20 Mindful Breaths During COVID-19

[This is a re-post of an earlier discussion to make it easier to locate for members in the online Introduction to Mindful Writing course I'm currently offering to New Hampshire residents.]

I'm finding mindful writing to be a helpful practice each morning during the COVID pandemic. It's providing an oasis of focus and calm. The following is one of the grounding techniques.

20 Breaths

Preparing to Write:

Find a quiet location and draw your mind to the point at which air enters and exits your nose. (Don’t listen to music.) Put aside your other thoughts: redirect your attention to your breathing for at least a minute before starting to write this exercise.

Next, breathing in, think “here.” Breathing out, think “now.” Repeat for a minute. If you find your mind wandering, it’s no big deal. Just gently guide your thoughts back to breathing.

Writing: 
Describe what a single breath feels like physically. Watching the inhalation, notice the breathing-in as a brand-new event—as though it has never happened to you before. Watching the exhalation, notice the breathing-out as a brand-new event—as though it has never happened to you before.

Stop for a moment. Number this breath: Breath 1.

Write 3-4 phrases or 1-2 sentences about Breath 1.

For instance, you could try answering a few of these questions: Where did you feel the breath in your body? With what did the breath make contact? What moved or changed in your body because of the single breath? How long did the breath seem to last? What was the temperature of the breath? 

To head in a more poetic direction, if the breath possessed a shape, what shape would it have? If the breath was an object, what kind of object might it be? If the breath came in a color, what color or colors? If the breath was a single word or phrase, what would that be?

Repeat until you’ve described twenty breaths.

The purpose of this exercise is to use writing to retrain the mind to pay attention to the present. For the times we're all living in right now, watching our breathing through writing can ground us and lead to a calm outlook. Ultimately, this will help you pay attention to the present while you write, which will carry all sorts of benefits in terms of your outlook about writing and the ideas you reach.

* Image from Shondaland.com

This Very COVID-19 Moment is Perfect

It can be hard to want to stay in the Now these days.

We wish things were different, longing for a month ago when faces weren’t covered by masks or yearning for a date in the future when existence returns to something at least in the same phylum of normal.

Every morning when I wake up, I keep my eyes closed for a full minute, dreading what additional previously unimaginable will happen between now and the closing bell of day.

Unless we’re one of the heroic individuals on the frontline, the majority of us can’t control the events happening outside our own doors (literally), but we can take charge of our own inclinations to run away from the present.

We should try to stay with the present because by fleeing the Now, it’s more likely we’re increasing our anxiety and fear through our monkey minds—our non-stop inner talk.

We evacuate the present moment and by extension abandon our actual place of calm, our only sanctuary.

Mindfulness can help people deal with difficult thoughts and experiences with self-compassion: those benefits are amplified when mindfulness is combined with writing.

The intent of mindful writing is the same as a general mindfulness practice. 

The intent is to see that this very moment—the length of time between one breath and the next—is perfect, safe, okay. We can reside in what’s happening rather than fleeing into a chimerical past or future.

During normal times, when I’ve spoken about mindful writing, it’s been in the context of reducing students’ anxiety about writing assignments. Students have been trained by the conventions of the classroom to ignore the present time of writing.

During a crisis like the one we’re witnessing, mindful writing can harness the power of the written word through the present moment to process and articulate painful experiences.

First, mindful writing steers attention to the present moment, which is useful for developing calm awareness through writing.

Mindful writing also helps us notice that double-edged nature of self-talk. Our monkey mind causes problems when we let ourselves be blindly persuaded by it. If we perceive our inner babble, this leads to greater emotional regulation.

Finally, mindful writing helps us notice how we gamble on the next moment, thinking we know how it’ll turn out, limiting possibility.

So for this COVID Spring, I suggest we all do a “Write Now.”

This calming activity doesn’t require special equipment (only basic writing materials) or even a lot of time (5-10 minutes would suffice) or qualifying writing skill (it’s just a freewrite, messy and improvisational).

To do a Write Now, ask yourself: What do I have to learn here and now, from this very moment? Then jot down whatever comes to mind, free of any evaluation.

The trick is to pose that question and then follow up (in writing) to see what arises. Accept and write without revision or denying any of it, without putting a spin or backspacing anything that this moment is producing.

Keep asking the question during the session: What do I have to learn here and now, from this very moment?

This mindful writing is not an occasion for oblivion (for that I have Netflix shows).

Instead, it makes me calmer because I am present. Rather than letting my mood be dictated by my runaway monkey mind, I supervise that monkey’s hijinks. I can be less kneejerk reactive to my own thoughts.

Mindful writing is not the same as keeping a COVID-19 journal. The point isn’t to record events as they unfold: the point is to use writing to be here, now.

It's about thinking of the long-term (because there will be a day when our lives reinflate). The skills we learn by writing in the Now during this COVID will assist us later.

Then mindful writing will filter into our regular lives whenever we need to write and are procrastinating or filled with self-doubt—a time when our fears have moved on to more benign concerns, like a blank page.

Now I'm off to do a Write Now of my own. This morning... I really need it.