In the third stage of this meditation practice we let go of the counting and simply follow the breath as it flows in and out. This is the Mindfulness of Breathing proper, and if I were forced to introduce the Mindfulness of Breathing practice in two minutes then this is what I’d teach — simply paying attention to the sensations of the breath.
However, by saying that I don’t want to devalue the earlier two stages, which are important aids in helping us to practice effectively in this stage of the practice and important practices in their own right.
Here’s an outline of the practice so far:
Set up your posture, as described in the posture guidelines, developing awareness of the body and relaxing as best you can.
Then, becoming aware of the breath as the central experience within the body, begin counting after each out-breath, counting in cycles of ten breaths. When you notice the mind wandering, gently bringing it back to the breath. Notice the gently relaxing quality of the out-breath.
Moving into the second stage of the practice, begin counting just before each in-breath, again counting ten breaths before starting over again at one. Notice the gently stimulating quality of the in-breath.
When you feel ready, move onto the third stage.
In the third stage of the practice, drop the counting, and just follow the breathing coming in and out. Pay particular attention to the transitions from an in-breath to an out-breath, since those are the places where you’re most likely to become distracted.
See if you can notice the breathing as a continuous process — not as a series of in-breaths and out-breaths, but as a never-ending stream of sensation connected with the movements of the body, and the sensations of the air flowing into and out of the body.
You can listen to an MP3 guided meditation that will lead you through the first three stages of the practice by clicking on the player below:
If you’ve been working methodically through this practice you know the score by now. Try doing all three stages for a few days. Practice them every day, if possible, and get to know them well.
Watch out for any tendency to want to skip over one stage (maybe because you don’t like it as much as the others). Each stage has its own special function, so remember to do them in the correct order.
You might want to make your meditation a little longer now, perhaps five minutes per stage, making fifteen minutes.
Shunryu Suzuki, the famous Zen teacher who founded the San Francisco Zen Center and who was a major influence on Western Buddhism, talked about “the gaining idea.” This rather awkward but incredibly useful phrase points to the problem that arises in our practice when we’re hungering for results. We want be enlightened right here and right now. Or we simply want to rush on to learn the whole practice so that we can check that off our list of things to do. The gaining idea is a major hindrance to developing skill in meditation.
As Suzuki Roshi said, “When a gaining idea arises in our practice, it is a sign that our practice is in trouble.” The reason for this is that we’ve actually incorporated our restless, grasping mind into our meditation practice. Our practice has been taken over by the mind that craves, yearns, and tries to appropriate results without following the path that leads to those results.
These attitudes of grasping, craving, and greedy hunger are the very things that cause us suffering in the first place. Because we suffer we want to meditate, because meditation is the antidote to craving and suffering. And then what happens? Our craving takes control of the meditation! It’s as if the antidote to the poison itself accidentally becomes contaminated with poison!
It’s useful if you learn to recognize this gaining idea, this notion that somehow your best interests will be served if you rush through the practice. That notion is false. Meditation is about letting go of grasping so that we can experience freedom. So start doing that now by deciding that you’ll pause where you are right now, and that you’ll explore the stages of the meditation practice and really get to know them before you move on to the next stage.
As part of that exploration come back to this section and read a bit more about the issues that can arise in this stage of the practice.
Perhaps this is a good time to remind you of your body. I’ve emphasized that it’s important to set up your posture at the start of a period of practice. Doing this provides you with better conditions for meditating.
It’s like making sure, when you’re building a fire, that your kindling is stacked just right and that your matches are dry, so that you’ll end up with a good blaze instead of a pile of smoldering wood and a bad temper.
But when you take your attention away from your posture in order to be more aware of your breath, you’ll often find that your posture starts to drift. You might find that some parts of your body start to sag, while others become tense. And these changes lead to mental and emotional changes.
The tension in your shoulders might be related to some anger you’ve started to experience. The sagging in your spine might be related to a feeling of despair that’s crept in. If you relax your shoulders, the anger will start to disappear again. If you straighten your spine, you’ll start to feel more confident again.
As you become more proficient at meditation, you’ll learn that you can periodically take your attention away from your breath for a split second in order to check your posture and make minor corrections. You’ll get so good at doing this that you’ll be able to effectively keep a continuous awareness of your breath.
