TURNING THE WHEEL
like a skilled potter watching clay turn on a wheel
notice how each inhalation turns into an exhalation
only to turn back again into an inhalation
over and over and over again*8
“Turning the wheel” is a Buddhist term referring to a progressive deepening of the teachings as expressed in a series of discourses the Buddha gave during his life. The wheel of dharma (the teachings of the Buddha) was first set into motion through an early discourse about suffering, its causes, and its resolutions. A later turning emphasized the empty and utterly spacious quality of phenomena (we look at other people and see their bodies as being very solid, but when we go inside and feel our own, all we come up with is a feeling presence of empty space and vibratory sensation) as well as the fundamentally compassionate nature of mind. Later turnings would elaborate on the first two, and in this way the full spectrum of Buddhist teachings could be addressed and expanded on. While some Buddhist schools embrace all the successive turnings of the wheel as elaborations and clarifications of the dharma, others focus their practices more exclusively on one of the turnings over the others.
The “turning wheel” referred to in this sutta is a different kind of wheel. It refers not to the deepening of teachings expressed by the Buddha, but to the deepening of understanding that arises for a meditator who keeps his or her attention fixed on the never-ending cycle of breath in which inhalations and exhalations keep turning into each other, over and over and over again.
When it comes to breathing practice, we’re not all that different from a potter. Once we sit the clay of our bodies down onto the cushion, we set the wheel of breath in motion and start paying close attention to it, round after round. Like the potter, we have to train ourselves to stay focused and not let the mind wander off. In the same way that the potter learns to understand the secrets of the clay through every turning of the wheel, we become ever more adept at breathing through the whole body every time we open to its possibility.
One of clay’s secrets is that you can’t just do anything you want with it. It doesn’t magically submit to your fingers in the way you’d like to think it should. You have to learn how to work with it and how to listen to it. It has its own stories to tell before it lets you unlock its shapes and forms. Sometimes there may be snags in the clay’s story that disrupt the flowing motion of the wheel. The master potter learns how to coax the secrets out of the clay.
A meditator works with body, breath, and mind in much the same way as a potter works with clay, motion, and intention. Sitting in meditation, you settle into your body and start watching your breath, turning, turning. If the potter loses his focus, the clay can fly off the wheel. If you lose your focus, you’ll likely spin off into thought. A master potter in a master moment doesn’t impose will on the clay, but lets the pot emerge out of it, in its own time, at its own pace, in its own way. The restrictive holding patterns in the body and mind unravel their secrets the same way the potter frees the pot from the clay—through accepting, feeling into, allowing, coaxing, never by forcing.
Breath rarely liberates itself in a straight line or along a two-dimensional plane. Far more common are twists and turns, logjams and releases, a journey of spiral unwindings through the body. What matters more than how you breathe (in and out through the nose, in through the nose and out through the mouth, in and out of the nose and mouth together, etc.) is how you keep surrendering to breath and to the puzzling possibility that it might breathe through more and more of your body. Sometimes the breath can slow down and lengthen; at other times it can speed up in short bursts. Sometimes it may fade so far away that you can barely feel it; at other times it can explode open, like a steam locomotive racing down a track of rails.
While breathing through the whole body implies that the entire body is constantly, subtly moving, there can be times when everything seems to come to a stop and freezes. At those times it is important to remember that the practice is to surrender to the breath as it learns to make its way through the whole body, never to force it. Sometimes deep sensations and feelings are hidden inside these extended, frozen pauses, waiting to be stirred, unearthed, released. At other times pauses come with a direct invitation to drop down deeper into the silent well in your center. Smooth or choppy, the current of breath keeps flowing, and its cycles keep turning, turning.
Breath is just the means. The real goal of the practice is to experience what happens to you—your mind, your sense of self, your understanding of incarnation—when you explore the possibility of breathing through your whole body. The purpose of Buddhist practices isn’t to perfect breath. It’s to find out who you are and who you become when you pay attention to it. Ordinarily, our minds rule the roost, and our breath and body stumble along behind, like children trying to catch up to an impatient parent. How different it would be if we gave our breath and body precedence and let our mind align itself with them. And how different still if we could integrate all three elements—mind, body, breath—into a coordinated merging so that they would function in concert as a more unified phenomenon. It would be like lining up the three numbers on a padlock so that it can slide open.
Meditation is for those of us who realize that we’ve forgotten who we are and would like to remember. Re-membering is literally a process of putting back together again the fractured and scattered pieces that have come apart. Integrating body, mind, and breath through the practice of breathing through the whole body helps us remember.