Counting the Tide

This is the oldest trick in the book and still one of the best. You give the busy part of the mind a small, harmless task, and while it is occupied, the rest of you gets a little quieter. It doesn’t matter how often you lose count. Losing count and starting over is the practice.

The working

1. Take your seat as in The Sitting Stone. Close your eyes or lower your gaze to the floor a little way ahead of you.
2. Breathe in through your nose without forcing anything. As the breath goes out, count one silently.
3. On the next out-breath, count two. Keep going like this up to ten.
4. At ten, begin again at one. Let the counting be soft, like a word said in another room.
5. When you find you’ve drifted, or counted past ten to fourteen, smile at it if you can, and start again at one. No tide is wasted.

Closing

Stop counting and take three breaths with no numbers at all. Notice whether anything is different from when you sat down. If nothing is, that’s fine too.