Five minutes, four segments. Read it straight through — the notes in brackets are for you, not the listener.
Straight in
45 sec[warm and unhurried, a little slower than normal speech]
Five minutes. You can stay exactly where you are — at your desk is fine, on a train is fine. You don't need to sit in any particular way.
Put down whatever's in your hands, and let your eyes close, or just lower them to the desk. [pause for 5 seconds]
Take one long breath out, to draw a line under whatever you were just doing. [pause for one slow out-breath]
Three points of contact
1 min 15[slower still, leaving room after each instruction]
Feel your feet on the floor. Both of them. The whole sole, or just the heel and the ball — whatever's actually there. [pause for 10 seconds]
Feel where you're sitting. The seat underneath you, taking your weight. [pause for 10 seconds]
And your hands. Wherever they've ended up. Let them be still. [pause for 15 seconds]
Shoulders down. Jaw loose. [pause for 10 seconds]
Ten breaths
2 min 30[same pace, counting aloud on each out-breath]
Now ten breaths. That's the whole exercise. You don't have to breathe in any special way — just count them.
Count on the out-breath. One. [count two through five aloud, one number per out-breath, roughly 6 seconds apart]
Halfway. If you've lost count, start again at one. Losing count isn't a failure — it's just information about where your attention went. [count six through ten aloud, same spacing]
Ten. Let the counting stop. [pause for 15 seconds]
Back to it
30 sec[bring your voice back up to a normal speaking pace]
That's five minutes. Nothing has been fixed, and that wasn't the point. You've just spent a few minutes not being pulled in four directions.
Open your eyes. Have a stretch if you want one. [pause for 5 seconds]
And when you pick the next thing up, see if you can do just that one thing for a while.