The breath
When I first started meditation, I thought the breath was the most boring thing they could have picked as a meditation object and I couldn’t wait to get to more advanced objects like visualization and mantras. But it was always the breath. Breathe in, breathe out.
As I learned more about different practices I found some monks do this breathing meditation for their entire lives. There is no more advanced practice. Just more advanced breathing practice. I despaired. What could be so fascinating about the breath that you would spend 40 years contemplating it?!
Buddhism isn’t a religion that expects blind faith. It’s based on allowing people to discover the truth for themselves. Investigation and experience are important aspects of Buddhism. So I was going to investigate why Buddhism is so fascinated with the breath.
I pretended to be intensely interested in the breath. I tried to be fascinated by every inhale and exhale. By every sensation in the nose or the throat. Unfortunately, this backfired on me and I actually became pretty fascinated with the breath. But the question I really needed to find an answer to was ‘why is the breath such a revered meditation object’? Why is it so special?
Like a lot of Westerners I’m not into the more ‘esoteric’ aspects of Buddhism, so I was looking for real reasons why the breath is a good meditation object. They also needed to be reasons that differentiated it from other types of meditation. For example, the breath is useful because it is with you at all times, so you can meditate anywhere, anytime. But that is true of other techniques too. You can always bring to mind the image of the Buddha. So ‘being available all the time’ is not a good enough reason for me to classify breathing as the greatest meditation object of all time.
Some of the reasons I found are obviously true and I don’t think anyone will argue with me about them. Other reasons are just my personal interpretation of how things work, or worded in ways that make sense to me.
So let’s begin. First of all, since I didn’t want to fall into any esoteric, voodoo, tantric, shakra nonsense I started my investigation outside of Buddhism completely. I started with things science tells us about the breath, its physiology.
Breath and physiology
For the purpose of my investigation I divided physiological processes into 3 broad categories:
- Autonomous processes like your heart and digestion
- Conscious processes like learning a new sport or meditating
- Subconscious processes like jumping out of the way of a car or daydreaming
Then there are processes that overlap 2 categories
- Eating or walking are processes that require both conscious and subconscious processes. And in these cases, the subconscious process is the muscle memory of the particular action.
- Then we have breathing – which is an autonomous process but one that you can also control consciously.
I can’t think of anything that would be both autonomous and subconscious or that would cover all 3.
The conscious and subconscious processes can override each other. If you’re meditating, your subconscious can pull you away and get you to think about other things. But if you notice you’re thinking of other things you can consciously stop thinking about it and return to meditation.
If you’re doing a visualization meditation that transition is pretty clear cut. You’re either visualizing an image or you’re not. You’re either in the conscious or the subconscious. The difference when you meditate on the breath is that the breath is still occurring even if you’ve gone into subconscious mode. I think that makes it harder for you to realize you’ve stopped focusing on the breath because your subconscious can say ‘Hey, its fine, you’re still breathing, you can think of this other stuff at the same time’.
Another difference between the 2 is that in a visualization meditation you are actively generating and holding a thought. When you’re meditating on the breath you’re simply observing it.
So that’s my first observation. That breathing meditation is fundamentally different from other meditation in ‘how’ you’re focusing on the object, and in what happens to the object when you stop focusing on it.
That doesn’t necessarily make the breath ‘better’. It just makes it different and gives you an opportunity to notice the differences. Personally I find visualization meditations easier because I feel like I’m doing something, whereas in breathing meditation I get a sense that I’m wasting time and being unproductive. Do any of you notice a difference between different types of meditations? Maybe even compared to guided meditations?
The next thing I investigated is the link between the breath and the parasympathetic nervous system.
Typically, the sequence between the breath and the nervous system is that the nervous system reacts to something and that triggers the breath to change. For example, something triggers a fear or an anxiety, which releases adrenaline and cortisol and who knows what else, which causes other things, but in the end, it causes your breathing to become fast and shallow. Or if it’s night time and your body has released melatonin, your breath becomes slow and deep. BUT, the sequence can go the other way. Which means you have a way to consciously influence your nervous system. I say ‘influence’ because you can’t completely control it – if your body has released adrenaline into your blood you can’t take it out, but you can influence it to stop producing more.
