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Mindfulness of Breathing (1 of 7) Introduction to Breathing

So my greetings to all of you. To introduce the theme for this week, it's going to be mindfulness of breathing. I have this idea over the next few weeks to cover some of the basics of mindfulness meditation. Basics doesn't necessarily mean that it's just introductory for people who are new; the basics are central and important for people who practice for a long time. Sometimes going back to basics is a way of really allowing the practice to grow and deepen, even for experienced practitioners.

For this week, I'll do seven days on this theme. We'll continue through Saturday and Sunday as well here in California at 7:00 AM. Seven days on different aspects of breathing and different ways of focusing on it, understanding it, or benefiting from it.

The Core Practice of Anapanasati

Breathing is one of the really core practices of all of Buddhism. Some emphasis on breathing for meditation is probably the most common form of Buddhist meditation practice. It goes back to the time of the Buddha, where the only meditation practice the Buddha really referred to as the meditation that he did was Anapanasati^[1]—mindfulness of breathing in and breathing out.

He sometimes went off on retreat into the forest for a couple of weeks or a month at a time, and he would tell people that what he was practicing there was mindfulness of breathing. One of the most detailed instructions for meditation that survived from that time is a meditation practice called Anapanasati, which outlines the sixteen stages or sixteen approaches of mindfulness of breathing.

Breathing at the Crossroads of Our Lives

Breathing sits at the nexus, the crossroads of all these different parts of our lives. They have to do with our emotional lives. As our emotional lives shift and change, so does our breathing. It has to do with how we respond and react to the world around us; then our breathing responds accordingly. If we feel afraid and go into a fight-or-flight mode, the breathing adjusts itself or changes to have the energy and the oxygen needed to really do the fight or flight. Just because we're anxious in a situation, we can expend a tremendous amount of energy. But if we recognize how the breathing has changed and gotten tight—maybe more chest breathing, or faster, or more shallow sometimes—and we learn to relax, then the fight-or-flight response can disappear. It can relax, and we can be more present in a calm and useful way in situations where we don't need to fight or flight.

Breathing also interfaces with how we're thinking and what we're thinking about. It interfaces with our physiology and what goes on in our bodies. These are all two-way streets, two-way directions. As the world around us changes, the breathing changes. As we change the breathing, as we relax and open the breathing, our relationship to the world can change. If we're tense and we learn to relax through our breathing, the tension can relax as well.

The ways in which we're trapped and caught in very strong rumination, very strong patterns of thinking—you might see that that also affects how we breathe. Sometimes we hold our breathing if we're really gripped by certain kinds of thoughts and ideas. But as we relax our body and relax the breathing, the mental grip around certain thoughts begins to relax as well.

There's this fascinating crossroads, and if you sit at the crossroads of breathing, it's a vantage point from which to see so many different aspects of our lives come into play. If you want to really study your life from one vantage point and be able to see the widest range of who you are and what goes on in your relationship to the world, probably nothing is better than just sitting there with breathing and watching the breath go on. It's a doorway to understand so much.

Discovering Ease and Natural Breathing

Of course, breathing is not always easy. To focus mindfulness on breathing can take a while to learn. There's this wonderful story of G.I. Gurdjieff^[2], a spiritual teacher in the beginning of the 20th century. He went, I think, to places like Pakistan to study deep in the mountains with Sufi masters, these Islamic mystics. He showed up to see his teacher, and his teacher asked why he was there. Gurdjieff said, "I'm here to learn how to breathe." At which point the teacher apparently laughed quite a bit, and for the next years, he taught him how to breathe.

Most of us know how to breathe, but to really learn how to have this relaxed breath and open breath, to really feel at home in our breathing, is something that I didn't discover until I was about twenty. I lived a rural life for a while, living on a farm, and through the physical work of farming and being outside a lot, I discovered feelings of breathing in a natural, relaxed, easy way that I couldn't remember ever having had before. It showed me what was possible.

