Mindfulness of Breathing: Refuge and Insight

This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Mindfulness of Breathing: Refuge and Insight ~ Diana Clark. It likely contains inaccuracies, especially with speaker attribution if there are multiple speakers.

The following talk was given by Diana Clark at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on April 08, 2026. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Introduction

Good evening. Welcome. Welcome. Nice to see you all. I think you all know that we'll sit in silence for 30 minutes. Jim will ring the bell for us. Then I'll give a talk and there'll be time for some Q&A. So you'll hear from us in 30 minutes.

Mindfulness of Breathing: Refuge and Insight

Good evening.

So, I'd like to start us off this evening with a poem. Sometimes I do this. It's not by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer^[1]. Surprising, right? I know, right? [Laughter] I just thought I'd spice it up a little bit with another poet. This poem is by John Roedel. I'm not quite sure how to pronounce his name. John Roedel. And it's titled, "My Brain and Heart Divorced."

So, it goes like this:

"My brain and heart divorced a decade ago over who was to blame about how big of a mess I have become. Eventually, they couldn't be in the same room with each other. Now, my head and heart share custody of me. I stay with the brain during the week and my heart gets me on weekends, but they never speak to each other. Instead, they give me the same note to pass to each other every week. And their notes they send to one another always say the same thing. 'This is all your fault.'

On Sundays, my heart complains about how my head has let me down in the past. And on Wednesday, my head lists all of the times my heart has screwed things up for me in the future. They blame each other for the state of my life. There's been a lot of yelling and crying.

So lately, I've been spending a lot of time with my gut, who serves as my unofficial therapist. Most nights, I sneak out of the window in my rib cage and slide down my spine and collapse on my gut's plush leather chair that's always open for me. And just sit, sit, sit, and sit until the sun comes up.

Last evening, my gut asked me if I was having a hard time being caught between my heart and my head. I nodded. I said, 'I didn't know if I could live with either of them anymore. My heart is always sad about something that happened yesterday, while my head is always worried about something that may happen tomorrow.'

My gut just squeezed my hand. I continued, 'I just can't live with my mistakes of the past and my anxiety about the future anymore.'

My gut smiled and said, 'In that case, you should go live with your lungs for a while.'

I was confused. The look on my face gave it away.

'If you are exhausted about your heart's obsession with the fixed past, and your mind's focus on the uncertain future, your lungs are the perfect place for you. There is no yesterday in your lungs. There is no tomorrow there either. There is only now. There is only inhale. There is only exhale. There is only this moment. There is only breath. And in that breath, you can rest while your heart and head work their relationship out.'

This morning, while my brain was busy reading tea leaves, and while my heart was staring at old photographs, I packed a little bag and walked to the door of my lungs. Before I could even knock, she opened the door and with a smile and a gust of air embraced me and said, 'What took you so long? What took you so long?'"

I kind of love the whimsy here and the cleverness of this, the fun that the poet is pointing to here. Pointing to the way that we can get all tangled up, and an alternative to just be with the experience of breathing. And we could say that's a beautiful description of mindfulness of breathing. A place where we can rest. Where the mind and the heart can rest. And from that rest, a place to see clearly, from which we can see things that we can't see when we're not resting in the sensations of breathing.

In this tradition that we practice here at IMC, the Insight Meditation Center, the insight tradition, mindfulness of breathing is a foundational practice. It's a simple practice, but it turns out to be very powerful. And the Buddha himself practiced mindfulness of breathing. In the early discourses, he describes that when he went off onto a retreat, the Buddha said that he was doing mindfulness of breathing practice. Maybe not so differently than the way that you do mindfulness of breathing practice. So it's not just a beginner's practice. Certainly, we teach it in introduction to meditation classes, and when we are teaching retreats, it's the first instruction that we give—mindfulness of breathing—partly because it's accessible. People can find their way with it. That's part of its power. Not the only part of it, but I mean, what good is a practice if you feel like you can't even do it? But all of us are breathing all the time, and there's something about the movement of the breath that makes it more interesting or easier to notice. In the same way that our eyes notice things that are moving, maybe there's a way that makes it a little bit easier for the mind to be with something that is dynamic and has a whole collection of sensations associated with breathing, if we take the time to notice.

So sometimes we might think that because it's offered at the beginning of a retreat, or even at the beginning of a meditation practice, or at the beginning of an introduction to mindfulness, we might make this assumption: "Oh, it's limited, it must only be for beginners, and it must only work in the beginning." But this can take you all the way to freedom.

