A Mindfulness Exercise to Contact With the Present Moment

Please put yourself in a comfortable seated position in a chair. And then go ahead and take a nice full, clean, deep breath. And as you exhale, close your eyes or affix your gaze on some part of the room. What I’m going to invite you to do is to make a commitment. Make a commitment to do one thing, one, single, solitary behavior exclusively over the next few moments. And this commitment is to attend to what it feels like to sit in your chair. Notice the temperature of the chair. Notice the shape that your body makes as it loses contact with the chair. And recall the exercise to do one, single, solitary behavior exclusively. Attend to sensing the chair. So if thoughts come up that have nothing to do with attending to the chair, see if you can just simply bring your attention back to the chair. Maybe some thoughts came up. Maybe you’re wondering, when is this exercise going to end? And you’re thinking about the future or this doesn’t seem like other mindfulness exercises that I’ve learned. And you’re thinking about the past.

That happens. That just shows that you have a working mind. But see if you can have a different relationship with those kinds of thoughts that take you away from the commitment of attending to the chair. See if you can notice that if you’re having any thoughts that have nothing to do with your commitment that they’re just simply like clouds in the sky on a windy day and watch them go on by and bring yourself back to your commitment to attending to the chair. Maybe some other thoughts have come up and that’s naturally going to happen. Mindfulness is not about not thinking but rather relating to thinking differently. So when the next thought comes up, just imagine that it is like a cloud in the sky on a windy day and just watch it pass on by and then bring yourself back to the commitment you made, attending to your body sensing the chair right here, right now. Let that thought go too. Any irrelevant thought to the exercise, to the commitment, you could just look at it as if it were distant like a cloud in the sky separate from you and moving away while you bring yourself back to the current commitment, following through on a commitment that you made, sensing the chair. Bring yourself back to the current moment by following through on the commitment of sensing the chair right here, right now.