Five minutes of awareness
This week I invite you to take five minutes every day to check-in with yourself. First, let’s decide on when you will be doing it, otherwise it is easy to forget. It works best if you hook it on to some other activity. For example, you can do it after you take a shower, or when you get home after work, or right before lunch, etc. When will you do it?
HOW-TO: Get settled in a comfortable seated position and close your eyes. Notice how your body feels, then notice the flow of your breath, then take a mental note of the state of your mind. How are you doing in this particular moment? Notice if you are feeling rushed, centered or lethargic. Don’t do anything about it, just pay attention to it for five minutes.
OPTIONAL: Central channel breathing.
After you do your check-in for two minutes or so, begin to lengthen up through the top of the head with every inhalation and imagine drawing a mental line from the top of the head to the base of the spine. On the exhale mentally draw the line in reverse, from the base of the spine to the top of the head. Do that for 6-12 breaths.
Notice how you feel after your five minutes of awareness and go on about your day. Have a great one!
After a few days please come back and tell us how it went. Did you manage to do it regularly? Was it hard to stay present? How did you feel afterwards? Please share!
Thank you Olga, I love your app and now a little extra with your newsletter brings more light to my life each day.
I find that as soon as I turn inward to notice, some body part comes forward. Today it was the rounded top of my skull. And when this subsided, the rest of the sit was calming and relaxed. I did not combine the breath work …I tried the chakra tracing yesterday and found that in settled state, I could never feel enough breath to trace them all on one inhalation. So I just stuck with one breath for each.
Sounds lovely. So interesting to hear about your experience!
I used this with my students as I was teaching Kriya Yoga and this fitted in well with developing the Awareness/ Svadhyaya. Thank you Olga!
Is it important to draw the mental line from the top to the bottom on the inhalation or can I draw the same line but on the exhalation.
Hi Sonia, thank you for your comment! You can definitely play with different versions of this visualization – the most important thing is that it’s connected to your breath in some way. Have fun exploring!
Hi Olga,
I was getting little confused when i saw the lines- on inhale going down and exhale going up. But makes sense if you visualize diaphragm on inhale contracts (goes down) and on exhale relaxes (goes up). This helps with the diaphragmatic abdominal breathing!!
As always, love your newsletter- there is always something new to learn and with a different perspective!!
-Thank you so much.
This is exactly right, thank you for your comment! A while ago I wrote a blog post about the directionality of breathing and how we can control it for our own purposes. May be it would be helpful to explain my motivation behind it, here is the link > 🙂