Brain Booth at Georgia Southern University Libraries

Mindfulness Tip of the Week

from The Brain Booth at GS Libraries

01.21.2025

A 12-Minute Meditation to Widen Your Perspective

Try this guided meditation to expand perspective and let go of stress:

• Find a comfortable seat. For this practice, unlike many other forms of mindfulness practice, it’s very helpful to keep your eyes open.
• As always, I like to start by just feeling the sensations in the body. Feeling a sense of relaxation trickle down from your head, all the way down into your feet.
• Now let’s turn our attention to the first element of this bigger view: the big mind. Focus in on this one small thing in your visual field as intently as you possibly can.
• Let your eyes relax. Notice that almost automatically, after a moment of focus like that, the mind just sort of relaxes into this wider, bigger view.
• Now let’s add one more piece to this. Begin to notice sound. Just notice sounds that are close by from this open, receptive, relaxed state.
• And now in a relaxed and gentle way, allowing yourself to notice sounds even further off into the distance. As you hold this wide-open gaze and you hear the sounds you might also notice that sensation is happening in the body. That’s also part of this view.
• Now see what happens when you just allow the sensations of the body to be part of this view. Noticing that your awareness, the scope of your mind, keeps getting bigger, broader, wider, vast.
• Chances are, if you’re new to a practice like this, it takes a little bit of effort and concentration to stay with this kind of a wide-open perspective. So the invitation for the next minute or two is to drop that effort.
• Staying where you are, just noticing any differences between the way you ordinarily see life or the world, and the way you’re seeing it now.
• Now you can bring yourself here. We never really left. It tends to be really boring and not very interesting, but it starts to become incredibly interesting the more my perspective widens.
• Here’s a practice that you can take with you for the rest of the day. Imagine that you’re seeing from the perspective of a mountain top or pick your favorite natural metaphor. The basic idea is that if you catch yourself feeling stressed out, just take 10 seconds to see whatever’s happening from the mountain top.   

Read more here: A 12-Minute Meditation to Widen Your Perspective

~ from The Brain Booth Team

~The Brain Booth: where everyone is welcome at any time~