Just as sounds never stop arriving at our ears, so the breath never stops arising and completing itself as long as we are alive. In every moment of now, we are always somewhere in the breath cycle of in or out or in the brief pauses between them. So, when practicing either sitting or lying down, standing, walking, or doing yoga, the invitation is to give yourself over to the sensations throughout the body that are associated with breathing, sensations that we seldom recognize or attend to or care about, unless of course we are choking or drowning, or we have a bad cold, so much do we take breathing for granted and tune it out.
Now, in cultivating mindfulness of breathing, we are purposefully tuning in to these breath sensations, and we are doing so gently, with a lightness of touch, allowing our attention to approach the breath, as we have said before, as if we were coming upon a shy animal sunning itself on a tree stump in a forest clearing—with that kind of gentleness and interest, not so much in stealth as in wonder.
Or, to invoke another image, allowing your attention to alight on the breath as a leaf might flutter down onto the surface of a pond, and then resting here, riding on the waves of the breath, so to speak, as it moves into the body and as it exits the body. Seeing if you can be in touch with the full duration of each breath coming in, in touch with the full duration of each breath going out, and with the pauses at the top and the bottom, the apex and trough, the apogee and perigee of each full swing of one breath. You are not so much thinking about the breath or the breath sensations. Rather, you are feeling the breath sensations as vividly and intimately as possible as you ride on the waves of the breath like a leaf, or as if you were floating on a rubber raft on some gently lapping waves on the ocean or a lake. In this way, you are giving yourself over completely to the breath sensations, moment by moment by moment.
Only trust.
Don’t the leaves flutter down
just like this?
In giving yourself over to breathing, in aiming and sustaining your attention moment by moment, you invite the sense of an observer observing the breath to dissolve into just breathing. The subject (you) and the object (the breath, or even “my breath”) dissolve into breathing, pure and simple, and into an awareness that needs no “you” to generate it, that already knows breathing as it is unfolding, beyond thinking, underneath thinking, before thinking, just as we saw for hearing. Sitting here breathing, there is just this moment, just this breath, just this non-conceptual knowing. The whole body is breathing, the skin, the bones, all of it, inside and out, and being breathed as much as breathing, beyond any thoughts we may have about it. Resting here, we are the breathing, we are the knowing, moment by moment, if there are still moments, breath by breath if there are still breaths… tasting the breath, smelling the breath, drinking in the breath, allowing yourself to be breathed, to be touched by the air, caressed by the air, to merge with the air in the lungs, across the skin, everywhere the air, everywhere the breath in the body, everywhere the knowing, and nowhere too. And of course, as with all the other practices, we come back over and over again to an awareness of breathing when the mind wanders into thought, into memory or anticipation, into stories of one kind or another, even stories about how you are meditating and being completely one with the breath, or that there is no “you” anymore.
And although it is natural that we say that “I am breathing” and that it is “my” breath, it is also helpful to keep in mind that the fact of the matter is that if it were up to us to keep the breathing going, we would have died long ago. We are too distractible and unreliable to be in charge of the breathing process. We get caught up in a thought, or get a text or an e-mail and forget about keeping the breathing going and… whoops, we are dead. So whoever you think you are, your very biology doesn’t allow “you” anywhere near the circuitry of the brainstem, the phrenic nerve, and the diaphragm that together keep you breathing, even during sleep. It would be much more accurate to say that you are being breathed rather than claiming that you are breathing. That would be much less self-centered. Such an orientation also reminds us of the gift and mystery behind who we think we are, and reminds us that we are much bigger than the narratives we create about our experiences and about who and what we are.