And I'd like to talk about that just a little bit here. One way this poem is playful and fun is where the head and the heart are arguing, and then the gut is saying, "Go talk to your lungs. Why don't you just do mindfulness of breathing?" And the poem ends with the instruction that the gut is giving: "Rest at the breath while your heart and head work their relationship out." The way that I'm interpreting this, and the way that I would like to suggest, is that there's resting with the lungs and allowing the conflict to resolve itself. The instructions are not "Go hang out with the lungs so that then you get more energy and you can get in there and really fight and duke it out and figure out which one is right, the head or the heart or the gut." It's not saying that at all. It's saying: get quiet. It's saying: rest. Take care of yourself. And in this poem, whoever it is that's sliding down the rib cage, whoever that is, they don't have to fix it.

And this is such a powerful message, this alternative to being with our experience instead of just jumping right in there and feeling like, "Okay, I got to fix it." And that's just more thinking. In the context of this poem, that's just more of the heart blaming something, or the head feeling or planning and trying to fix something. Instead, mindfulness of breathing is an alternative. Can we be with our experience? And then we'll discover, if we can just be with our experience with care, with warmth, with openness as best we can, then the best version of ourselves shows up. Our best wisdom, warm-heartedness. So then what to do next becomes more clear. It gets born out of care and wisdom, which is different than the sense of, "Oh my gosh, this is very uncomfortable. I have to fix it." That's something different. Chances are you'll do different activities. Or if you're doing the same activity, it has a different feeling. All of us recognize this. If something is done out of care and wisdom versus if it's done out of a certain discomfort and urgency.

So this is one way in which mindfulness of breathing can really be transformative: it gives us what you might say is some breathing room. Some breathing room in which there isn't this jump to fix or blame, complain, or collapse—these different ways in which we can respond to difficulties that might not be so helpful.

Another way that mindfulness of breathing can really be a support for our practice and for our life is that our breath is connected to our inner life in obvious ways and subtle ways. Some of it is just simple physiology. All of us have this experience. If there's a longer exhale, there's just a little bit more relaxation that happens. This is the way the human body works. At the same time, it's really hard to be relaxed if there's a lot of short inhales, right? That's more like crying or something like this. So it's just a way in which our basic biology means that our breath is connected to our inner life. Our breath influences our inner life, our mood, our experience. But also the other way: our emotions, our thoughts have an impact on the breath too.

I know in my role as a dharma teacher, and when I'm teaching retreats, or in any other setting in which I'm having a one-on-one discussion with anybody, I'm really paying attention to their breath. Of course, I'm paying attention to the words, but I can tell by the way that they're breathing what's happening inside, what they're not able to say. And often it's not something we can control. When there's a deeper understanding or a letting go, there's an exhale that happens. And if somebody is just breathing really fast or shallow, I can tell there's a lot of agitation, even though they might not be articulating this. So even if you're not so in tune to how your breath is telegraphing your inner life—even if you're not aware of it, others can be. When we're angry, we're breathing differently than when we have joy. When we're confused, we're breathing differently than when we are happy. Excitement, tension, sadness, they show up in the way that we breathe. And so there's a way that mindfulness of breathing sometimes can tune us into what's happening in our inner life.

If you have a meditation practice in which you have a steady practice or do sits for a certain duration, you'll notice that the experience of the breath changes throughout the meditation period. And this is a kind of hallmark of when things are starting to get collected or gathered. When the mind and the body are starting to get settled, then the breath starts to get more quiet, more subtle, a little bit more difficult to detect. And sometimes people come and say, "Oh, I'm so afraid of my breath. It feels like I'm not even breathing." And when I notice that, I take a big breath just because it feels like I'm not breathing. So mindfulness of breathing is a way in which we can gain some greater understanding, some greater intimacy, some greater connection to our inner life, as well as be a support for our inner life, whatever happens to be happening there.

And as this mindfulness of breathing starts to allow the awareness to rest there, from this place of rest, we might say we can see more clearly. And what do we see more clearly? There's this way in which the breath becomes not only a place of refuge—if we have the breath which we're using as an anchor, mindfulness of breathing, then we notice when the mind is drifting and maybe getting in an argument with the heart or something like this, and then we just begin again with mindfulness of breathing. And then the mind drifts and has to solve that problem or rehash that conversation, and then we come back again to the sensations of breathing. And then we're like, "Oh yeah, okay. There's that grocery list. I've got to remember to pick these four things up at the store on the way home." And then we come back to the sensations of breathing. More and more, we just start to stay here at the sensations of breathing. And maybe the mind drifts a little bit and we just start to come back. It drifts a little bit and we start to come back, and then we start to stay here. It becomes a refuge. It becomes a place to rest.