Remember learning to drive? You probably found that at first you’d take your attention off the road to change gears and when you took your attention back to the road (several long seconds later) you’d find that you’d drifted off towards one side or that a red traffic light had mysteriously appeared from nowhere. Later, you’ll have found that you were able to change gears without significantly taking your awareness from what was going on around you.
The same thing happens in meditation – we learn to deal with the seeming complexity of managing our posture and what we’re doing with the focus of our attention – elegantly and even effortlessly. A good way to start practicing this skill of monitoring your posture without disrupting your practice is to check and correct your posture in between stages.
You might want to do this every time you move from one stage to another. Later, you’ll find that you can integrate monitoring your posture into your practice in the way that I’ve described.
While stage one of this meditation practice helps to develop more calm (by emphasizing the qualities of the out breath), and stage two helps to develop more energy and awareness (by emphasizing the qualities of the in breath), the third stage emphasizes both the in breath and the out breath equally. This helps us to blend the calm relaxation of the first stage with the energized awareness of the second stage.
In our meditation practice we are ideally developing a sense of energetic calm awareness, or a calmly energized awareness. While doing stage three you can be aware of the constant oscillation between the calming out breath and the energizing in breath, and allow the qualities of the out breath and of the in breath to permeate each other.
Modifying an analogy the Buddha himself used, you can think about making dough. When you’re making dough, what you’re doing is taking two contrasting substances – a wet one and a dry one – and combining them together in a perfectly balanced blend.
If you have too much water, then you’ll have a sticky mess, while if you have too much flour, you’ll have a dry, cracked ball.
Get the proportions just right, and you’ll have dough that is perfectly pliable and workable. (The Buddha’s analogy involved a “bathman or bathman’s apprentice) blending soap powder and water — presumably the Buddha was more familiar from his earlier life with bathing in luxury spas than he was with baking).
Just as the right balance of flour and water (or soap-powder and water) produces a pliable mixture that can be used appropriately, this stage of the mindfulness of breathing meditation practice helps us to develop pliability of mind; to get our minds into a calm and energetic state where we can work to develop a much greater degree of concentration.
If the first two stages have gone really well, letting go of the numbers can allow us to develop a deeper and more balanced concentration. However, if we haven’t managed to develop enough calmness in the first two stages, then it’s easy to get lost in the third stage.
This often happens because the counting has been acting as an anchor for our awareness: it stops us from drifting too far away from the breath. So if we let go of the counting we can often float off into distraction.
One way to retain an anchor while letting go of the numbers is to use a physical sensation in the body as an anchor. I sometimes use the physical sensations in my hands in the same way as I use the numbers.
Sometimes at the end of every out-breath I take my awareness to my hands in order to keep me grounded. I use the sensations in my hands much as I’d use the numbers.
The physical anchor is a more refined anchor than the counting because it’s non-verbal — it cuts down on the amount of thinking, so that your mind can develop a deeper level of stillness.
Other times I maintain awareness of my hands throughout the cycle of each in-breath and out-breath. When I breathe in there’s a sensation of rising in the body and so I have a general sense of the gap between the hands and the breath widening. In each out-breath there’s a feeling that the body is sinking, and so I get a sense of the connection between the hands and the breath narrowing. So I notice the connection between the hands and the breath, and this helps keep the mind from wandering off.
Partly I think this works because it makes the practice more interesting. But partly I think it’s something to do with introducing a “stretch” into the practice. What I mean is that I’ve noticed that when my mind stretches to accommodate two separate sensations it seems to calm down very quickly. I can’t explain this, but I offer it as a tool that might be useful.
Other “stretches” involve being aware of the space outside my body while focusing on some inner sensation (like the breath), and being aware of sounds outside of myself while following some inner sensation.
You might want to play around with this idea of creating a stretch in your awareness and see what happens. Just notice two very different and geographically separate sensations, and pay attention to both simultaneously. And notice what the result is.
We talk about “trains of thought.” You can think of these as being like real locomotive trains that pull into a busy station and then go rattling off. Most of them don’t go anywhere that we particularly want to go (most of them are to do with worrying, getting angry, running ourselves down, etc). But our mind is like a little kid that’s very restless and curious, and keeps going through the open doors into the carriages.
