A 12-Minute Meditation to Come Home to Your Body

Mindful's founding editor Barry Boyce shares a practice on how our vulnerability can connect us to everyone and everything around us.

Adobe Stock/Ulia Koltyrina

This meditation practice is about mindfulness of body or mindfulness of embodied experience because whatever is happening isn’t happening in an abstract way, it’s happening here—in our bodies. So we need to return home, to go back to square one. And so we can call this practice a coming home practice, a being home practice, or a square one practice. 

A 12-Minute Meditation to Come Home to Your Body   A 12-Minute Meditation to Come Home to Your Body 12:52 Your eyes may be opened or closed. If they’re opened, your eyes are lowered in a soft gaze and not focusing on anything in particular. In fact, before you close your eyes—if you’re going to close your eyes—I just want you to take a moment to appreciate the sense of sight (if you are sighted). Notice the colors, shapes, and forms around you in your immediate environment. Whether it’s closed in a room or whether you have a vista beyond.  Now, notice what you’re hearing. Is there anything you’re hearing in the immediate area? In the middle distance? Beyond?  Notice what you see, what you hear, and what you sense with touch. Feel your bottom touching the chair. Feel the…