How can I be at peace with the current situation? In this week’s guided meditation, Dr. Mark Bertin will gently recognize the sensations, emotions and thoughts that actually appear, and provide practice to build a presence for the rest of your life.
This is a concrete and compassionate practice. Dr. Bertin notes the tendency to deny or “fix” what is happening in our lives, and then leads us to find a third way.
Meditation to make you feel peaceful about how things are going
Read and practice the guided meditation script below and pause after each paragraph. Or listen to audio practice.
Start by finding a comfortable posture that you can maintain for these few minutes of practice. It first brings a kind and patient sense of our bodies. Notice how you sit. Adjust to wake up and be vigilant. Focus on areas of tension, see if you can release them a little, and gather awareness and bring it to the sense of breath. You need to do anything or something has to happen right now. As a success, you can reconstruct the moments of distraction from your breath. My mind is always busy. It happens that we separate our attention and awareness throughout the day, and whenever you come to breath, it is a moment of consciousness and a moment of intention. If you are distracted, remember this sense of intent clearly. You can tell yourself, oh, my mind is busy – and then let go and simply return to the next breath. Next, spread your consciousness throughout your body. Most of us live with experiences of joy and sometimes moments of discomfort and pain. And if something definitely needs adjustments to relieve physical pain right now, it’s always fine. But, for either something you are comfortable with at this moment, or for the constant, you just need to see if you can just notice it, then go back to breath. Now, continue to use your breath lightly as an anchor, shifting your consciousness and realizing your emotional state. Emotions are part of our experience. They are there whether we acknowledge them or not. They tend to influence how we think and interact with the world, so cultivating open and compassionate consciousness is empowering. Living in peace with our emotions as they arise and pass is the core of living in peace in the world. It is also central to touching our best intentions, as emotions tend to drive buses when they are not paying attention to the buses. See if you can give yourself permission for these few minutes to continue to recognize your emotions. Be careful if it is difficult. Provide compassion and grant yourself permission to experience them. Let go of the need to modify or change them. Now I am experiencing happiness, or now I am experiencing sadness, or what feelings come to mind? Can you also bring a sense of compassion to this part of your practice? Lie in the intention of treating yourself like a young child or a close friend. If your mind is distracted, remember that there is always an option to come back to keep breathing again. Now let’s turn our consciousness into thought. Thoughts can be felt so consumed, and even through meditation we cannot stop them. That’s not the point at all. Rather, we are asking whether we can live more peacefully in this part of our experience. Each of us creates a story that seeks to understand projects for the past and future. The problem can be sticky, everything is consumed and anti-minative. So, for these few minutes of practice, can we simply pay attention to our thoughts as thoughts? Fear as simply fear. Fantasy as fantasy. Observe them like clouds passing by the sky, and like a sense of peace and care. My heart is now in an exciting state. This is really tired. Or at another time, we experience a quiet mind, a simpler mind, and realize our thoughts when they arrive more easily. But through practice, you simply notice and name it. Ah, there’s that idea, then I’m back to breath. The intention and perspective we bring to practice are fundamental to practice itself. Through practice, we can aim to live life even during extremely difficult times, with more awareness, compassion and self-care. This will help us improve our ability to stay in touch with our own best intentions when we need to act accurately or communicate well. So when we practice, what happens happens happens. But we can do our best to keep our awareness, to keep our thoughts clear and to be kind. When we finish practice, we settle for a while. Then, perhaps, set an intention to continue this caring and kindness when you move on to the rest of your day.
Looking for mindfulness-based tools to help you live a better life with ADHD?
Along with ADHD Life Coach and ADHD educator Dana Crews, Dr. Bertin leads the retreat from October 10-12, 2025, helping adults navigate life with ADHD. Hosted at a Menra Retreat Center surrounded by gentle Catskill Mountain, the Holdings and Whole is a restorative and educational three-day ADHD retreat that offers practical, mindfulness-based tools to strengthen emotional regulations, deepen self-awareness and promote reliability.
Get more information and book your location here. Additionally, listeners for this podcast can request a 15% early bird discount for a limited time by entering the code “Mindful” at checkout. There are limited spots!
