The breath can be a powerful anchor to the present moment. This meditation guides us first by settling into a posture and beginning to tune into the sensations of the body, then allowing the breath to serve as an anchor when the mind gets lost in thoughts. 

As we settle with the breath as a home base, we can find that we open to the ever-changing waves of experience with increasing balance, clarity and ease.

15-Minute Awareness of Breath

The Self-Compassion Break is a practice that is part of the Mindful Self-Compassion program developed by Drs Kristin Neff and Christopher Germer. This practice can be done at any time to evoke the three elements of self compassion: Mindfulness, Common Humanity, and Self-Kindness. It is designed to be used in a moments of stress, suffering or difficulty. The more you practice the Self-Compassion Break, the easier it will become to use it on your own, in those moments when you need it most.

Self-Compassion Break

The body scan is helpful for cultivating interoceptive awareness (body wisdom). Interoceptive awareness may help to improve your health, decrease stress, enhance resilience and performance.

Please note, there is no music in this body scan.

Ottawa Meditation & Wellness 

5 Minute Body Scan

12-Minute Body Scan

This breath awareness practice incorporates counting breaths as a way to support staying anchored to the breath. This meditation is good for beginners and more experienced practitioners who may be experiencing a particularly busy mind. For beginners, it may also be a good place to begin exploring stretches of silence, with the support of counting and other guidance. This meditation can also be used for people taking the mPEAK or MBSR programs.

Ottawa Meditation & Wellness Inc.

25-Minute AOB with counting

This guided meditation moves through awareness of the body breath, sounds, thinking, emotions, and into choiceless awareness. It is ideal for people with some mindfulness meditation experience and can be used for the mPEAK Program, and as an alternate meditation to the longer (45-minute), choiceless awareness offered in the MBSR Program.

30-Minute Choiceless Awareness

Loving Kindness Meditation (LKM) trains the mind to be more loving and kind. LKM uses language —phrases as the vehicle of meditation. There is a saying: “Be careful what you say to yourself because you are listening!” This short meditation cultivates loving-kindness specifically oriented toward the body.  This meditation sometimes brings up challenging emotions, so please be gentle with yourself. 💕

Loving Kindness for the Body (10-Minutes)

This is the first core meditation in the Mindful Self-Compassion Program. 

This focused attention practice infused with warmth and affection can help to calm the mind. Allowing yourself to be comforted and soothed by the rhythm of your breathing can add a sense of being supported and nourished by the breath.

Affectionate Breathing

This guided meditation is part of the eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC)program developed by Drs. Kristen Neff and Christopher Germer.

Loving-kindness meditation is a way of training the mind to be more loving, kind and compassionate.

This practice is ideally suited for those taking an MSC Program or reading the MSC Workbook. Without some loving-kindness experience, some aspects of this practice may not be understood, including the intention of supportive touch.

Loving-Kindness for a Loved One & Self

In this meditation, you will have the opportunity to take a few moments to deliberately transition from whatever it was you were doing and arrive more fully in this moment, whether transitioning from work to home life or from one meeting or client to the next. 

Checking with yourself, acknowledging what’s true for you right now, and seeing if you can let go or set aside whatever isn’t needed right now, knowing you can always return to it later. 

At the end of the meditation, there will be an opportunity to set an intention for how you want to show up in your next activity.

Arriving/Transition Meditation (i.e., from work to home or before meetings)

This is an adaptation of the Loving-Kindness for Ourselves second core meditation in the Mindful Self-Compassion Program (MSC). 

It is ideally suited for those taking the MSC program or reading the workbook.

Ottawa Meditation & Wellness

Loving Kindness for Ourselves

Soften, Soothe, Allow is an informal practice from Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) Program for working with difficult emotions. 

It includes labelling emotions, finding the emotions in the body and caring for and comforting ourselves — physically (softening), emotionally (soothing) and mentally (allowing.) 

It is ideally suited for those taking the MSC Program or reading the workbook. 

There is no bell at the end.

Soften Sooth Allow

This mindful eating exercise cultivates greater awareness of what makes up experience while eating – sensory experience (body sensations) and thoughts, emotions, and impulses that often drive eating behaviour. 

This 15-minute practice starts with a short check-in and reflection on hunger level, followed by mindfully eating a meal, then a fullness check-in and whether to continue or stop eating.  

Research shows that when we eat more mindfully, we’re better able to control urges to overeat, binge or engage in emotional or stress eating. With practice, mindful eating can lead to a better relationship with food and greater ease and enjoyment.

Please have a plate of food (a meal or snack) for this practice.

Mindful Meal

This 35-minute Body Scan Meditation is used in the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Program. The intention of the body scan is to develop an awareness of the physical sensations in the body while also being aware of thoughts and emotions.

There is a 5-minute pre-amble at the beginning and brief guidance along the way on exploring discomfort or pain in the body. 

*I have been asked not to include a bell at the end of the practice as some people find the body scan helps them drift off to sleep (though not intended for that purpose.)

MBSR Body Scan

This five-minute meditation is an opportunity to pause and tune in to the body and the present moment at any time throughout your day. Hopefully, allowing you to discover how even a short practice can feel restorative and bring greater steadiness and calm.

No Excuses! Five-Minute Meditation for Calm

Awareness of breath, body, sounds, thoughts and emotions is a meditation offered in week four of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program before the version offered in week five that includes choiceless awareness. 

