Over my time as a therapist, I have learned that mindfulness and meditation skills can feel really intimidating for a lot of people. We almost have this idea of needing to sit cross-legged on a pillow like the Buddhist monks we see on TV.
I am here to tell you it is much easier than that. In this article, I will talk about the activity I usually suggest people start with.
A color visualization activity is great for the person who is just trying to begin their mindfulness journey. During this mindfulness activity, you will visualize a healing color and a release color. First, you will close your eyes and scan your body for areas of tension. Then, you will visualize the air being taken in as the healing color, and then you’ll picture the air leaving your body being the release color. This activity gives you the chance to explore and build the connection between your mind and body.
When getting started with mindfulness and meditation, it’s important to try different things. By doing this, you will find out what works for you.
Square Breathing: The Skill At the Core of This Mindfulness Activity
To get started, this is what I usually will suggest to my therapy clients; there really isn’t a clever name for it, so I just call it a color visualization. This is an excellent place to start because you can do it for however long you want. In the beginning, you may only try it for a few minutes at a time, but as you get better at it, you can start working up to more extended amounts of time.
Before you give this a shot, it is vital that you already know how to use something called square breathing. During square breathing, you breathe in for four seconds, hold your breath for 4 seconds, and breathe out for six seconds. If you want to learn more about square breathing, what it is, and how to practice it, check out my article on it.
Square breathing is an important skill to use during mindfulness and meditation because it lets us focus on our breath, control our heart rate, and practice being grounded in the present moment.
How To Do Color Visualization Meditation
- Find a Comfortable Spot
- Close Eyes Explore What Your Body Needs
- Pick A Healing And A Releasing Color
- Imagine the Air You Breathe In As the Healing Color, Directing To the Areas That Need It
- Imagine the Air Leaving As the Release Color, Leaving Those Sore Areas
- Repeat As Many Times As You Need
- Check-In With Your Body Again At the End
If you already have experience with square breathing, you have everything you need to get started with this mindfulness activity.
To start, go ahead and find a nice spot where you feel safe and comfortable. Start by closing your eyes and bringing your attention to your body. Is there anywhere in your body that feels tight? Just spend a while here paying attention to what your body needs.
We do this because we all carry stress from our lives somewhere in our bodies. For some, it is in our shoulders or in our backs. For others, it may be in our eyebrows.
The next step is to picture in your mind two colors; one color will be a color that is healing to you, and the other color is one that is releasing. Use your imagination. There are no right or wrong colors. You can choose. While doing this with clients, I have seen all kinds of colors being used as both healing or releasing.
After you have chosen your colors, it is time to start using that square breathing. The idea here is to imagine the air you are breathing in is that healing color. I want you to imagine that the air being drawn in is heading to one of those parts of your body that you found needed more attention. Then, I want you to imagine the air you are breathing out is the release color you chose. You can imagine that color leaving the sore or tight area and leaving your body through your mouth.
Repeat this step as much as you need to. This is the great part about practicing this exercise on your own; you are the one that decides how long you spend on each step. After you have done it, check back in with your body and see if it is feeling any different. Feel relaxed?
It is Okay; Mindfulness Can Be Difficult
If you need more guidance, there are all kinds of great guided meditations and body scans out there on YouTube. It is empowering to know that you can do this exercise entirely on your own. You could be in the middle of the woods and be able to do it. Now that I think about it, that could be an awesome feeling!
If this activity is not for you, don’t give up! Take a look at this article where I list out all kinds of skills that can help you calm down and find your calm, peaceful place.
If you are feeling like you need help or prompting, go ahead and enter your email below. I will send you a sheet that I put together that walks you through how to do this all on your own.
Why Does Color Breathing Work?
I have guided many people through this mindfulness activity and have been asked many times, “why did that work?” I won’t pretend to know exactly why, but this is why I think it works.
A lot of people go through their lives constantly worrying about the future, to try and avoid repeating the past. This can cause us to be everywhere but the present. When we aren’t in the present, there is not a strong mind-body connection.
This can lead us to not even realizing when we are in pain or stressed throughout the day. This mindfulness exercise helps us slow down, check in with our bodies, and then address what our body needs. It helps us be more intentional with our thoughts. Many people spend a lot of time avoiding the present. This activity gets us to be in the present and pay attention to our needs.
It ia completely normal to feel as though we don’t know what we need to feel better. We know we don’t feel right, but we don’t know how to fix it. This activity helps us address a fraction of that “not feeling good” or tension in our bodies by simply breathing into the tension and not running away from it.
It probably sounds far fetched reading about it. You are probably feeling like there is nothing you can do on your own to make yourself feel better. But give this activity a chance, and you will learn that you have more power and control over your feelings and your body than you may have once thought.
Some Quick Suggestions Before You Start
Make Your Mindfulness Journey Your Own
The most important part of this is remembering that what works for one person may not be what works for another. I have found that for mindfulness and meditation, this color exercise is a good place for most beginners to start.
But everyone is different, and everyone’s brain works differently. If you find that this color exercise isn’t working for you, there are plenty of other places you can start. One that works for a lot of people is visualizing your happy place. Instead of imagining a healing and a releasing color, try instead visualizing yourself in that place where you feel safe and at peace.
For some, that is going to be at the beach; for others, it may be in the woods. Whatever it is, finding your ability to visualize and imagine that place will be empowering, powerful, and healing. If this is something that you are interested in, there are tons of awesome guided meditations like this on Youtube that are completely free.
The whole point of this mindfulness thing is to take back a little bit of control over our minds. We are working on getting more intentional with our thoughts and attention. The way you choose to practice mindfulness is not what’s important; practicing these mindfulness skills at all is what’s important.
Mindfulness Takes Practice
Mindfulness or meditation can be discouraging because of how hard it seems at the beginning. This causes people to stop before they really even get started. For those of you that have been down this road before, I want you to remember this. I like to compare getting into mindfulness to starting to go to the gym.
If you have ever gone to the gym, you have probably seen that person that is squatting 600 pounds or bench pressing 250 pounds. You probably know that this person has been going to the gym consistently for a while.
We know they didn’t go to the gym and instantly started lifting that much. It took a lot of hard work for them to get to where they are.
Starting mindfulness is much the same; think of it as our mindfulness muscle. It isn’t realistic for us to expect that we will be good at it right off. We need to take time to practice the skills. I like to think of our ability to do mindfulness like it is a muscle. We have long term goals of where we would like to get to, but it takes daily practice to get there.
There are going to be some days that we make more progress than others. There will be some days where we are going to feel that we lost momentum. All of that is okay and expected. The most important thing for building muscle, practicing mindfulness, and leading a happy lifestyle is showing up every day and working towards our long term goals.
Final Thoughts
Like I mention in my previous article on square breathing, it is an important building block to many different coping skills. By using square breathing during this color visualization, it is possible to start being more present. Square breathing helps us get more intentional with our breathing, which is the first step to becoming more intentional with our thoughts.
Often we spend a lot of time worrying about the future to avoid the past. By following the steps I outlined in this article, you will start to empower yourself during your mindfulness journey. It sounds silly at first, but by visualizing these healing and releasing colors during square breathing, we can begin to identify our needs and address them.
I hope this article got you thinking about mindfulness and its value in your journey. If you need extra prompting while you practice this color visualization, enter your email below, and I will send you a script that is similar to what I will say in session with clients.
