Unusual sentence construction in meditation app

Question

I'm using a meditation app called "Headspace" and I recently started to notice a rather unusual construction that the teachers use in their guided meditations, and I'm wondering whether it's a grammatically correct construction that I was previously unaware of.

It goes like this:

"Taking a moment to get comfortable, whether you're sitting up or lying down, the eyes softly focused, just taking a big deep breath, breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth. As you breathe out, just gently closing the eyes and just feeling the weight of the body pressing down, allowing thoughts to come and go, ..."

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ob1sWh9u2I

So they're using the present participle again and again, but only very occasionally insert a subject into their sentences. I agree that this evokes a very relaxed and calm atmosphere, but once I've noticed it, it's hard to un-hear...

Answer 1

As you say, each "sentence" seems to consist of a series of present participle (or perhaps gerund) phrases. I'll put those phrases within brackets:

[Taking a moment to get comfortable, whether you're sitting up or lying down,] the eyes softly focused, [just taking a big deep breath], [breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth]. [As you breathe out, just gently closing the eyes] and [just feeling the weight of the body pressing down], [allowing thoughts to come and go],

This is only one way to separate the phrases; other ways are certainly possible.

The only exception is the nominative absolute phrase "the eyes softly focused". However, even that might be considered to function as a modifier within the previous participle phrase.

A series of like (parallel) phrases is certainly a grammatically correct construction, but usually we expect sentences to consist of subjects and predicates headed by finite verbs. I think that the quoted text is fine for a meditation class, but I certainly wouldn't write sentences like these in my doctoral dissertation.

Answer 2

My guess is that, as you are observing the present moment in medidation, describing what you are supposed to be doing could be part of the guidance your teacher gives you.

Grammar-wise this looks like present continuous to me.

Answer 3

If it's "grammatical" it's certainly a non-standard, informal usage. Typically one would expect the imperative mood, which drops the "you" subject for commands like "Relax, take a deep breath", but this is different.

Having skimmed through one paper, "Subject pronoun drop in informal English" by Andrew Weir, 2008, University College London, I don't think it mentions this exact kind of usage in spoken English. It's discussing British English, and attributes subject dropping in spoken English to dropping initial unstressed syllables, which I have heard a British person describe as a sort of mumbling.

In the video, he does say "you" at times so it sounds like he's talking in second person, as in the hypnosis cliché "You're getting very sleepy".

So I think this could be a form of this British informal subject-dropping mumble, combined with hypnosis-style present continuous declarative statements in the second person.