Mindfulness Breathing Space: The Pleasant

Raising the general level of happiness

So this practice is designed to help you draw your attention towards things which are more pleasant in your life. Within your body,  within your breath and within your experience. By doing this we can get into the habit of doing this on a daily basis and this can help us to raise the general levels of our happiness in our life. 

Acknowledging the landscape of our experience

This does not mean that we ignore the negative things in our life. In fact in the practice also acknowledges the unpleasant; the areas of tension, the aches and pains. And by doing this we experience the true landscape of what we are experiencing within the moment. But by inclining our mind towards the pleasant we are exercising our intention to turn towards what we want to and realising that we can. 

The effort required for freedom

We realise that this practice takes effort. While the slipping into negativity seems to take less energy and often happens out of unawareness – part of our automatic pilot. ‘Turning towards’ anything takes a deliberate act. One that gets easier the more we practice, one that provides us with increasing space to make more skillful choices.