Meditation Technique pt.1: Mindfulness of Breathing

One of my favorite Buddha images, Sukhothai Historical Park.

In my last post, I talked about the conditions that lead to the experience of seeing clearly, or vipassana meditation. In this post, I want to begin the discussion of the actual techniques that I personally use to steer this journey in the right direction, so as to avoid the numerous pitfalls that await any unsuspecting practitioner.

So what are these pitfalls?

To me, the practice of meditation is like walking a tight-rope, with craving on one side and aversion on the other. Basically, the Buddha said that these two things, plus the third of ignorance, are what keep us locked in the wheel of samsara, or suffering. Craving, in meditation, can be seen as reaching for positive experiences and aversion as pushing negative ones away. In either experience, the mind isn't equanimous. That is to say that it isn't calm, centered, and steady. Another way of looking at it is to say an equanimous mind is always content with what it has, and it doesn't look to change things.

This doesn't mean that we don't want to improve our lives, but that we are willing to accept and be at peace with the way things for us in this very moment. As it turns out, this acceptance is the key to manifesting change.

In order to see clearly into the nature of the mind and the reality of any given moment, we need to develop a mind that is calm, steady, and centered. When we practice observation, we take a step back from our reality and into the space of the silent observer, making it easier to see these three poisons, as they are called, of craving, aversion, and ignorance at work in our lives all the time, without us even knowing it.

So when I sit down for my daily meditation practice, I use a variety of techniques to calm the mind and maintain awareness. Or I should say I try, because much of the time, I am unable to achieve this. "Try" is a tricky word though, as the idea about Right Effort is a fine line. If you try too hard, the mind is overstrained, if you don't try hard enough, the mind is too scattered. In the middle, somewhere, is concentration.

So what do I try?

Meditation in Therevada Buddhism generally comes in two flavors: vipassana and samatha. Samatha is calm-abiding and vipassana is clear-seeing. Some like one more than the other, some practice both. I see them as connected, and have noticed that many times, clear-seeing follows calm abiding. So oftentimes, I start with a concentration practice that leads to samatha.

Breathing. The breath is the most consistently recognizable aspect of our direct experience of any given moment. It's always happening. So is the heart, but the heartbeat is much more subtle and therefore more difficult to perceive. This makes the breath a great place to start. The point of concentration is to keep your attention fixed on the present moment. Observation leads to attention. So basically, one way or other, you want to watch the breath. Some people don't like this description, and prefer to think of it as being the breath, so as to not create a duality between the experience of breathing and the experiencer. Either way, it's not something that you need to think about.

Since I like to keep my home practice nice and loose and relaxed, I don't always use one technique for practicing mindfulness of breathing. Sometimes, I focus only on the sensation of the breath coming and and going out of the tip of the nostril, as taught by Pa Auk Sayadaw, a Buddhist monk and meditation teacher from Burma. This is the technique that I find to be the most effective, as there is no movement in the location of where the breath is actually being observed or perceived. When my concentration moves, my mind tends to move as well. Having a fixed point to observe keeps my mind steady, and even though there is movement in the breath passing through the nostrils, the location of the observation remains the same.

When my intention is weak, I find that my mind is unable to focus on such a small aspect of my experience. On days like this, I just try to pick up any part of the breath I can. I notice that when I am practicing like this, the clarity of concentration is minimal compared to those days when my intention is stronger and I am determined to watch the breath at the tip of the nose. But somedays, I am just content with even trying to practice anything, so I don't push my luck.

A couple of years ago, mindfulness of breathing was the extent of my practice, and I sort of took in the whole experience of the breath coming in through the nose, going down the throat, and filling the belly, before going back out again. At that point, I was counting 1 through 10 on the exhalations, and then starting over again. After coming across some more teachings and a little bit of self-analysis, I sort of realized that my point of concentration had somehow shifted from the breath to the act of counting itself. That's not to say that this technique doesn't work, it's just that you have to be careful and check in to see what you are actually concentrating on.

When my concentration is weak, I still use counting, but when I don't need it, I let it go. 

As soon as I realized that my concentration from breathing, or counting as it was, was weak, I'd just go back to the breath. Always back to breath. My mind would wander, and I'd bring it back. It would wander again, and I would bring it back again. There was no other aspect of my practice. When I started to look at the other aspects of my experience, such as the mind's tendency to bring forth judgment and criticism, a whole other world seemed to open up for me. Now, at any moment in my life, I can use this practice of checking in with the mind to see what's happening there. It's a wonderful partnership, mindfulness of breathing and mindfulness of mind.

I don't want to get too much into mindfulness of mind in this post, but I am a big believer in it's importance in every practice of mindfulness, due to it's tendency to show up and take over.


So when the mind is unable to stay with the experience of breathing, what happens next? 

This is when the practice really helps us see how our minds like to take something small, blow it out of proportion, and turn it back around on ourselves. Here we are, practicing meditation and doing something good for ourselves, and as soon as the mind slips in concentration, we find the judgmental mind steps in to tear us down for it.

