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Mindfulness of Breathing (5 of 7) Intimacy with Breathing

It's an amazing process, the process of breathing. It sounds maybe kind of amazing that I would say that I didn't really learn to breathe until I was 21. What I mean by that is that I was living on a small farm, doing farm work every day and being outdoors every day quite a bit. It was a fairly remote place, so I didn't see a lot of people. There wasn't a lot of activity, no TV, and certainly back then no computers or internet. It was just a very settled and peaceful, quiet life of hard work.

To my surprise, at some point in that process, I felt a way of breathing that had greater ease, peacefulness, relaxation, and naturalness than I could ever remember having in my life. Probably I had it when I was small occasionally, but I didn't know to pay attention to it. So I felt like, "Oh, this is what breathing can be." I felt like in some ways I had learned to breathe in a nice way, and that capacity for an easy, relaxed breath comes and goes.

But what I love is to sit down to meditate and discover what my breathing is like today and now. It has so many different flavors, textures, and ways that it is. It's kind of like how no two snowflakes are supposed to be the same, or no two days have exactly the same weather. I love how, at least in this environment, the colors of the vegetation change. No two days are all the greenery the same. There's fresh spring green, a settled green of the summer, and then things getting drier and drier, and maybe turning colors. Every day there's a change. The same thing goes for the breath: every breath is different, every day the breathing is different.

To sit down to be with breathing is a process of discovering, "Oh, that's how it is today." Inevitably, what I find is that if I can just allow myself to leave myself alone and allow the settling to happen, the breathing begins to relax, settle, and become freer and more at ease than it was when I first sat down, especially if I've had a busy day.

Leaving Ourselves Alone

That's one of the functions of mindfulness of breathing: to get out of our own way. Meaning, not to be so actively involved with projects, doings, fantasies, memories, discursive thoughts^[1], and conversations in our head. These are often closely connected to our emotions, desires, and drives, so that the physical body gets activated and aroused in different ways, one way being arousal with tension and holding patterns.

To sit down to meditate with the breath is a way of stepping away from discursive thought, stepping away from the mind always doing and being active, trying to figure something out or accomplish something. We let things settle. This settling then allows the body to settle because the body is not being activated by the activated mind.

As I said before, one of the functions of mindfulness of breathing is to interrupt the continuity of this discursive mind. Sometimes the discursive mind is entertaining, wonderful, and valuable, and I don't want to diminish its important role when it does have one. But not a few of us discover that a high percentage of discursive mind and thinking is not particularly useful or helpful. Occasionally we might even recognize that what's going on in there is a bit of nonsense. So, to have the ability to stop doing that, to interrupt that flow of discursive thought simply by taking a moment to land in the physical experience of breathing, is like moving our attention from one place where it has been hijacked by discursive thought and choosing to place it someplace where it's maybe useful to be, or is a safe alternative.

That interruption begins to lessen the pull of discursive thinking. You won't feel it each time you let go of your thoughts, but if you do it repeatedly over and over again, slowly that pull into discursive thought, that fascination with discursive thought, begins to lessen and it's easier to stay present. As we become able to stay more and more with our breathing in a relaxed, simple way, trusting the experience of breathing, we learn how that itself is also a way of leaving ourselves alone.

We're not trying to accomplish something with mindfulness of breathing or get somewhere. It's not another kind of accomplishment or goal. It's kind of like just hanging out, as we would hang out at the riverbank in a relaxed way watching the river go by, and all our cares and concerns begin to fall away. We're not trying to do anything on the riverbank watching the river; we're just there. So much settles, quiets, and disappears.

I call that leaving ourselves alone. To let the mindfulness of breathing develop continuity like that, like you're just watching the river go by, brings that kind of peacefulness and lack of project. It's not a project mind involved.

Relaxing Into Awareness

An important part of mindfulness of breathing is learning how to relax. Mindfulness of breathing is certainly not a tensing, it's not resisting something or asserting something, but a lot of it is learning the art of relaxing into attention, relaxing into awareness, relaxing into mindfulness of breathing.

We can talk about relaxing into awareness because awareness is a natural capacity of the mind that, if you're conscious and awake, is always there. You don't have to work at it. Some of it is just a matter of letting go of what obscures it: the discursive thoughts, a lot of concerns, projects, doing, judgments. Just keep opening to the natural capacity of awareness.

Excuse me for a minute, I have to cough. We have a fair amount of smoke here today again.^[2]

A Mirror for the Mind

One of the wonderful things about mindfulness of breathing is that it also begins teaching us. It's a mirror for understanding ourselves and teaching us how we are so involved in discursive thoughts, or how we're caught up in concerns, or that we are not relaxed. We're trying too hard or not trying enough, and all these kinds of things as we try to come back and have the regularity of breathing.

Many of you have heard the story I like to tell. Many years ago, I was up in the Santa Cruz Mountains, close to where the fires are now. I saw a stream of water, and I was sitting next to the stream. I couldn't tell whether the water was flowing. It seemed like it was completely still; it was very shallow water. So I put a little stick into the water vertically, and then I could see little waves forming on the edge of the stick. It showed me there in fact was a current, but it was very slow. I needed that reference point of the stationary stick in the water that showed there was a current flowing.

In the same way, mindfulness of breathing is like putting a little stick into the currents of our life, the currents of our mind. We start seeing much more how busy the mind is, how the mind might be out of control. We see how strong the pull is into our thinking and our concerns, or our pull into emotions. To see it clearly, to be able to see it more clearly because we have this reference point of breathing—the fact that it might be hard to stay with the breathing—is also a lesson. It's a mirror for what's going on with the mind that makes it hard.

In this way, I like to think of mindfulness of breathing as: it works when it doesn't work. You can't do it wrong. It works in a sense if you can actually stay with it for some time, hang out with it, and have some continuity. But when you can't have continuity with the breathing, if you use the breathing as a mirror to see better why you can't—not to analyze it, but just to notice, "Oh, the mind is very discursive, having all kinds of conversations, or there are a lot of strong emotions swirling around that I keep getting involved in and picking up"—then you see that's what's happening. You can see it more clearly now than you could before. And because you can't stay with the breathing but you can see more clearly what's happening for you, mindfulness of breathing has worked. It helps us to be mindful of how we are. So I like to think of it that way, that mindfulness of breathing works even when it doesn't work.

A Movement Towards Freedom

Mindfulness of breathing also, as we begin to relax into it, is a movement towards freedom. In mindfulness of breathing, the more we can stay with the breathing, the more the mind begins to let go, relax, and soften. That movement of relaxation, letting go, softening, is a movement towards what Buddhism calls liberation^[3]. Sometimes that can be felt with the exhale. It's letting go, releasing with the exhale. We get maybe at some point a small little taste of some qualitatively nice freedom, letting go and relaxing and trusting the exhale. Parts of the exhale just say, "Oh, okay, letting go."

It's kind of like when people say, "Ah," in a nice way. It's a really nice thing they do on the exhale. So it's a kind of gentle, soft letting go that can happen there. I'll talk more about that tomorrow morning—breathing and letting go, freedom.

Thank you for being part of this, and I hope that this supports you in just a greater appreciation for your breathing. Even if breathing is difficult for you, and there are lots of times we have challenges with the breathing, I'm hoping that there might be just some little kernel of what I'm saying that you might find useful and supportive. I look forward to seeing you all next time.