To Practice 10 Breaths…

• Choose a focus of appreciation. This might be a beloved object or photograph; the thought of a beloved person; or a moment during a hike or other experience where you pause to fully take in the beauty of the moment
• Take a couple of deep breaths to calm and center yourself
• Turn your attention fully to what you have chosen to appreciate. If it is an object, hold it in your hand or in your gaze and feel it with all your body. If is a person, evoke them fully in your mind, and feel their presence with your whole body. If it is a moment in nature, invite all five senses into appreciation of your experience: what you are seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling.
• Allow yourself to drop down and more fully inhabit this experience with each breath. You may want to keep track of each breath with a minimal counting on your fingers, touching a finger to your thigh or your thumb with each count.
• At the end of ten breaths, gently name to yourself what was pleasurable about the experience.
• Continue with your mindful day!

Why Practice 10-Breaths — a bit of neurology

Excerpted from: Schneider, Glen. Ten Breaths to Happiness: Touching Life in its Fullness. Parallax Press. Kindle Edition.

• Our brains are comprised of cells called neurons, which connect together chemically and electrically in clusters called neural pathways. Our sense impressions, memories, abilities, and emotional patterns are all encoded this way in the physiology of the brain. Mental traffic tends to follow existing routes, regardless of whether the neural pathway is appropriate, accurate, or actually beneficial. Beginning in childhood, the more we repeat a pattern, the more habitual it becomes. As psychologist Rick Hanson writes, “What happens in your mind changes your brain, both temporarily and in lasting ways; neurons that fire together wire together.” See Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius, Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications, Inc., 2009).
• The human organism is preferentially wired—overwhelmingly—to recognize danger and threats. Survival is paramount. Happiness and joy are secondary behaviors, but they can be learned.
• Neuroscientists have found that it takes about thirty seconds of stimulation to firmly root a new neural pathway. A new neural pathway becomes more firmly rooted the longer an experience is held in awareness and the more intense the emotional stimulation. As new connections are created and used repeatedly, footpaths eventually become freeways. With practice we can rewire our brains so that patterns of happiness become habitual and deeply nourishing,

The Ten Breaths practice incorporates these findings of neuroscience in a practical way. Meditation traditions have long used the practice of counting the breath to ten as a way of sustaining concentration. It also happens that it takes a minute or more to take ten conscious breaths. So if we combine counting ten breaths with our positive experiences, we have a generous measure of the time needed to firmly root and strengthen a new pathway.

• Sustain positive experiences for at least thirty seconds.
• Feel positive experiences in the body as fully as possible.