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Guided Meditation: Letting Go With Breathing

Warm greetings. Welcome to the meditation session, and welcome into this meditation community of ours. If this is your first time, a special welcome. You get a sense of the goodwill in this community through the chat that represents many people who come.

Many years ago, I went with my young son, who was maybe thirteen, for the only time in my life where I really went to play a round of golf. I don't know anything about golf, and I thought it would be fun to go with him. It was fun, and it turned out to be phenomenally difficult to hit the ball off that first tee. I was so surprised how many times I whiffed the ball on the tee. I remember finally hitting a really good, solid clunk against the ball, and my immediate thought was, "Wow, this is great!" And the ball rolled about four feet.

As we went around the course, there were maybe two or three times where I hit the ball off the tee pretty nicely for me. You could hear in the smack of the club against the ball that something was right. The ball lifted up into the air, and as it did so, my mind got really quiet. It was kind of like time stopped, and my mind just focused on the ball going up, up, up, out, away, sailing through the air, and then sailing down quite far away down the green. My thought at the time was, "Oh, this is why people do golf." The feeling of time stopping, and the feeling of almost becoming the ball flying through the air, was such a wonderful feeling of standing there in harmony with the natural world around me.

This idea of quieting the mind and really being present for something in the wonder of this life is part of what can happen in meditation. It's not easy, of course, for this to happen. But as we learn the art of release, letting go, and quieting our thoughts, one of the places that it's sometimes possible to have the same kind of feeling as I had watching the ball sail through the air is watching the breathing.

It's not so much the breathing that's so interesting as it is when the mind becomes still and quiet, and the attention is almost absorbed in the breathing, or becomes the breathing. There's no feeling of separation between awareness and breathing. In the breathing, there's awareness; in awareness, there's breathing. There's very little else going on, or if there is, it has receded far into the background.

To do that involves a quieting of the thinking mind. Some people focus on the idea of letting go of their thoughts, or quieting their thoughts, as a permanent thing—to sit down and be able to quiet it. But it might be more useful to think of it as happening in very small, short segments, small little episodes. Appreciate the small second, half a second, a moment when something about the thinking mind has paused quietly. There's a gap between thoughts, and what is wondrous there? What is it like to welcome or allow the breathing to really sail through that awareness like the golf ball sailing through the air?

For this meditation, I'd like to suggest that the practice have a lot to do with letting go. You have a lot of these momentary episodes of letting go and being quiet, so that more and more the awareness is fully available for just the breathing. Awareness is not split between thinking and trying to be with the breathing. When you're thinking, part of your awareness is dedicated to thinking. Let all that dedication of awareness go into just breathing—just breathing without any concern that you're trying to do anything more than allowing and welcoming the experience of breathing into awareness.

I'll guide us through it a little bit here. Take an upright posture, lowering your gaze, and gently closing your eyes. Take a few long, slow, deep breaths, and on the exhale, relax. Take a deep breath in, and release the shoulders and the belly. On the exhale, there can also be a release of any holding in the small of the back, any tightening or holding in the thighs or the arms. Then let your breathing return to normal.

With a normal breath, not focusing so much on working at breathing, maybe there's more attention that can go to the subtlety of holding in your body. Even in the quiet, subtle places where the body is tense or held, as you exhale, relax and let go. Also, as you exhale, soften the mind. Relax the thinking mind, especially if you can identify any tension, pressure, tightness, or physical agitation that's connected to thinking.

As you're breathing, relax and let go of your thoughts. Maybe your thinking is like a piece of cloth that is bunched up and creased, and as you exhale, you're flattening it out, straightening it out, quieting the thinking mind. Then become aware of the transition from the exhale to the inhale, and in that transition, allow yourself to receive the inhale. As you exhale, let go of your thoughts. Let go into the body's exhale. See if you can, in letting go of thoughts and quieting thoughts for a few moments, give your full attention to the experience of the body exhaling. It is maybe like you're watching a ball flying through the air, or a bird flying through the air, marveling at this natural process of breathing.

