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Mindfulness of Breathing (1) Introduction

It's a good day, and it is nice to be here with all of you, nice to be sharing this. As we begin this week, for the theme of this week and actually for the coming weeks, I would like it to be mindfulness of breathing.

There are a number of motivations for this. One is that it is the beginning of the year, and I thought it would be good to go back to basics. Many of us have been sitting for many months now at the 7:00 AM sitting, and we've done a wide range of teachings and ideas. But it's also always good to come back to basics. In a sense, I think it's always good to start over again, almost as if we're a beginner. One of the basic practices that I like to teach is mindfulness of breathing, which I think is pretty obvious since in most of the guided meditations I've been doing, breathing has absolutely been a big part of it.

So, back to basics, but also because of the Buddha's teachings on breathing and the full potential of breathing. Mindfulness of breathing is not just a beginner practice or a basic practice. It is really a practice that can take us all the way to awakening. All the full depth and range of what Buddhism is about, much of it is available through mindfulness of breathing. The path of practice can be negotiated through the path of mindfulness of breathing.

One of my favorite teachings of the Buddha is, in fact, his specific, detailed instructions for mindfulness of breathing. He gives sixteen steps, sixteen stages of deepening, a kind of a map for deepening or filling out the experience of mindfulness of breathing all the way to awakening. These sixteen steps are an opportunity to look at a whole series of different aspects of the spiritual life, meditation life, and our own life that goes deeper and deeper. It is no longer just the basic beginning practice, which breathing can be, but the breathing opens up to these other dimensions which are quite wonderful.

Over this next period, I'd like to go through these sixteen stages of mindfulness of breathing. Some people know it by its Pali name. It's usually called Anapanasati^[1], in which sati means mindfulness, and anapana means mindful of breathing in and breathing out, inhaling and exhaling.

It begins very simply, and then it develops. As the concentration develops, as the intimacy develops, it becomes more and more developed—this whole teaching and this practice. I don't know how long it will take, but I thought we would just have that open-ended for a while as we go through these, maybe for the month of January. I trust that doing this will create a very strong foundation for the rest of the year.

I'm also pretty confident that the foundation you have had from this last—and for some of you, nine months of the 7:00 AM sitting—will serve you really well for going through this Anapanasati. I know that for some people, mindfulness of breathing doesn't work so well, and there are many reasons for that. There are many reasons not to have breathing as the central focus of meditation. It is completely fine to have other focuses in practice, other ways. But since this is what I've been doing so much over these last months, I'm trusting that those of you who are sticking with this have some beneficial relationship to mindfulness of breathing, and so that will work for you.

If you don't, you are welcome to ignore the breathing instructions and references to breathing, and translate them to how you're practicing. Some of the dynamics, how things unfold and evolve in these sixteen steps of Anapanasati, sixteen steps of breathing, also unfold when there are other meditation subjects, other ways of doing mindfulness practice. Hopefully, you will be able to recognize yourself in some of these other steps as we go along and see how they come into play for you.

I've been practicing mindfulness of breathing for probably forty-five years, and I do not tire of it. I find it actually becomes richer and more interesting as time goes along. It is one of my favorite things to do, and I feel very grateful. I feel like I've been transformed in wonderfully beneficial ways by this mindfulness of breathing practice that I do.

It is a mindfulness practice of breathing that's not pure mindfulness. One of the reasons I like to emphasize mindfulness of breathing is that staying with breathing has a dual function. It's a wonderful place to cultivate mindfulness, and it's also a wonderful place to cultivate concentration. To be able to cultivate those together is part of the benefit of mindfulness of breathing compared to other objects of mindfulness. The sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing are clearly also a way of developing concentration together with a constant mindfulness, an awareness of breathing itself. That's one of the reasons I like doing it.

I also just like the intimacy with breathing, the intimacy with oneself. Breathing is not just a mechanical activity. It is not just simply an exchange of oxygen with carbon dioxide in our body. How much we need to breathe, how much oxygen we need to take in, depends on the activities we're involved in. Running requires us to breathe differently than if we are sitting quietly.

But breathing also shifts and changes based on our relationship to what's happening in the world and our relationship to ourselves. Depending on the emotions that come up for us, even our thoughts, what we think about, and how we relate to our thinking, can very subtly affect how we're breathing. Our whole life has threads that are intimately connected to how we breathe. Breathing sits at the crossroads of so much of our life. And sometimes if you sit at the crossroads, everything comes in there sooner or later.