Before we know it we’re miles away from where we wanted to be (in dangerous territory, often!), and it takes us forever to get home.
By learning meditation you can learn just to watch the trains pulling up and pulling away, being aware of them and choosing not to get into them.
Are there any trains we want to get into? Yes. Some thoughts can be useful, if they are thoughts that guide us toward our immediate experience. For example, we can say to ourselves things like “Staying in the moment … there’s just this moment.” Thoughts like that take us deeper into our meditation.
One difference between useful thought trains and those that take us into distractions, is that when we’re reflecting (as opposed to being distracted), we know what we’re thinking and why, and what effect those thoughts are having). By contrast distracted thoughts are like dreams — we don’t know we’re in them until we “wake up.”
But it can take a while to recognize which thoughts are useful and at first it’s not a bad idea simply to treat all thoughts as distractions and to let them all depart from the station of the mind while you “just sit” on the platform.
There’s another way that the third stage of the mindfulness of breathing meditation, in which we drop the counting of the first two stages and simply follow the breath flowing in and out, is a progression from those two stages.
The progression consists in sensing the continuity of the breathing process, through having an unbroken awareness of the breathing rather than in having an awareness of individual breaths.
When we’re counting out-breaths (as in the first stage of the meditation practice) or counting in-breaths (as in the second stage) there’s an inevitable tendency to experience the process of the breathing as being chopped into bits. There’s an in-breath. Then an out-breath. Then another in-breath. Then another out-breath. We may acknowledge pauses between the in and out phases, so that we mentally chop the breathing into four parts: in / pause / out / pause.
Now actually the breathing process isn’t quite like that. It’s not really divided into discrete parts. When you watch the breathing closely in meditation you’ll see that the in-breath shades into a feeling of fullness, which then shades into the release of the out-breath. Then the increasing sense of emptiness at the end of the exhalation shades into the beginning of the next in-breath. There are no distinct beginnings or ends. There’s just one continuous process that changes its character over time. It’s much like looking at a rainbow. There are different colors, but when you look at where one color shades into another you’ll see there are no distinct transitions.
We’re practicing mindfulness of breathing, not mindfulness of breaths.
When we experience the breath as chopped up then there’s a tendency for our awareness itself to become discontinuous. We actively experience the in-breath, then the mind goes a bit floppy for a moment, then we pay attention to the out-breath, then the mind goes a bit squidgy again. Somewhere during the times when the mind is taking a little vacation from vividly noticing the breath it decides instead to get absorbed in some thought or fantasy, and we don’t have the mental sharpness to stop it from going on a little (or perhaps a long) wander.
When we get to the end of the second stage and stop counting we have the opportunity to experience the wholeness of the breathing rather than the chopped-up-ness of in-out-in-out. And so our awareness itself becomes more continuous. We’re less likely to get distracted. The mind becomes more attuned to the subtler sensations where the breath is changing from an inhalation to an exhalation, and vice versa. And we develop a very pleasant sense that we have a continuous thread of awareness running through our experience.
So practically, what this means is that we follow the sensations of the breath as it flows in, noticing the sensations of movement becoming subtler as the sensations of fullness are becoming stronger, noticing the “cresting” of the inhaling as it releases from fullness into the emptying of exhaling, noticing the sensations of exhaling becoming stronger as the body moves faster and as the exhaling happens more slowly, bottoming out into an increasing sense of emptiness, until the emptiness gives way to a sense of filling. And so on, and so on. It’s actually hard to put this in writing because for the sake of clarity in writing I have to use commas and periods, which suggests a succession of discrete experiences rather than an ever-evolving transition within one single experience, which is the process of breathing.
Another approach would be, next time you’re following the breathing (and maybe that’s right now) seeing if you can notice any absolute boundaries and discontinuities within the process of the breathing. I think you’ll find there are none, and that as your sense of the breathing becomes more continuous, so too does your sense of the continuity of your mindfulness.
The great hypnotherapist, Milton Erickson, told a story about how one day, when he was a boy, a riderless horse wandered into the farmyard outside his home. Milton had never seen this horse before, and had no idea where it lived, but very soon he had the horse back where it belonged. How did he do this?