Not so that we are avoiding everything. It's not about hiding. It is not about repressing. It's about maybe having some less busyness, more clarity. And as this happens, we begin to notice, "Oh yeah, this breath," as I've been describing, "changes." Not only is an inhale felt differently than an exhale, and not only is the transition between inhales and exhales different, but different breaths are different. They feel differently. There's the arising of the breath, and there's the ending of the breath.

Some of you might be familiar with this practice of Anapanasati^[2]. Perfectly fine if you haven't heard of this and you don't know. But in here is this instruction just to notice: is the breath deep or is it shallow? Is it long or is it short? And as you start to notice, you realize, "Oh, actually it's not only the breath that's changing, everything's changing."

And so there's this shift from being connected with or concerned with the content of our experience—whether it's the long grocery list, or rehashing that conversation, or rehearsing what we're going to do or say to that person. And instead, we start to notice the process. "Oh yeah, there's a lot of thinking that has some agitation, has some energy behind it. Oh yeah, the emotions feel heavy, but they're not as heavy as when I started the meditation period. And the thinking that I was rehashing or rehearsing, it's not as fast as it was before. I didn't have as much energy behind it, as much pressure behind it."

And then when we start to see this again and again and again, that things are changing, something happens in our relationship to it, to whatever the experience might be, whatever the emotions or the thoughts. There's this way in which things maybe don't feel quite as solid. We've slapped a label on it: "Big Problem." We've slapped this label on it. And underneath this label is a black heavy box. But all of a sudden, we start to see, "Oh no, actually it's changing a little bit. Maybe the problem isn't there exactly the same way all the time." It starts to feel maybe a little bit less heavy, a little bit less impenetrable, and a little bit more like a collection of experiences or sensations.

When we start to notice the changing nature of things, it starts maybe to lose some of their problemness. I'm not saying that we have to wait until everything gets completely fixed or something like this. I'm just saying about seeing less of their solidity and more of their fluidity. All experiences have both of these qualities, we could say. But this sense of stuckness that we have with problems is because we aren't seeing some of the changing nature. Sometimes the changing nature does seem to be the problem also. But is there a way in which we can see that our relationship to the changing nature is also changing? Everything's changing on some scale, big or small. Some is obvious, some is very subtle. So seeing the changing nature helps the problemness to drain away. And there's a way in which the mind, completely on its own—we don't have to make this happen—just feels like, "Oh, maybe I don't need to hold on to this so much." This idea is like you'll get rope burn as it's moving. And this letting go, whether it's just a little bit or a big letting go, is always the doorway to more freedom. Always.

It's not something that we absolutely have to force to happen, but there's this way in which we can just meet experience the way that it is. And as best we can, make this shift from content to process. From the content of our thoughts and emotions to the process, which is changing. And mindfulness of breathing helps this shift to happen.

I am not saying that we should never solve any problems. That's ridiculous. I am not saying that we should just avoid everything. I'm saying there's more than one way to be with our experience instead of just one very long list of things to do. Can there be a way that our relationship can shift to experiencing less holding on, fixing, trying to make it different, and more maybe just loosely holding on with our hands open, instead of a clenching? More with an open-handed way.

I know that when I first started this idea of, "Okay, well, maybe I don't have to jump in the middle and fix everything in the way that I thought I did," it was exhausting trying to fix everything, try to get the world just right. Then I discovered that some things fix themselves. Maybe not in the way that I imagined they would, but some of them fixed themselves, or their importance kind of diminished. Not everything, some things.

And so the invitation is to find for yourself, with mindfulness of breathing, there can be some calming, some settling, a place to rest if you will. And from this place of rest, we can see more clearly. We can see more clearly what's really happening. We can see more clearly the process instead of just the content. And then some letting go can happen. And this letting go is the doorway to freedom, the doorway to peace and ease. We know this, the Second Noble Truth, right? The Buddha is talking about this. This holding on is a cause of suffering (dukkha^[3]). And it's amazing how subtly we can be holding on without even knowing that we're doing it, that we won't be able to see or recognize or feel unless there's some calmness or collectedness, which mindfulness of breathing can help with.

So I started this talk with this kind of fun, playful poem which I really enjoy. I love the whimsy and playfulness of it. And part of what I think is so beautiful about Buddhist practice is how it holds everything. We could just stick with mindfulness of breathing as a way to help us with our heart and our head's everyday stuff. And the same thing can lead to more and more freedom, peace, and ease. And this is most often how people's practice starts. They start a practice, they just want to feel better. I don't blame them. Of course, we all want to feel better. And then we start to recognize, "Oh yeah, there's a little more ease here." And we stick with it and start finding more and more freedom.

So my wish for you is may you find some ease, may you find some peace and freedom with mindfulness of breathing. Just being aware of the breath that's with you all the time. Thank you.

