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"Find some inner peace, guide others, be the change you want to see."


  • Beginning to Guide Others
  • The Basic Stages of a Mindfulness Meditation
  • Building up the Guidance Practice
  • Resources for Guidance Practice


    • Beginning to Guide Others

    If you can practice formal seated mindfulness meditation effectively for any length of time on your own, then you should be able to guide others. It's just a matter of:

  • Refining and sequencing the sentences you want to use.
  • Embodying heart as you speak - truly caring for the people you are guiding (including yourself, of course).
  • Leaving enough space in-between sentences for people to relax their minds and feel the effects of the guidance on their bodies.

    Due to the verbal nature of mindfulness meditation guidance, a wide variety of metaphors and words can be used, and this means no one 'live' guided meditation is exactly the same. One does not adhere strictly to a script - it is better to practice guiding in an organic, open, and free way - as if you were guiding and reminding yourself about the key elements of your own personal practice.

    Some guides try to keep the words as simple as possible and to a minimum so that there is more opportunity to feel what is happening directly within the body, with less likelihood of stimulating the imagination. Other guides prefer to use examples from nature to root the listener within the dynamic natural environment around them.

    A mindfulness meditation guide is demonstrating the mindful state - a physical, "heartful" condition of the body. The resonance or tone of the guide's voice communicates whether a peaceful state is present in the body or not. This means that it is very important to be able to use the methodology one is using to guide others to maintain a peaceful state as one speaks, otherwise the listeners may lose faith in the quality of the guidance being offered. So in a way one is guiding oneself to maintain a peaceful and grounded state for the benefit of others.


    • The Basic Stages of a Mindfulness Meditation

    A mindfulness of breathing meditation is often one of the first key meditations taught to newcomers to the practice. In secular Western mindfulness, the guidance tends to use the following 4 stages:

    1) Setting up the posture (purpose: to establish positive body language and a stable physical position that can be relaxed into as painlessly as possible).

    2) Tuning into the breath (purpose: to take attention away from one's busy thoughts and to directly witness the positive automatic self-perpetuating life process underlying one's whole existence).

    3) Maintaining your focus on the breath (purpose: to create a habit of primarily sensing and trusting one's positive body (one's heart) to balance oneself in the present moment and to allow enough time for a tangible sense of peace to arrive as thoughts are left to come and go off to the sides of one's main focus).

    4) Allowing the breath to go deeper into the belly (purpose: to allow us to relax more deeply and become more sensitive to our 'gut feelings' - the fluctuating tension in our belly that can signal any anxiety building, giving us an opportunity to dissolve it).


    Building up the Guidance Practice

    One can begin practising guiding in individual stages, starting with stage 1 above (setting up the posture) and then moving through to stage 2, then 3, etc. During a group meditation activity, it can be planned that one person guides stage 1, and then another person can take over to do stage 2, and another person can take over for stage 3, and so on. A key sentence can be used to signal that the stage being guided by one person has come to a natural end (for example; "Relaxing the belly") and it is time for the next stage to begin with another guide.

    When one meditates by oneself, just speaking the words out aloud, and even recording oneself and listening back afterwards can be very useful. Choose words and metaphors that have worked best for you when listening to guided meditations from mindfulness teachers. One can build up to guiding a larger group by practising guiding a partner, family member, a good friend, or an individual member of a meditation group. Getting some feedback from an already experienced guide can be very valuable before one begins guiding larger groups.


    Resources for Guidance Practice

    Here is an online copy of a guided meditation script (with Chinese translation). It lasts for 20 minutes when appropriate silence is included - this can give an indication of how much might need to be said:

  • Daoscape Mindfulness of Breathing Guided Meditation Script.

    Here are some links to mp3s of guided mindfulness of breathing meditations spoken in English by highly experienced teachers - placed free of charge online by the respective teachers:

  • Mindfulness Meditation of the Body and Breath - Prof. Mark Williams, Oxford University.
  • Affectionate Breathing Guided Mindfulness of Breath Meditation - Kristin Neff, associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
  • Mindful Breathing Exercise - Dr. Patrizia Collard, UK psychotherapist and author of MBCT for Dummies.
  • Complete mindfulness meditation - Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at UCLA's Mindful Awareness Research Center, co-author of Fully Present: The Science, Art and Practice of Mindfulness (2009).