Well, he sat on the horse’s back, got it to start walking, and then every time they came to a turn in the road, he paid attention to the almost imperceptible movements of the horse’s body that told him where it wanted to go. And once young Milton had sensed in which direction the horse wanted to head in, he encouraged it to do so. It turned out that the horse knew its own way home, and all Milton had to do was give it a little gentle guidance — or encouragement to trust its own instincts.
It’s similar with our breathing. I’ve said that in the mindfulness of breathing practice we’re not controlling our breath. On the other hand I’ve also suggested that you can use deep breathing, or breathing into the belly, or breathing into the upper chest, etc., as ways of altering your state of mind. This might sound contradictory, but it’s not really. When we change the pattern of our breathing, we don’t have to exert any control. We can gently guide the breath without controlling it, as Milton did.
Had Milton tried to tell the horse where to go, he’d never have got it home. Horses, after all, are trained to follow orders. Instead he used a more subtle technique of being aware of where the horse wanted to go, and then reinforced that desire with some gentle guidance. The horse soon got the idea.
We all are riders of horses, in a way. Our breathing is generally under the control of subconscious processes, and it has to be said that our subconscious, by and large, does a pretty good job of keeping breathing. The subconscious rarely fails to carry out its tasks, which is more than can be said for our conscious minds (how often do we go upstairs to get something and then forget by the time we get there what it was we wanted?). So let your subconscious do what it’s good at.
When you want to change your breathing, say by breathing into your belly more deeply, then all you really have to do is to take your awareness into your belly to give your subconscious a gentle hint, and then let it do the work. In this way, we gently guide our breath rather than control it.
The fourth stage of this meditation practice helps us to have greater focused attention. You can learn about that here.
You can also learn more about this meditation practice in my book, Wildmind: A Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation.
View Comments
Hi Bodhipaksa,
I have one or two questions please,
1: Feeling hungry near end of meditation, even though i would have eaten an hour before starting.( the hunger is like i havent eaten in a week)
2:Im starting to get great heat in my Hands and they tingle
But after meditation i get cold fast, where id need to put a jumper on:( i do have Raynauds )
3: During meditation i get flashes of images,(not all the time, can be White light, to a red circle) but i cant recall it back, the only way i can describe it is a car journey and you are looking out the window when you see something then its gone, Strangest thing i have seen is a foot, a mans foot.
I sometimes feel i am not doing it right, i focus on breath, then my mind is blank, then my thoughts get louder and when i give up an hour or 2 may have passed, yet feels like i was sitting for only 5 minutes:
Finally: Since starting there can be days where i can get angry or agitated in myself ( out of character for me) after meditating, could be a day or two afterwards ( if i dont meditate daily)
I just dont understand why i would feel agitated, when i am ment to feel good and at peace, Am i doing it wrong?
I have googled looking for answers but i cant find anything
Thank you
Hi, Lorraine.
That seems to be five, rather than one or two... :)
1: Feeling hungry near end of meditation, even though i would have eaten an hour before starting.( the hunger is like i havent eaten in a week)
Just notice the hunger mindfully. There can be a tendency to treat hunger as an emergency, but it's just a sensation. You can choose just to notice it with curiosity. I've written about the practice of mindful hunger elsewhere.
2:Im starting to get great heat in my Hands and they tingle
But after meditation i get cold fast, where id need to put a jumper on:( i do have Raynauds )
The heat in the hands is a sign that you're relaxing, and that blood is flowing to your extremities. That's what happens when the parasympathetic nervous system is activated. Because of this you're losing body heat, and so afterward you feel cold. Try wrapping a blanket around your legs (not your upper body unless your environment is very cold).
3: During meditation i get flashes of images,(not all the time, can be White light, to a red circle) but i cant recall it back, the only way i can describe it is a car journey and you are looking out the window when you see something then its gone, Strangest thing i have seen is a foot, a mans foot.
They're of no significance. Just allow them to pass. Pay more attention to the sensations in your body (the breathing, etc.) and your mind won't have so much mental space available for generating random imagery.
