Mindfulness in Eight Weeks: The revolutionary 8 week plan to clear your mind and calm your life

When you’re ready, begin to explore the changing physical sensations in your body, right now. Start by bringing the spotlight of your awareness to the big toe of your left foot. What sensations do you find there right now? Warmth, coolness, tingling, tickling? Nothing much at all? Just notice whatever’s there. As much as you can, bring a warm and kindly curiosity to whatever you find. Then, move that focus to each of the toes in turn, bringing a gentle, interested, affectionate attention to what you find, perhaps noticing the sense of contact between the toes, a sense of tingling, warmth, perhaps numbness – whatever’s there.

Then, when you are ready, on an in-breath, feel or imagine the breath entering the lungs, and passing all the way down the body, down the left leg, all the way to the toes of the left foot. And, on the out-breath, feel or imagine the breath coming all the way back up from the toes, to the foot, right up the leg and torso and out through the nose. Continue breathing in this way for a few breaths, breathing down to the toes on each in-breath, and back out from the toes on each out-breath. Practise this ‘breathing into’ as best you can, approaching it playfully, imaginatively, experimentally.

When you’re ready, on an out-breath, let go of attention to the toes, and bring your attention to the sensations on the bottom of your left foot – bringing a gentle, investigative curiosity to sensations at the sole of the foot, the instep, the heel (noticing, perhaps, the sensations where the heel makes contact with the floor or mat or bed). Experiment with ‘breathing with’ any and all sensations – being aware of the breath in the background, as, in the foreground, you explore the sensations in the bottom of the foot.