Then, as I learned to meditate, that capacity for natural breathing came back. It probably came back easier because of the experience I had on the farm. This idea of really discovering ease with the breath—in the Buddha's language, the word for assurance is the same word as to breathe easily^[3]. To breathe easily and discover really how wonderful it is to rest and be with an easy breath all through the day is one of the great benefits I feel from the years of meditation practice I've done.

I am really in touch with my breathing much of the day. It's almost automatic for me much of the time; part of my attention is there on what goes on with my breathing. It's an early warning system for me. I can start noticing how my breathing is and how it changes. It is an indication of how my mood is changing, my mind, my intentions, what I want, what I'm trying to do, all kinds of things.

It isn't that I always feel like I have to keep a relaxed breath. Sometimes when I'm doing physical work, the breathing goes all kinds of ways. Last week I was backpacking and walking up some of these steep hills in the Sierras. I would not say my breathing was relaxed, but I really enjoyed the heavy breathing, the heavy work of doing it. So you do not always have to feel you have to have a relaxed breath, but you have the capacity to come back to that as a baseline.

Working with Control and Tension

One of the things that I had to learn early on about breathing was how much I held my belly tight much of the day. It was only in meditation that I started to realize that, and I would try to keep the belly relaxed. I learned very quickly I shouldn't make it the main project in meditation, but I would do it two or three times in the course of a meditation practice session to relax the stomach.

Sometimes it would just tighten up right away, but then over the months, I was able to keep these periods of a relaxed belly more and more. That became a fantastic reference point. Because of this relaxed belly, I can now see so much about what goes on when it does tighten up, which I couldn't see when it was always tight. There was no variation, and so there was no learning then. But to have it relaxed enough to see the variation allows for much greater learning about what goes on.

Some people will control the breathing. Some people find it hard to focus on their breath; they interfere with it or they breathe too hard if they're focusing on it. Some people have had certain kinds of accidents or events happen to them earlier in life that make breathing difficult. So, certainly, it's possible not to use breathing as the primary focus for meditation, and some of you maybe already have found other things to do.

However, it is valuable to give yourself a chance to try to learn about it. It takes a while, just like it took a while for me to learn to relax the tension in my belly. It takes a while sometimes to learn how to effectively be with the breathing in a relaxed, soft way, without controlling it, fixing it, and breathing harder just because we're focusing on it. One of the ways to learn that is actually to learn that we are doing that, and that's our tendency. Once we see that tendency, then we can maybe find a way to adjust and find a way to do it that is more relaxed and open. It takes a while, like learning to ride a bicycle.

Two things that I've learned about that. First, when I was controlling my breathing, I found it useful to go to the back ribcage and focus on the subtle movements of the back ribcage and the spine as I was breathing. That was a place that was removed from the front where the control was. The control was more in the front, with the front of the diaphragm and the chest. By focusing on the back, I pulled myself out of the area of control, and it was easier to relax with the breathing. Then, when I was relaxed and present, I would come in through the back door, sneaking into the front, and be with the breathing in the front.

The other thing that I learned that's very effective is not to be concerned about a controlled breath or the difficulty of breathing, and just to be very content. What we're trying to do here, fundamentally, is just to be mindful of breathing, just to be aware of breathing as it is. If it's a controlled breathing, then we become the world expert on what it's like to have a controlled breathing. That kind of attitude—that even controlled or uncomfortable breathing is worthy of attention and you can be relaxed about having it—supports things beginning to relax and soften on their own. We don't have to be the one who fixes it.

Conclusion

So that will be the focus this week, and I'll talk each day about some different aspect of mindfulness of breathing and how it interacts with all these different parts of our being and our relationship to the world. I hope that lays down a nice foundation for you, acts as a reminder of the foundation, or enhances your meditation practice and how you live your life as well.

I hope that you all stay safe. I hope those of you in California can stay out of the smoke the best you can, and that all of you are well protected from COVID-19 and illnesses and all kinds of challenges. I hope you take good care of yourselves, and that you'll take this mindfulness of breathing as part of your self-care. Thank you.