I sometimes feel i am not doing it right, i focus on breath, then my mind is blank, then my thoughts get louder and when i give up an hour or 2 may have passed, yet feels like i was sitting for only 5 minutes:
Presumably by a "blank" mind you mean that you're not talking to yourself. Sometimes we think a lot, sometimes we think less. That's not a sign that you're doing it wrong. It's just how it happens sometimes.
Finally: Since starting there can be days where i can get angry or agitated in myself ( out of character for me) after meditating, could be a day or two afterwards ( if i dont meditate daily)
I just dont understand why i would feel agitated, when i am ment to feel good and at peace, Am i doing it wrong?
Perhaps you're becoming more sensitive to feelings in the body because of your meditation. And since those feelings can include things like hurt, you may be finding that you're more sensitive, emotionally. I'd suggest that you pay attention to what's happening when you are more reactive like this. What's sparking it off? Is is fear, hurt, frustration? See if you can notice those feelings mindfully, and not react to them with anger or irritation.
I am six weeks into daily ten-minute mediation. Last week I started noticing the following sensation in my brain during the first minute of mediation. When I close my eyes and slowly exhale several times to quite my mind and prepare for a session, all of the sudden it feels like an energy of entire brain converges to the front (behind the eyebrows) of my brain and slowly contracts almost like a muscle. I can't say it hurts but I certainly feel it. Then "it" slowly relaxes and the next twenty or thirty seconds are devoid of anything – I don’t notice anything, no breathing, there’s no physical me, just a void that is self-aware. Interestingly if I think about the formation of the "brain muscle" it immediately subsides, but if I let go and simply allow it by gently noticing it (not “staring” at it), it develops into a full sensation. I can now produce this physical sensation at will; but if I do it several times in succession I get a heavy feeling right behind my eyebrows; but it eventually subsides. I am so very grateful for the Creator for answering my prayers and giving me the gifts of Meditation, Frequency and The Law of Attraction. There’s one other experience I’d like to share with you – how I envisioned curing my flu and got better in under an hour. But that’s before I discovered Meditation and it might be unrelated to this blog. Thank you for your time and for sharing your wisdom. Sincerely, Arthur.
Hi, Arthur.
I'd suggest that you head over to the accompanying page on odd experiences in meditation. I'd imagine that what you're experiencing is what's called a "nimitta." This is a good thing, but the important thing is that a nimitta is a sign that you're going deeper in meditation rather than the nimitta itself. But it is good to pay attention to these sensations and just allow them to be there, since they seem to involve a kind of feedback loop, where paying attention to the sensations takes you deeper, which stabilizes or even intensifies the sensations, and so on.
Hi, I have been practicing meditation for 15 minutes since a month. While meditating my breath get really slow and sometimes I feel that I was not breathing at all. But as described above by other meditators I don't get any sensation nor any dreams my mind gets just blank. At first I thought that this is a good sign and I am progressing well, but these day my mind is in blank state not just during meditation but all the time throught the day; I am not able to think at all. Now after mediation I feel sleepy and active both at the same time. Am I doing it in wrong way? Should I stop practicing?
This doesn't sound at all healthy, Gaurang. I'd certainly suggest stopping, or trying another form of meditation, like metta bhavana.
Hi bodhipaksa,
last night i meditated for about 15mins in the middle of my meditating i felt weird. I suddenly felt a heat and my body became sweat and i felt that i'm running out of breath..
Is this normal or i'm doing the wrong practice?
thanks for your time.
Hi, Kristi.
Sorry for the delayed reply. Busy summer!
What you're describing could be many things — even a virus! I wouldn't be concerned about it unless it became a regular occurrence.
All the best,
Bodhipaksa
I had an experience with meditation almost 20 years ago when i was 18 that i have never discussed with anyone educated on the subject. I meditated by relaxing my body and focusing on my breathing until everything melted away and i found myself engulfed in a soft white light. Not flashing ligts or moving lights but almost as though i was floating in an empty room and the air itself was light. It's very difficult to describe because it was so amazing but a few words i can use to describe my sense of it are peaceful, love, knowledge, timeless and complete. It was such a significant event in my life that i have never let go of the memory and for the past couple of months i think about it more and more. I have never tried to meditate again (althoug 20 years ago i experienced it two nights in a row) and i have been so conflicted between believing that what i experienced was real and the ways it changed my views on life but doubting myself because it was so long ago and i have never had any spiritual or meditation guidance. I guess my question would be is there any significance to my experience or should i stop dwelling on it?
