Meditation Techniques: What is Mindful Breathing?

Mindful breathing is one of the introductory meditation techniques. It’s a perfect way to start practicing mindfulness, while also setting up a solid basis for more advanced techniques. It works both as a standalone practice or part of a bigger routine. However, there are some traps, that you should be aware of!

Mindful Breathing: The Foundation of Meditation

There are a lot of meditation techniques, and finding the ones that suit you best is an exciting and joyful journey. But in order to do that, you need to start somewhere. Mindful breathing is (in my opinion) one of the best practices to start mindfulness.

It is easy to start, doesn’t require any sort of mantras or deep knowledge about meditation. What’s more: it can be performed anywhere by anyone.

You can treat mindful breathing as a standalone technique. It works great if you need to calm down or just rest after a hard day. Or you might want to incorporate it into a mindfulness routine, whether it’s meditation, self-hypnosis or even yoga.

Mindful breathing is often called the foundation of meditation. And it’s hard not to agree with that!

Woman meditating with mindful breathing

Benefits for Mind and Body

As stated before, mindful breathing is a simple technique. Yet, it offers many benefits, both for your physical and mental health.

Those benefits include:

  • Calming your mind,
  • Reducing anxieties,
  • Relaxing whole body,
  • Bringing attention to tensions and discomforts you might feel,
  • Prolonging attention span.

Of course, some of them come with time. If you are just starting, don’t overthink about potential benefits. Just try it with curiosity and see what happens.

You might surprise yourself even after the first time!

How to Practice Mindful Breathing: A Step-by-Step Guide

Before you start your practice, make sure you have some spare time and that none disturbs you. Find a quiet place where you feel safe and turn off phone or notifications from laptop.

Once you are ready, it’s time to begin! If you are a beginner, follow these steps:

  1. Sit down in a comfortable position. Better not to lie down on first try, as it’s easy to fall asleep. You can sit legs crossed, or rest half-lying. It doesn’t matter that much.
  2. Close your eyes and take some breaths.
  3. Find the natural flow of breath. At that point, you don’t need to do anything with it. Don’t slow it down, don’t make it deeper. Breathe at your own pace.
  4. Notice the flow of the breath. Feel it in nostrils, throat, chest, abdomen. Focus on that feeling with each breath and exhale.
  5. If you feel comfortable, try to deepen your breath. Make it slower and stop for 1–2 seconds before exhaling.
  6. After adjusting to the slower pace, once again notice the flow of the air in your body. Is it the same? Or maybe you can feel it deeper?
  7. Stay in that state for as long as you feel comfortable. If you are curious about it, you can once again deepen and slower your breath.
  8. Once you feel like you had enough, return to your normal breathing, and thank yourself for that time.

Of course: that’s just mine routine. The best one for you is the one that… well, suits you best. But it’s a good way to start, that leaves you some flexibility.

HERE you can find more breathing exercises perfect for beginners.

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

There are a lot of challenges coming into play when you start with new meditation techniques. It’s the same thing with mindful breathing, of course. And the number one things is: what if my mind drifts away?

First things first: it’s completely normal. Don’t worry about it. In fact: you should thank yourself for noticing that every time!

All you need to do is to just take a deep breath in, exhale and focus back on your breath. That’s it! 

The second most common challenge is falling asleep. It is usually one of the two things:

  1. You actually fell asleep – it usually happens when you are meditating while lying down. If it happens half-lying, you can just sit down next time. And when it happens again — try sitting down on a chair. You can also set up a gentle timer that wakes you up after 15 minutes (or some other time).
  2. You went into trance – trance is a state of mind where you are — simplifying — semi-conscious. It’s a natural state, and it happens throughout our lives on a daily basis. It can also be induced by meditation. If it happens, that’s actually good, as it usually means your body was fully relaxed.

Some of us also tend to “panic” when opening eyes during meditation. Let me assure you: your practice is not ruined by that. It’s completely okay to open eyes if you are bothered by something or just felt like it.

Just close them once again and bring your attention back to breathing.