This meditation begins by grounding the attention in the sensations of breathing, then opens the attention to other sensations, then sounds, thoughts and emotions.

Breath, Body, Sounds, Thoughts, Emotions

This guided reflection is an adaptation of Loch Kelly's glimpse practice: "Relax the Problem Solver"  

This short reflection is not to escape everyday problems or issues that require your attention; instead, it's an opportunity to experience what it's like to step out of the problem-solver identity and to notice what qualities arise.

Relaxing the Problem Solver

In this meditation, you’ll be guided using imagery to different ocean levels. The waves at the top are a metaphor for thoughts and emotions, the currents in the middle for the rhythm of breathing, and the ocean floor for awareness itself. Inviting you to drop below the waves to a quieter, more peaceful place — to the breath and deeper to awareness itself. 

This meditation is an adaptation of Amita Schmidt’s "Below the Waves Meditation.”

Beneath the Waves — A Vertical Meditation for Peace & Calm

This reflection is an opportunity to get to know your inner voice a little better and to learn how to move from a stance of self-criticism or fear-based motivation to a place of love, support and kindness. 

As Maya Angelou once said: "I learned long ago that the wisest thing I can do is to be on my side," this is especially true when motivating ourselves to make behaviour changes. 
	
This is an adaptation of the “Discovering your compassion voice” practice in the MSC Program.

Loving Yourself Into Healthy Habits

Resistance prevents us from mindfully accepting the reality of the present moment. Essentially, the struggle happens when we believe or want our moment-to-moment experience to be different from what it is. 

In this guided reflection, we will explore resistance and the importance of bringing mindfulness to this aspect of our experience for greater ease and less suffering.

Exploring Resistance

Typically this body scan is a body awareness practice rather than being intended for relaxation and/or sleep; however, the reality is that many people find that it does just that.  That said, it can be used either as an awareness practice, or for relaxation/sleep, but it's best to choose one or the other. 

If used as an awareness practice, the body scan is a great way to get us out of our head and into our body. It is often said that we are like “walking heads”, the body scan offers the possibility to turn down the volume on our inner chatter (thoughts and emotions) and trains the attention to be more present. It can also lead to greater self-awareness as we attend to the inner workings of our body and mind.

20- Minute Body Scan

This practice is called RAIN for difficult emotions. RAIN came into being about 15 years ago and has become popularized by Tara Brach. 

I first experienced RAIN when I was on silent retreat with her and in my experience it is one of the most invaluable mindfulness exercises or tools out there, and when practiced regularly can, over time, become a natural response to difficult emotions. 

Briefly the acronym RAIN stands for: 

R: Recognize the difficult emotion. You might ask what’s happening inside me right now and name the emotion. Naming the emotion alone can allow it to release some of the hold it has on us. 
A: Allow it to be present, letting it be here rather than pushing it away or resisting it. Allowing opens us up to the next stage...
I: Investigate is about inquiring into the felt sense of our experience rather than it being a cognitive or analytical process.   
N: Nurture, during this stage, we’re offered different practices to hold the emotion or vulnerability with care and loving-kindness.  

Feel free to try out this adapted version of one of Tara’s practices.  Her website also has many additional RAIN resources, including RAIN practices for couples.

RAIN for Difficult Emotions

Sounds can be the object of our attention during mindfulness practice (even unpleasant ones) just like the breath, sensations in the body, thoughts and emotions. When we bring attention to sounds we discover their impermanent nature. We may also discover that the irritation that often comes from unpleasant sounds doesn’t come from the sounds themselves, but, rather, from our reaction to them. When we bring mindfulness to sounds, we can shift our relationship from aversion to openness and curiosity, allowing the sound to simply rise and fall, lessening their negative impact.

5-Minute Awareness of Sound Meditation

This is a short awareness of thought meditation, another important aspect of our experience. Developing the skill of simply observing thoughts come and go much like clouds in the sky or like images moving across a TV screen, rather than getting lost in the content or emotional charge of particular thoughts can be a useful skill to develop.  This practice can support our ability know when we’re lost in thought and to discern what thoughts are worth investing in and what ones we can let go of.  We can come to see thoughts as for what they are -- mental events rather than facts, representations of reality, rather than reality itself.

7-Minute Awareness of Thought Meditation

This compassionate body scan is a practice that is offered as part of the eight-week Mindful Self-Compassion program created by Drs Christopher Germer and Kristen Neff.

30-Minute Compassionate Body Scan

Jennifer is the founder of Ottawa Meditation & Wellness and a skilled teacher who has experience working with adults with a range of challenges, including anxiety, depression, trauma, and chronic pain, as well with those who are simply looking for new tools to build resilience and meet the stressors inherent in daily life. She trained at the University of Massachusetts and UC San Diego medical schools and is certified by both Brown University and the International Mindfulness Teachers Association. Her teaching is grounded in her personal mindfulness practice combined with experience and extensive training. Her desire to teach comes from personally experiencing the transformative benefits of the practice and fuels her passion to teach and serve others.

Ottawa Meditation & Wellness offers mindfulness meditation, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and Mindful Self-Compassion workshops and classes, day-long retreats, and talks to individuals, groups and in organizations. For more information please visit: omwellness.ca

Jennifer Innes, Founder

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