Summertime and the breathing is easy – Frank Liddy

Summertime and the breathing is easy

I believe we can officially celebrate that we are now in summertime and nature is letting us know as we look around us. Trees in full foliage the darling buds of May blooming and the birdsong. What more is so enlivening as this time of year and I truly believe in order to enjoy this moment we need to slow down.

Mindfulness practice enables and empowers us to embrace this moment, so let’s look at a couple of mindfulness tips that bring us into the here or should I say in this case the hear and now. It’s nature’s way of telling us to smile at creation and one way to bring about that smile is to bring your attention to your face.

As you begin to sense your face notice your facial muscles and nerve endings, guide your attention to your eyes, the eyelids, then to your forehead, temples, cheeks, nose, nostrils. Now bring your attention to your mouth, lips, sensing your lips your lips soften, widen and a gentle hint of a smile appears, allow your attention to rest on your lips for a while. Sense the softness of your smile and and notice how your facial muscles relax.

Now gently bring your attention to sound, without judging, analysing, or interpreting, notice how sound appear then disappear like the ebb and flow of the airwaves. If you become distracted gently return to sound.

I personally allow myself a number of mindfulness breaks throughout the day. Especially as I sit in a park or beside a river , I take a moment to wake up to the beauty that is all around me and let the beauty sink into my soul.

Frank Liddy, Lead Mindfulness Practitioner for Inspire Professional Services | B.A, A.Dip.

About Frank Liddy

Frank has worked in the community care voluntary mental health sector for over twenty-five years and currently delivers Mindfulness Programmes for Inspire.

He is the founding Director of the Belfast Mindfulness Centre, co-founder of Compassion City Belfast and Northern Ireland’s representative for The Mindfulness Initiative.

Frank studied mindfulness at the University of Wales and is a qualified integrative humanistic Counsellor and holds certificate of registration for NI social care Council.

As well as teaching mindfulness compassion through the life-long learning programme at Queen’s University Belfast, he has also successfully delivered experiential and practice-based training programmes to mental health and allied professionals working in psychiatry, nursing, social work and the criminal justice system.