow immediately.

Occasionally your abdomen and lungs may spontaneously take a much larger breath with a long ‘sighing’ expiration.

“as breathing is my life, to stop I dare not dare.”

John Lennon (written when he was a school boy)

Just be attentive to the patterns.
Again, do not force the breath to be a particular way. If your experience of the breath is not as I have described, just sit with it the way it is and notice it.

Do not try and slow your breathing (this will happen naturally), let the breath set its own tempo.

As soon as you notice you have drifted off on some storyline of thoughts, simply label them “thoughts”, and return to awareness of the breath.
Be with that.

So that is your challenge for tomorrows meditation. Try sitting for 10 minutes.