Meditation for carers

冥想

Built for interruption

Most meditation advice assumes you can arrange twenty uninterrupted minutes. If you are caring for someone, that assumption is the first thing to throw out. The version that survives real life is short, repeatable, and doesn't mind being cut off halfway.

One minute, several times a day, done badly, beats a perfect half hour you never get to.

Three that fit around someone else's needs

While the kettle boils. Feet on the floor, three slow breaths out. That's it. Attaching the practice to something you already do every day means you don't have to remember it.

In the car before you go in. Thirty seconds sitting still before you walk back into the house. Carers often describe this as the only gap in the day, and it is enough to be useful.

At three in the morning. If you are awake listening for someone, trying to clear your mind usually backfires. Counting the out-breath — just the out-breath, up to ten, then start again — gives attention somewhere to go that isn't the listening.

What it is not

It is not a fix for being under-resourced. If you are doing the work of three people, no breathing exercise closes that gap, and we are not going to suggest it does. Respite, practical help and sharing the load are the actual answers; this is something to get you through the week in between.

It also does not treat anything. If your own health has slipped while you were looking after someone else's — and it very often has — that needs a proper look, not a coping strategy.

The part people skip

Carers tend to book appointments for the person they care for and not for themselves. If it has been more than a year since anyone checked on you, that is the thing to change first. Everything else on this page works better from there.

Talking to us

If you want to work out what is realistic in your particular week, that is a conversation worth having with someone who has had it before.