Thank you for taking the time to read my post and for all the knowledge you share.
Mandi
Hi, Mandi.
An experience like that is certainly significant in personal ways. It's good to have "peak experiences" in life that we can recall, and often those memories can bring us some joy. But on the other hand, it's just an experience. It probably hasn't radically transformed you. You've opened a door in the past, seen something lovely on the other side, and then decided not to open that door again.
If you started meditating again you probably wouldn't have the same experience again. You're a different person now, and conditions are different. Maybe you know that. At the same time, meditating isn't, fundamentally, about the peak experiences. It's about the gradual work to develop skillful qualities like mindfulness, patience, courage, kindness, compassion, and wisdom. Sometimes as we develop those qualities we pause and just bathe in the beauty of our experience (as you did), and that's great because it inspires and nourishes us as we get back to work. Eventually life can become more like that experience — less extreme, but imbued with an ongoing sense of stillness and love.
Anyway, I'd say it's up to you whether or not to make that experience meaningful. I'd suggest that to do so you might want to gather your courage, take the plunge, and start meditating again. Don't expect to repeat the experience. It may or may not happen again. But it's a preview of what your life could be like.
I've closed the comments on this post because of the large number of them. If you've had unusual experiences in meditation that you're uncertain about, I'd suggest:
1. Reading the article above.
2. Reading the comments above.
3. Reading this article on unusual experiences in meditation.
Ive been meditating for awhile now. But today I incorporated your "stretching" idea by observing the sensation of the breath through the nostrils, ambient sounds and body sensations - namely a denseness in the shoulders and the rising and falling of the stomach. I tried to focus on all of them simultaneously which I found a little difficult but workable. One thing that was very different was that I completely lost track of time. I think I meditated for 50 minutes but really can't be sure!
I'm glad this approach was helpful, Adam.
Oh wow, I didn't see this thoughtful and insightful answer way back on August 30 2009. Adam's comment caused me to be notified. What's super cool and coincidental is, I was telling somebody about this post that is read years ago to a friend of mine just the other day! Great coincidence. Thank you for the thoughtful reply.
Mark.
Hi Bodhipaksa
.
While reading this I thought of something that has bothered me lately. I am a seeker I guess and I try different things like self hypnosis, meditation, visualization, every day mindfulness in my own way. Admittedly I stumble and I make mistakes, take wrong turns, Try things that don't feel right in the end. I learn. I'm slowly getting to a point where i wish to organize and learn more. This might be something I can easily learn on this site but i feel suddenly impatient to ask.
In many guided meditations I've found online they often, if not always, say "Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.".
I didn't realize until now that it feels wrong to me. My mother actually taught me many many years ago how to breathe and the way you describe it above is how I breathe by instinct. There is no pause in my breathing, unless I'm upset perhaps, or ill or very tense.
But breathing in through nose, out through mouth feels like interruption to me. I don't actually understand the benefit of it.
Is my thinking flawed regarding this? Is there a "proper" way it's supposed to be done? I would appreciate a word on this. I am a believer that given time and thought and with some awareness, one can trust instincts. I don't like rules if I fail to see a meaning with them. :D
Much love
And I really like the site you have created here. Impressive.
Hi Jenny.
Thanks for the kind comment about the site.
I also find it odd to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, unless maybe I'm exercising. Normally I'll inhale and exhale through the nostrils. None of my own meditation teachers have suggested doing otherwise...
Thank you Bodhipaksa for your reply. Then I will simply do what feels right to me and trust myself. I am reading articles regarding breathing and I do wish I had found this site earlier. But on the flip side of that, I do believe that we find many things when we are ready and no sooner. I am glad to be here now and have just today spoken to my husband about making me a meditation stool as it appears to be the best thing for me. It is quite silly yet wonderful to be so excited about a piece of equipment. :)
Thank you again and I'll be around.
Jen
If you're interested, Jenny, there's a Wildmind community on Google Plus. It's a very friendly and supportive place. Do feel free to check it out.