Two Basic Skills of Concentration and Mindfulness Needed to help any Problem
Two Basic Skills to Mindfully Breathe to help troubling thoughts, feelings or body sensations
You will work on two skills developing increasing mindfulness and concentration. There are both general effects that can benefit any problem, and more specific effects that work on individual aspects of a problems bodily sensations such as pains, the associated feelings, and thoughts. By doing mindfully based breathing meditation general effects will occur that will help any problem. How does this occur? By the very nature of doing mindfulness based meditation using breathing your very problems will come up both directly and indirectly as distractions.
Mindfulness in the present moment and moment to moment paying attention, the bare awareness without using thought or judgment to your breathing and the thoughts that distract you from your breathing, and concentration is the focusing power you will develop as you do this over and over.
The combination of these two will calm your mind and make it possible handle problems in a new way. At least two things can happen the feelings and sensations associated with your problems will be able to held in awareness longer and longer and as you do that they will get weaker and weaker, easier to manage, and may eventually go away, and secondly you will develop new ideas or insights about them as you see the connections they have with other things that they are directly related to.
For example no thought can thought, feeling, or body sensation can exist only by itself, but only as connected to each other, a sensation-feeling-thought complex, and by its very nature it and its components are always temporary or impermanent, and you will further find that that no matter how good something is, it has a down or bad side, and no matter how bad something is there is an upside or good side to it, and that nothing in worth ignoring, for in that which seems insignificant or not interesting or not important, may hold previously un investigated seeds of information that may help solve your problems. All of this can be yours if you can develop more and more mindfulness and concentration.
If you have trouble doing this sitting, try it standing or walking or while your doing anything else you can do over and over.
Slow down, stop what you are doing, and become Aware of your Breathing and Concentrate on your breathing sensations, by not using any thinking modalities at all, but just by maintain focus of feeling and following the flow of the physical sensations, over and over, again and again. By no thinking is meant no expectations, no controlling, no judging bad, good or neutral, no bringing in the past, the future, just stay in the present not using any of these aspects of thinking and stay aware and feel the sensations of breathing. Try little by little to make your awareness, your feelings and the breathing sensations to become like one. Become one with your breathing.
It is normal and to be expected that you will be Distracted by something which could be anything. You will start thinking about your breathing rather than just being aware of it, and feeling it and sensing it, or you will start thinking about some body sensation like how you are sitting, or a pain, or an external sensation like a sound, or thinking about some thoughts from the present , past or future, or some feelings. What every Distracts you and pulls you focus off the breathing, note what it is, and go back to your exclusive awareness on only the breathing sensations. Don’t fight with the distraction, or try to resist it, or hold on to it, or retain it because it feels good or bad, and don’t ignore it, just notice it with the barest attention, and return back to your focus on the breathing.
Follow the basic formula of ABCDE, Awareness of Breathing to develop Concentration and when Distracted by anything including you thoughts about the breathing Experience it by noting it with the barest attention just using feeling and sensing of it what ever it is, like the breath, accept it, allow it to unfold, and then let it go, to go back to breathing , over and over again.