"What's wrong with you, why can't you concentrate?"

This is something that you will probably hear from day one. First of all, you should ask, "Who are you?" There's no one here but you, so you don't need to listen when the voice in your head is trying to talk to you like you are someone else. Basically, the voice in yourself is like a wind-up toy, and is no one. You are the one listening and feeling bad for what this voice is telling you.

Don't believe the voice in your head!

What I do when I "catch" this voice beating me up for my inability to focus, which happens on a daily basis, is I do my best to let it fall off of me. Like a hot coal, it can only hurt me if I catch it, which is exactly what we tend to do when we don't know that this voice is not worth listening to. Sometimes, my response is somewhat of an internal laugh, sometimes even an external smile. "Ha," I say back to it, "I see you at work, and I know you aren't real." 

Careful to not start a lengthy dialogue with this voice in your head, or try too hard to figure out where "you" stop and the voice begins. It doesn't really matter, just notice its tendency to bring negativity into the forefront of your experience and that will be enough for you to stop believing it. As far as dealing with it without believing it, well, that seems to take practice. Since this voice runs the show for us much of the time, it's not exactly an easy transition to make.

Keep "calling it out" and it will lose its power over you. 

Don't judge it, and don't pick a fight with it. Just by shining the light of awareness into the dark places in our lives, healing takes place. You don't need to bring in the troops; flicking on the light-switch is enough. If you try to fight back, you will find your mind has lost its balance. If you stay present, and neither grab this hot coal, nor try to swing at with a bat, you will notice that your mind has become calm, stable, and has the ability to watch your direct experience as it is happening.

When you have this experience of calm presence, just keep practicing like this, neither grabbing for anything nor pushing anything away. As soon as you throw a party for yourself for "arriving" in the moment, your bouncer probably didn't see the ego sneak in the back door and now you're back in your story, thinking about how great you are and this and that. But don't believe these stories either, they probably just come from a deeper seated sense of lack and insecurity, which is probably caused from believing that voice in your head for all these years...

The great thing about meditation is that you don't need to look into everything, it will come looking for you!

Angkor Thom, Cambodia

Lately, in preparation for an upcoming 21-day vipassana course I plan to participate in, I have been trying to practice concentrating on the rising and falling of the stomach, but with little success. And by success, I mean that I have found it very hard to concentrate on this aspect of breathing as it tends to be more subtle, especially when the breath is relaxed and shallow.

So how should I be breathing?

Well, in short, you shouldn't be doing anything. We want to move toward observing any aspect of our direct experience for the way it is, not for the way we think it ought to be. Controlling the breath is not necessary, just simply allow it to be however it wants to be. Sometimes, it will be short. Sometimes, it will be long. It can be smooth or choppy. It can be deep or shallow. When it's deep and long, it's easier to observe. When it's shallow and short, it can be very difficult to observe. When the mind becomes relaxed, sometimes it feels like breathing has stopped altogether, and sometimes it does. If the breath has disappeared from your ability to observe it, just stay with the experience of waiting for it to return. It will.

The breath is the only thing you need to practice with when it comes to meditation, but for my mind, I find it helpful to include other aspects of my direct experience. For example, my attempts to concentrate solely on breathing will be met with all sorts of obstacles that are constantly changing. It could be mental chatter, pain in the body, sleepiness, or some sort of mood/attitude. If I am in a bad mood, can't focus long enough to stay with more than 3 or 4 breaths, and have shooting pains in my back, I just find it's better to go to those other experiences than to try to stay on the breath.

At one retreat I sat, the teacher, Steve Armstrong, related the practice of concentration to being like a bulldog guarding its bone. There can be an intense amount of focus and peace there, but when "life" happens, some of the various other techniques I practice can be useful in helping me avoid dead-ends and circular tracks of mental activity.

There's nothing miraculous about the practice of mindfulness of breathing, at least not in the beginning.
When you try it, and are honest with yourself, you will find that is very hard to stay focused on the breath for any amount of time. The mind will slip away very quickly, and go to any one of the things that is floating around just below the surface and waiting to pop up into our lives.

The breath is an anchor, and can help to steady the mind when the seas are rough. It's probably not something that you want to skip over completely, in pursuit of some "better" technique. Just because many people don't use this as their main practice, doesn't mean that you don't need it. As I said, it's always there, and will always be there until you die. If you only know how to deal with pain or rocky emotions, what will you do when the skies are clear and there is no turbulence?

Meditation is not just a cure for your ailments. It's more than that, it's meant to elevate your state of consciousness into a higher realm, and is relevant in every moment of your life. Don't worry about that too much though. For now, just keep breathing, and try to remain connected to the direct experience of the breath. Whether it's at the nostril or the belly, whether you count or you don't, just keep watching. 

In my next post, I'll talk about another technique that is closely related, but seems to warrant it's own category, and that is mindfulness of body.