To change the analogy, it's said that if you're a nature photographer in the plains of Africa and you want to take pictures of a lot of animals, one really good way to do that is to just sit at the watering hole and wait. All the animals sooner or later have to come to the watering hole, so you get to see them. It is a lot easier than going around searching through the plains for the animals.

In the same way with mindfulness of breathing, just about everything is related to breathing one way or the other. We sit there at the breathing in mindfulness of breathing, trusting that what needs to be taken care of, what needs to be attended to, will show itself in the breathing and how we breathe. It is all connected, and we see this deep connection to breathing, to the rest of our lives.

We see this in some of the wonderful words that the Greek and Latin words for breath are related to. In Greek, psyche is related to the word breath or breathing. So psychology is literally the study of breathing. Psyche is also related in Greek to mind or spirit. The way that breathing and mind, or spirit or inner life, are connected seems to be expressed in this Greek word psyche.

We see the same thing in the Latin words for breath, which can also mean spiritus. The word respire or respiration has the word spiritus in it, and to respire is to breathe again. The word spiritual contains within it this word for breathing. Spirit is related to that Latin word for breathing. I am very fond of the idea that the two words, spiritual and inspiration, both have this Latin word for breathing connected to them.

Then we have this wonderful connection—I like it since we're all together here at 7:00 AM in the morning—that the words conspiracy and conspirators also have this word breathing in them. We are a group of morning meditation conspirators, breathing together for these days. You find that in other languages as well, that the word for breathing is closely connected to words like our inner psychic energy or life force within us, the qi^[2] within us, or the prana^[3] within us. It seems to be a very common idea in human cultures that breathing is closely connected to something deep, inner, and spiritual, or the soul, the spirit, the mind, the heart—something quite intimate.

I find it quite marvelous that our breathing can sometimes feel like the most intimate thing within us, connected to what's most intimate, but it's also the interface with what is most not-self, not ourselves. Some people might say what's greater than self, but I think Buddhists would say maybe what is most not-self. Breathing is most our own, and most something which is not something we own, not our own. There's an interplay with this. This wonderful interplay between this intimacy and something that's beyond self, or greater than self, or freer than self, that is right there together with the breathing, points to the potential in breathing.

Now, it is not automatic that people should feel this intimacy or this wonderful potential that mindfulness of breathing has. Even for me, after all these years of practice, there are times when I sit down to meditate and the breathing is far from a really pleasant, intimate experience. I have something that I call my "cardboard breath," where it just feels like cardboard. It feels kind of dead, tasteless, and uninspired. I've learned that that's just how it is sometimes, and I just go along with it. Sooner or later it will change and be something else. I just trust that it is okay to be mindful of the breath, regardless of how the breath is. I don't have to have the breath be sweet, wonderful, or intimate. I just trust that it is really good just to be with the breath as it is.

Especially for people who are new, they can't imagine how the breathing is so wonderful and so profound. It seems so boring and plain, and so far away from the things that really give juice, excitement, and energy to life, or far away from things that will keep us safe. So, it is something that takes a while sometimes to learn and to settle into. But as we really find the potential of settling in and being relaxed, an inner world opens up. I like to think of this inner world as being represented by the English expression "breathing room." We sit in order to find lots of breathing room, to give breathing room to our full life, to have breathing room for our mind, our thoughts, our hearts. Rather than it being claustrophobic, breathing helps give all this room. There is something about settling in and focusing on breathing that makes more room, makes more intimacy, and makes more clarity in this life as we go along.

That is a general introduction to the plan for the next period of time. I will do some more introductory words tomorrow around mindfulness of breathing, specifically referring to the discourse that the Buddha taught on mindfulness of breathing, and then we'll start the sixteen steps. Thank you so much for being part of this and being here, and I look forward to our time tomorrow.

Announcements

Oh, and before we stop, I wanted to apologize for Friday. I had said last week we would have a community meeting on Friday, and I completely forgot about it when Friday came around. I apologize for that. Part of the reason for that was that I had a lot of family matters that occupied my time, and maybe even preoccupied me last week, so it completely slipped my mind. We'll do one hopefully soon, the community meeting, on a Friday. Thank you very much.