Not Just the Breath

Close your eyes. Take a couple of good, long, deep, in-and-out breaths, and notice where you feel the breathing in the body. When we use the word breath here, we’re not talking about the air coming in and out through the nose. We’re talking about the flow of energy in the body. Part of that flow is the energy that allows the air to come in, go out.

But there’s also a flow in every part of the body. Everywhere your nerves extend, everywhere your blood vessels extend, there’s energy. So where do you feel it most prominently? Focus your attention there. If long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you can change. Make it shorter, more shallow, heavier, lighter, faster, slower. You can experiment for a while to see what rhythm of breathing feels good for the body right now.

Of course, as you learn about the breath you’re going to be learning about the mind as well. I’ve heard people say, “Why focus on the breath as your meditation object? When you die it’s going to leave you right when you need it the most.”

Well, as you focus on the breath you’re not going to be only focusing on the breath. The Buddha also wants you to be sensitive to the feelings around the breath, your mind states around the breath—particularly the extent to which you engage in what he calls saṅkhāra, fabrication—how you talk to yourself, the perceptions you hold in mind, the feelings you create through your focus.

You can focus on the breath in a way that gives rise to feelings of pleasure, or you can make it give rise to feelings of pain. Right now we’re focusing on the pleasure so that the mind will want to stay in the present moment. Then you talk to yourself about the breath—whether long breathing feels better than short breathing, faster feels better than slower. You have a little bit of conversation going on inside. That’s to be expected for the mind to settle down properly. You have to adjust things for a while.

In this way, as you focus on the breath, you’re learning a lot about the mind, useful tings about the mind, because these processes of fabrication are how we engage in the world as a whole. Whether you’re meditating or not, you’re fabricating your response to the results of past kamma as they appear. You’re talking to yourself about things going on around you, and you hold certain perceptions in mind. And the way you breathe is going to have an impact on the feeling tone in the body, feeling tone in the mind.

As we meditate, we’re getting more sensitive to all these things. As you go through the day, as major events happen in life, you want to see how you’re engaging in fabrication, in what way you’re doing it without skill, in what way you can develop more skills.

So you’re learning a lot about the mind as you focus on the breath. The breath is like an anchor in the present moment. You want to get the mind anchored here so that you can see it clearly. When the mind is with the breath, you’re watching the mind in the present moment. That’s where you see a lot of things that you wouldn’t see when you’re running around to the past and future.

So try to get centered right here and then try to stay centered right here as much as you can. Even as you get up from meditation, you’ve got to tell yourself you’re getting up from the sitting posture, but you’re not leaving the meditation. You can watch your mind as you go through the day, anchored in the breath. You’ll learn a lot of valuable lessons.