One of the challenges that is not often mentioned is muscle tension. You might feel some tension in your neck, shoulders or back while practicing mindful breathing.

In order to avoid that, try relaxing before you bring attention to the breath itself. Or just simply change position to more comfortable. It’s a common myth that you have to stay completely still during meditation.

You don’t!

Incorporating Mindful Breathing into Daily Life

One thing I love mindful breathing for is the fact, that it is easy to incorporate it into daily life. Which is great, because even when you don’t yet feel long-term effects of meditation, you can benefit from short-term ones.

Let’s work on a simple example. You are stressed after your work-call and not sure what to put your hands into. Panicking won’t help — we both know that. But at the same time, you are too stressed out to work.

In order to get yourself together, you can:

  1. Close your eyes and focus on breath.
  2. Slow it down progressively, without forcing yourself too much.
  3. Take 3 slow, deep breaths.
  4. Start breathing in following routine:
    1. Inhale for 4 seconds.
    2. Hold breath for 2 seconds.
    3. Exhale for 4 seconds.
    4. Hold still for 2 seconds.
  5. After your heart’s rate stabilize, open your eyes and go back to your daily tasks.

This routine is easy to remember, can be done basically everywhere, and works wonders when feeling stressed. What’s more — it’s simple to adjust it to your preferences.

Try it a few times and experiment on your own!

Other Meditation Techniques — How to Blend Them?

As already mentioned, mindful breathing is a great practice to blend with other meditation techniques. To explain it simply, let’s say you want to try mindfulness visualization.

Before you go into visualization itself, start with mindful breathing, as explained before. However, this time, do NOT deepen your breath to your limits. Just do it 2–3 times. After that, once you are fully relaxed and focus, move on to visualization.

Easy, right?

You can also go the other way around. Let’s take mantra meditation. Some mantras might feel both great and heavy after finishing. And that’s perfectly fine! However, jumping straight back into “normal” life is not necessarily a good idea.

Thus, after finishing your mantras, go with mindful breathing. That way, you can relax after some harder affirmations. Thanks to that, when opening your eyes, you won’t be trembling with uncontrolled energy.

Mindful Breathing: My Personal Approach

This part is just my personal experience. Feel free to jump into conclusions if you feel like you’ve read enough. However, I’d love to share my experiences with mindful breathing.

Because when I first started, I kind of… well, disliked that meditation technique. I felt like it brings me no real benefits. And what’s more — it’s just boring.

Now I see that I was wrong. Though mindful breathing is simple, it often works wonders.

For example: I’ve used to jump straight into self-hypnosis without any sort of relaxation beforehand. Why? Well, because auto-hypnosis (in my view, of course) bore tastier, bigger fruits way faster than mindful breathing.

Partially, it was true. However, I’ve soon noticed that my practices are less effective. Though I could relax while in hypnosis trance, I felt I was lacking something.

Then one day I decided to practice self-hypnosis as if I were a complete beginner. It involved listening to audio with mindful breathing exercise.

Guess what?

I had a deep, relaxing and absolutely wonderful hypnosis trance. And since then, whenever I’ve got time, I start with 3–4 minutes of mindful breathing before going into auto-hypnosis.

Of course, as with every meditation technique, you need to take time with mindful breathing. And who knows, maybe you really won’t like it and find something better? But that’s the beauty of that practice: it is easy to start and simplifies other, harder meditations.

Transform Your Meditation

Mindful breathing is a great start into meditation and other mindfulness practices. If you are an absolute beginner, it’s a tool that (in my opinion) you should try out first. You don’t need absolute any other preparation than finding a peaceful, silent room.

Mindful breathing is all about focusing on both inhale and exhale. When your mind starts wondering somewhere else, just simply bring attention back to your breathing.

It is simple, easy and effective. There are both long-term and short-term benefits to it, which include anxieties reduction, muscle relaxation and increased attention span. And you can use it both as a daily ritual and tool to tackle sudden stressful situations.

Start practicing as soon as possible! In 2 weeks, you will notice a huge difference.

And if you are not sure how to create a meditation routine, check out my guide HERE.