January self-care challenge, Day 4: A moment of meditation

It’s Day Four of our latest Tenner Week self-care challenge, and today we’re going to create a small moment of calm. The mini-challenge here is to do 10 minutes of any sort of meditation – simple as that.

You don’t need to ‘clear your mind’, sit as sill as a rock, or start chanting or praying. You just need to set aside 10 minutes to just ‘be’.

Ideas you might try today:

• Sit comfortably and focus on your breathing, letting the breath rise and fall naturally.
• Download an app with free meditation features, such as Calm or Headspace.
• Use the ‘breathe’ feature on a smartwatch
• Do a yoga meditation if you already know how to do those
• Use the ‘How to meditate‘ instructions at Mindful.org

Anything where you can take a quiet moment for a few minutes can be useful.

If you have more time this evening, there’s an NHS ‘beditation’ video to help prepare for better sleep and it runs for about 35 minutes.

What’s happening here

I managed a zero spend day yesterday, and also managed to get out for a lunchtime walk and complete a yoga class. During my afternoon tea break I realised I’d started window shopping online after mindlessly clicking on a link in a sales email, and essentially ended up laughing at my knee-jerk reaction to the phrases ‘final days of sale’ and ‘70% off’.

Every time, can’t not click on that link, I despair. Anyway, as soon as I became aware of what I was doing, I shut that browser right on down because I don’t desperately need anything this week. Oh, and I only have 70p in the budget, let’s not forget that small but important detail.

We had leftover veggie haggis cooked up with herbs, spices and more vegetables for haggis burritos last night after yoga. I think I put too much kale in them because it all tasted way too healthy and needed a good dollop of hot sauce to round it off. Zero waste, spicy taste.

As promised, the clothes donation was properly bagged up yesterday so it isn’t a tripping hazard any more, and it’s now waiting in the hallway for more action. I’ll hike it over to a charity shop on my coffee break later today, which should count as a good walk too – the meditation will have to wait until mid-afternoon, but I’ll do my best to schedule that in.

Will you be doing some meditation, breathing exercises or mindfulness today? How is your budget looking now we’re halfway through the week?