The 5 Best Mindfulness Exercises for Beginners

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Mindfulness Exercises for Beginners

These simple exercises are perfect if you want to start practicing and are new to mindfulness.

For Mindfulness to produce benefits, it is enough to practice some exercises for 5, 10, or 15 minutes a day; if you wish, you can do it for longer.

What is important in practice is not the exercise itself, but the attitude and the fact of maintaining full attention while practicing and, above all, maintaining consistency over time.

In this article, we will see some easy mindfulness exercises perfect for starting to include this type of activity in our habits.

What is mindfulness?

Mindfulness can be considered as a way of life that consists, among other things, of maintaining full attention or full awareness in the present.

When we put it into practice, we must be aware and intentional of what we are doing at that very moment, without judging and with full acceptance and openness.

There are a series of Mindfulness exercises for beginners that can be put into practice at any time and that can be started without experience, or with the help of a professional who can teach basic guidelines and guide the process until the person reaches a certain level.

Mindfulness in the present moment

The first of the Mindfulness exercises for beginners that we want to recommend is a task as simple as keeping your attention fully in the present moment.

In other words, all a person needs to do is fully concentrate on the daily life tasks they are doing (for example, showering, cooking, cleaning the house, etc.) so that by paying full attention to these experiences, these experiences acquired greater richness at the experiential level.

It is important that the person make all their senses available for these experiences, paying attention to the smells, textures, or the different sensations they experience through touch, hearing, sight, and taste, when you do the exercise.

This can be while you are eating, and if your mind wanders, warmly and calmly invite yourself back into the whole experience of the present moment.

Static Mindfulness Meditation

One of the most recommended Mindfulness exercises for beginners is static meditation, a very useful and frequently used tool in your practice, to learn more about your own thoughts, emotions, and any kind of sensation. that can cause us

This exercise is usually done sitting in a chair, but it can also be done sitting on the floor, usually on a mat, in a comfortable position (for example, the lotus position).

Once the person finds a comfortable position, the goal is to focus on the breath, taking slow, deep breaths, and if attention drifts to another stimulus, focus back on the breath.

Another variant of static meditation consists of the person, still in the same position, focusing on more complex elements, such as thoughts and emotions; although we will talk about these variants in more detail below, which require greater mastery.

Mindfulness of thoughts and emotions

This simple Mindfulness exercise can be useful on those occasions when a person is submerged in negative ruminating thoughts or is experiencing emotions that cause them discomfort, with the aim of being aware of the way their mind wanders and, thus, being able to understand that these thoughts are the product of your imagination.

In the case of emotions, the objective is for the person to allow these emotions to be present in their own consciousness from a point of view of acceptance, without trying to avoid them or force them to change.

This is a useful exercise in those moments when this occurs, the person is experiencing unpleasant emotions and tries to avoid them without success.

To perform these mindfulness exercises on thoughts and emotions, after having performed an exercise that allows you to induce a state of mindfulness in breathing and relaxation, the person must allow a thought that causes them concern to remain.

In your awareness so that you can locate the sensations you experience as a result of that worry and then give that state of mind a name.

From the moment you do this, the person must allow the emotion experienced to remain present while focusing on their breathing at the same time.

Body scanner (body scan)

The body scanner basically consists of going through each part of the body, concentrating at all times on the sensations perceived in them.

A good example of how to practice the body scan would be to start by focusing on the sensations felt in one foot, work with the sensations felt in each part of the leg, then move to the other foot and then move up. the leg until it is completely gone.

Once finished with the lower extremities, we will continue focusing on the abdomen, the thorax, and the upper extremities (hands and arms), and finally, we will focus on the sensations perceived in the head; continue to become aware of our entire body.

All this we must do while keeping our eyes closed preferably.

Mindful walking

The last of the Mindfulness exercises for beginners that we want to recommend is mindful walking, in which the person simply has to walk focusing their attention on the stimuli and sensations that arise in the here and now, whether walking or in the form of work.

Thus, we are not focused on worries or any problem that occurs to us, but on each step, we take, on the sensations we experience, and on what happens around us as we walk.

The main goal of the mindful walking exercise, as well as informal meditation practice (for example, mindfulness in the present moment), is to take you off autopilot while performing a series of routine tasks, to be fully aware in the present moment.

In this way, you will be able to discover which are the key situations for the appearance of ruminative thoughts that cause discomfort, and thus train yourself to tolerate the experience of that precise moment and focus on what is happening around you.

Even with enough practice, these ruminating thoughts will no longer cause this discomfort.

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