Every time you exhale, let go of your thinking, as if you're opening up a door or window to let the breeze of exhaling move through you. With every exhale that you let go of your thinking, don't concern yourself with how well you can do this; that's just more thinking. Be content to do it the best that is available, appreciating to whatever degree there's more awareness available to receive the experience of inhale and exhale. It is as if, for these minutes meditating, the most important thing happening is the body breathing, and you letting go of everything else so you can attend to and accompany your body breathing.

Feel your way into the deeper places that you can let go. Letting go, and letting go into that, and then letting go into your breathing.

As we come to the end of the sitting, one of the significant consequences of letting go and release is that we become available to experience the gifts of this life. When the mind is preoccupied with thoughts and anxiety, there's little room to be available for the wonder of our moment-to-moment life. If we turn that availability of attention—available to see, available to listen, available to perceive and be with other people—perhaps people will more often be seen as a gift, as a wonder. Maybe there's more ability to care and love, have goodwill, to listen deeply, to hear deeply, to see others deeply.

Perhaps as we come to the end of the sitting, you can imagine, in the best of circumstances, what it's like to let go deeply of your concerns, your thoughts, and judgments, and to be available to others. Available in the sense of being available to perceive them, to see them, to know them, so that they are seen clearly and known clearly, and they feel safe, known, cared for, and loved.

May it be that this meditation we do always has a role in the social world that we live in, to help make this a better world for ourselves and for others. May our ability to be available with our attention support the welfare and happiness of others. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free. And may we, in humble ways, contribute to that.

Dharmette: Breathing (5 of 5) Release is Peace

On this fifth talk about mindfulness of breathing, the topic is release. There is a saying in English—Buddhist English, maybe because it rhymes—that "release is peace." There's something about the proper or appropriate way of letting go that leads to peace. It leads to an availability. When attention is hijacked by our preoccupations... excuse me here, I don't have the mute button for the time being, so I have to hopefully take the mic away from my mouth to clear my throat.

To let go properly, we are letting go of the things that preoccupy our attention or awareness so awareness becomes more available. As awareness becomes more available, we're available to what is happening. Some of those things are uncomfortable—suffering or challenges. There's something very special about being available to see it, perceive it, and know it, as opposed to not being available, which implies or leads to feeling like it's a problem to fix, or feeling oppressed by it. Just being available: "Oh, this is difficult." It also helps us to be available for love, to be able to love, care, have goodwill, and be friendly.

This idea of letting go gives us all these wonderful gifts, and the gifts of being available to the world. It's a wonderful feeling to really be present walking and be available, rather than asserting ourselves into the world, seeing the world through our wants, fears, and aversions. Being available to what's happening also tends to lend itself to much more perceiving that this world, what happens, is a gift, rather than a right or a "should."

How does this relate to mindfulness of breathing? As we settle down in meditation and settle into something—it doesn't have to be the breathing; some primary focus that's appropriate for us, though breathing works for many people—as we settle down into the breathing, more and more of our attention is able to stay with it. The more we let go of our preoccupations and our thoughts—if they're easy enough to let go of, just let go and come back to the breathing; let go and let go into the breathing; let go and receive the experience of breathing and root ourselves in the breathing—the more that attention is available for breathing, the more the sense of availability, the feeling of being available, comes. We are less caught up in the world of thoughts, ideas, experiences, memories, or projections into the future that tend to be agitating. Our attention becomes more available for the breathing. The reciprocal aspect of that is that we're less caught up. The more you're able to focus on the breathing, the more there is a natural letting go, letting things fall away or no longer being involved in them. So sometimes we let go of thoughts, and sometimes we just hold the course with the breathing, staying with the breath, and less energy is given to the preoccupations.

As more attention goes to the breathing, more awareness gets gathered, it gets available, it's present, and it's not caught up in things which are not so healthy for us. The benefit of breathing in meditation isn't just that we can do it. The sense of availability also means we're available to what makes it difficult to be with the breathing. There are powerful forces in us that keep us distracted, caught up in thoughts, and swirling in our emotional life. Those should be respected deeply and not dismissed or feel like they're unwanted. To let go of what's easy enough to let go of, or to stay focused on the breath in the way that's relatively easy to stay focused, leads to being available for seeing more clearly what's going on in us. That's one of the values of meditation and breathing—not being successful at staying with the breathing, but how the effort to be with the breathing highlights more what's really happening for us.