So why is this useful in meditation? If you’re paying attention to the breath you can tell if you’re in a relaxed or anxious state. And if you’re feeling anxious or some other disruptive emotion, you can control your breath and consciously get your body into a relaxed state so you can meditate.
So that is observation #2 – you can use your breath to control your emotional state. Has anyone used the breath to calm themselves down during meditation?
So far nothing I’ve said is unique to Buddhism – it only relates to meditation in general. So now that I’ve found some ‘scientific’ reasons why the breath is a good tool, I want to know if I can use the breath to understand some Buddhist concepts better. The 2 concepts that arose for me while I was investigating the breath are no-self and inter-connectedness
Breath, no-self, and inter-connectedness
The concept of no-self in Buddhism is something you can’t fully understand intellectually, the same way I don’t think an alien who doesn’t have emotions could understand joy or sadness. Those are things you have to actually experience to truly understand them. I haven’t experienced no-self but I’ve tried very hard to identify a self so I’m slowly chipping away at everything I’m not.
So I was meditating on my breath and thinking about how this tiny little intake of air every few seconds is enough for your body to extract oxygen out of it, get it into your blood, circulate it through your whole body, to every cell, and at the same time, expel CO2 out of your blood and into the outgoing breath.
As a person I feel that my blood and everything in it is ‘mine’, and is part of ‘me’. But if I’m taking in oxygen and expelling CO2 every few seconds, and both those things are part of ‘my’ blood, at what point does it start or stop being part of ‘me’?
If it’s at the nose then that air is still attached to the atmosphere – does that mean the atmosphere is part of me? If the transition happens at the barrier between the lungs and the blood does that mean the inside of my nose, throat and lungs are not part of me?
And regardless of where the cutoff actually is, I’m so dependent on the air that my lungs are practically an umbilical cord tying me to the atmosphere. I can’t even leave the atmosphere without taking a little piece of it with me, like in scuba diving or in space. And if I’m dependent on the air having the right molecules to keep me alive then I’m dependent on the trees to keep transforming CO2 into oxygen. I’m not going to keep going through the whole cycle of the Earth’s ecology, I’ll leave that up to you. But if I’m so dependent on so many other things, can I really say there is an independent, stand-alone ‘me’?
Maybe the ‘me’ doesn’t include the physical body. Maybe its something closer to a ‘spirit’. Or maybe it’s not real at all, maybe it’s just a feeling evolution instilled in us to help us survive and reproduce.
I don’t actually think the Buddha ever said there wasn’t a self – he just pointed out things that couldn’t be the self – like our thoughts and senses and the body, because we don’t have control over them. And how can they be ‘me’ if I can’t control them? But I’m going to leave that to you to ponder.
And that is my third observation – that the breath can be a starting point to investigate other concepts.
My point
So what’s my point? My point is that if there are aspects of Buddhism that you don’t really want to take on faith, or that you’re not sure why they are even part of Buddhism, you don’t have to accept it. But instead of rejecting it outright I encourage you to think about it – why would it be useful? Is it worded in a way that might have been meaningful to people 2500 years ago but sounds odd in our current context? Is it something that was meant for the monks and nuns, or for lay people? Could there be a more rational explanation that would produce the same outcome? Is it a story that was used to illustrate a point rather than an actual event?
And also I hope your breathing meditation is a little less boring.
And we will find out right now because we’re going to meditate for x minutes, and then you can tell me how it went. For this meditation I’d like you to try and be curious about your breath. See if you can feel it at the nose, or in the throat. Can you feel it coming in and going out? Can you feel it expand your chest or your stomach? Does it make a sound? If you could see it what would it look like? Anything that comes to mind.