And with that, I'll open it up and see if there are some comments or questions.

Q&A

Question: Thank you, Diana. That was lovely. So are you saying that if you never practice any other form of meditation than mindfulness of breathing, that is enough?

Diana Clark: Yes. Because something that I'll say is mindfulness of breathing is a little bit like being at the watering hole. If you're a photographer and you just hang out at the watering hole, then all the animals eventually come to you. If you just have a certain amount there, everything else will show up. But you know what? Actually, you shouldn't take my word for it. You can find out for yourself.

Question: Maybe related to that question. You mentioned a practice... Anapanasati? Could you talk a little bit more about that, maybe, and how we could go from basic focus on the breath to what that entails? I'm pretty curious.

Diana Clark: So Anapana^[4] is sixteen steps, and it starts with mindfulness of the breath. Sometimes it gets translated as knowing whether there's a long breath or a short breath, or knowing whether it's a deep breath or a shallow breath. It includes mindfulness of the breathing, knowing the body, and knowing the mind at the same time, associated with mindfulness of breathing. It also includes noticing—like I talked about here—the ways in which there's some letting go that happens. I'm kind of generalizing these sixteen steps. And this letting go leads to more and more freedom. It comes from the Anapanasati Sutta^[5]. I don't know if you listen to the 7 AMs, but I think Gil^[6] did like 42 classes on Anapanasati, or something like this. 42 or 24, I don't know—a lot. If you take the deepening meditation program series here, that's based on Anapana also. So there are a lot of resources there if you'd like to learn the specifics.

Questioner: Yeah, I'll check it out. Thank you.

Diana Clark: Mhm. Maybe over here.

Question: So all conditioned things are impermanent (anicca^[7]), and then you spoke of sort of seeing those conditions.

Diana Clark: I said just seeing the impermanence. Not the conditions, just seeing how things are arising and passing. That's different than seeing conditionality.

Question: How is it different?

Diana Clark: Just to feel how there's an inhale, and then the inhale stops, and there's a transition to an exhale. So there's an inhale. Just noticing how the inhale has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And then there's an exhale: beginning, middle, and end. Just noticing that it arises and passes away. That's different than saying, "Oh, it's because the abdomen moved down here, and the relationship between CO2 and O2 in the body was different, and so there were nerves that caused the diaphragm to move." So it's not about conditions. It's not what's underneath it. It's just seeing the changing, that it begins and ends. Does that make sense?

Questioner: Yes.

Diana Clark: Somebody else have a comment or a question?

Should I read this poem again? It's so funny. So all of these pages long. Okay, here we go. This is by John Roedel. "My Brain and Heart Divorced."

"My brain and heart divorced a decade ago over who was to blame about how big of a mess I have become. Eventually, they couldn't be in the same room with each other. Now my head and heart share custody of me. I stay with my brain during the week and my heart gets me on weekends, but they never speak to each other. Instead, they give me the same note to pass to each other every week. And their notes they send to one another always say the same thing. 'This is all your fault.'

On Sundays, my heart complains about how my head has let me down in the past. And on Wednesday, my head lists all of the times my heart has screwed things up for me in the future. They blame each other for the state of my life. There's been a lot of yelling and crying.

So lately, I've been spending a lot of time with my gut, who serves as my unofficial therapist. Most nights I sneak out of the window in my rib cage and slide down my spine and collapse on my gut's plush leather chair that's always open for me. And just sit, sit, sit, sit until the sun comes up.

Last evening, my gut asked me if I was having a hard time being caught between my heart and my head. I nodded. I said I didn't know if I could live with either of them anymore. My heart is always sad about something that happened yesterday, while my head is always worried about something that may happen tomorrow.

My gut just squeezed my hand. I continued, 'I just can't live with my mistakes of the past or my anxiety about the future anymore.'

My gut smiled and said, 'In that case, you should go live with your lungs for a while.'

I was confused. The look on my face gave it away.

'If you are exhausted about your heart's obsession with the fixed past, and your mind's focus on the uncertain future, your lungs are the perfect place for you. There is no yesterday in your lungs. There's no tomorrow there either. There's only now. There is only inhale. There's only exhale. There is only this moment. There's only breath. And in that breath, you can rest while your heart and head work their relationship out.'

This morning, while my brain was busy reading tea leaves, and while my heart was staring at old photographs, I packed a little bag and walked to the door of my lungs. Before I could even knock, she opened the door and with a smile and a gust of air embraced me and said, 'What took you so long? What took you so long?'"

It's very sweet.

So, I'm wishing you a wonderful rest of the evening and safe travels home. Thank you.