Some people are so distracted by their distractions they don't know they're distracted. But if we have this reference point of attempting to be with the breath, even if you're not able to do it much, just the effort to do it is beneficial if it shows us much more clearly what is happening for us that keeps us away from the breathing, the preoccupations we have. Then there is this idea of being available for that: "Oh, so this too should be cared for, should be loved in a certain kind of way." In the coming weeks, I'll talk about mindfulness of the body, mindfulness of emotions, and mindfulness of thinking. That is how we practice with the things that are revealed as we attempt to do mindfulness of breathing, but these other things then get highlighted. Sometimes it's completely appropriate to not stay with the breath. To fight against everything else and stay with the breath is counterproductive. The art of learning to let go of breathing sometimes, to attend to these other things, is part of what I'll be teaching over the next few weeks. But for now, the topic is release with breathing. If you're able to really settle in and gather yourself on the breathing, there's a natural process of things being let go of: our concerns of the day, memories, and resentments we have that for the time being get forgotten. One of the values of meditation—something simple as breathing, over and over coming back to the breathing—is a cleansing, a kind of emptying of the preoccupations of the day, the momentum in the mind that goes on. And so there's a release that goes on.

Sometimes it's appropriate to support that release by a little bit of active effort at letting go. I see that on the exhale; maybe for other people it would be the inhale, but for me, it's the exhale that is a wonderful place to let go of my thoughts. It's amazing to this day how thoughts sneak in quietly through the back door of the mind, so that sometimes I don't really notice that I started to think again. But every time I begin exhaling, it's a time to notice my thinking. If it's easy enough to let go, I let go into the breathing, let go into a receiving of the experience of breath. If I can let go with the exhale, then I'm more available and more present to receive the gift of the inhale, the arising and appearing of the inhalation as it occurs. This rhythm of letting go with the exhale and receiving on the inhale is sometimes a wonderful way of supporting this process of release.

But talking about letting go on the exhale puts a lot of agency on the meditator, like this is what the meditator is supposed to do, and that can also keep us agitated and preoccupied. So sometimes we want to try to do this with a very light touch, without expectation, without a need for anything really to happen, without using it to judge ourselves, or to be in a hurry, as if we have all the time in the world. Sometimes if there's too much self going on and efforting, then it's easier to just simply stay with the breath the best you can. Hang in there, gather yourself on the breathing, and don't worry so much about letting go. The letting go will happen by itself the more we get gathered around the experience of breathing.

Then, as we keep practicing, the time will come when it will feel obvious that the right thing to do is to let go. It's such a healthy thing to let go of what is unhealthy, when it's not helpful, when it diminishes us or brings more agitation into us. The quieter the mind becomes, the more peaceful we are, the more we can see, "Oh, here I'm getting involved in that thought again. I've done that a thousand times. I don't need to do that," and let go. Then we let go back into the breathing, coming back to just breathing in and breathing out.

The deeper we go in meditation, the more that experience can be characterized as a release, either something that's very gradual over time or something that's very clear, like a big shift that happens suddenly. There's a little quantum shift, boom, and now we're here in a fuller way, embodied in a fuller way. Release is peace. Release helps us become available for our experience in our life and the people in our life. That availability makes us available to know suffering more intimately and clearly, not to suffer more, but to care more, to meet it in a new way, maybe with love. There's something about the availability to the challenging aspects of our life, the suffering, that can give rise to real love, compassion, care, and goodwill. Love supports letting go, letting go to be available, to feel the fullness of this life, all its aspects more fully, and then perhaps to love some more.

And so we go around and around. I hope that you will trust mindfulness of breathing. Give yourself over to it if you continue meditating through the weekend. Really trust it and be intimate with it, and see if some of what I'm talking about you can feel or sense in the very simplicity of mindfulness of breathing. Then on Monday, we'll talk about mindfulness of the body and have a week on that. So thank you all very much.