My late-afternoon yoga class was practicing a simple alternate nostril breathing technique. It was already dark outside, and the first light snow of the season was falling. There were only a dozen people in the room. I had taught the class a breathing practice called nādī-shodhana (or purifying breath), and though most of the students had caught on right away, Susan was struggling. She was overworking it, as usual—huffing and puffing. Others were beginning to notice. Jake (ever aversive to noise) looked at me with a cold and plaintive stare.
I tried to catch Susan’s eye. But no. Her eyes were closed, and she was bearing down on her practice with all her might. She was closing and opening the nostrils correctly—with the thumb and third and fourth fingers of her right hand. Back and forth, back and forth, huff and puff, huff and puff. But her practice had none of the subtlety of beautiful prānāyāma.
I interrupted my own practice for a while and watched. Susan was gobbling air. I was used to seeing students hold their breath. But Susan had brought in an interesting new twist. Hunger for air—a strange kind of overindulgence.
Susan’s voracious appetite included not just food, but all types of experience. She was always moving, driven—eager for the next moment, for what it might bring. She was, as a result, time-bound, rushed, and slightly frantic—always leaning into the next moment. She could not trust that life itself would feed her. That breath would feed her.
As I watched more closely, I discovered something curious: though the drama of huffing and puffing made it appear that Susan was breathing deeply, she actually was not. She was not breathing down into the lower lobes of the lungs. The wave of breath was not going all the way down into her belly. Her diaphragm was held tightly, and though her chest was moving, her abdomen was not. She was gobbling breath, yes. But it was obvious that it was not satisfying. Why?
Susan was exhibiting a subtle form of hyperventilation syndrome. She was breathing by using the thorax rather than the diaphragm—a condition that results in chronically overinflated lungs. This simple breathing irregularity can chronically activate the body’s fight-or-flight response, resulting in a sense of being ill-at-ease in the body.
The lesson? Breathing deeply is not necessarily the same as breathing fully and effectively. Truly effective breathing involves long, slow exhalation and natural (not forced or excessive) inhalation.
Susan, did you know that you were breathing like that?” I asked.
Susan and I were sitting together on a stack of pillows at the back of the room after class. A small group of students was practicing postures quietly on the other side of the room.
For a moment, Susan looked wounded. “I was afraid this class would be too advanced for me,” she said.
“No, Susan. It’s not that at all. It’s just that there is something here we could explore.”
We talked for a while, and Susan began to relax. I reflected back to her precisely what I had seen in her breathing. She got interested in what I had to say.
“Would you like to investigate this a little bit more?”
Susan nodded her head. (This was the upside of Susan’s hunger—she was an excellent student; in the pursuit of learning she was willing to risk.) I had her lie down on the floor in supine position, in what is sometimes called corpse pose.
I had Susan put her hands on her belly. I put on some soothing music—a low, quiet drone—and lit a couple of candles. The Dancing Shiva was shimmering on the altar behind us.
I instructed Susan to place her hands palms down on her belly, to let them be heavy, and to breathe down into her belly as if her breath could meet the touch of her hands there.
“Feel the warmth of your hands on your belly. Feel the breath down in the core of the body. Feel it in your back. And in your sides. Let yourself relax.”
Susan lay for a few moments like that—her body completely still. I covered her with a soft blue blanket, and then, with her permission, I gently held the back of her head.
“Oh, keep doing that. That’s wonderful,” she said, purring. I massaged her neck for a moment.
Susan began to relax. She was soothed. She told me later that she felt held and safe—and that this feeling changed the way she was breathing.
I could still see tightness, though. Susan’s ribs seemed locked, and her diaphragm held rigidly. Her belly was moving, but her sides and back were not.
I continued to coach her. “Just let your body breathe naturally. Trust the breath. It’s OK however it emerges. Don’t attempt to guide or force the breath in any way. Just be with it as it arises.”
Before long, Susan’s breathing shifted. Her breath became soft. Quiet. Her ribs unlocked. Subtle waves of sensation were rising and falling throughout her body. Susan’s belly, abdomen, and pelvis were pulsing with the breath.
“Um-hum,” she mumbled almost inaudibly.
Then, as if momentarily frightened that this pleasure would end, she opened her eyes. “Stay right where you are,” she said. “That is so soothing.”
Susan, reassured, began to let the weight of her head release into my hands. She rested like that for a while. The candles flickered. The soft drone of the music was calming. A smiling Swami Kripalu looked down on us from his perch on the wall behind us.
Finally, when Susan seemed calmly absorbed in the breath, I pulled my hands from beneath her head. I put a meditation cushion close to her body, and sat cross-legged in meditation pose several feet from her side. I had determined to let her lie there as long as she wanted to.
A few minutes after I withdrew my hands, I watched as Susan’s body changed. I could see a wave of trembling begin in her belly. Her breathing became more ragged again as she resisted the wave of feeling.
“It’s OK, Susan,” I said softly. “I’m right here. Stay with yourself. Trust the energy and let it move.”
Susan began to choke. Energy began to move in her body now. Her body began to shake softly and jerk. She surrendered to the wave of breath, and was riding this wave.
“Stay with it,” I coached. “Allow the body to breathe as it will. Relax. Just feel.” Finally, a wave of sobbing emerged. Then subsided. Then arose again.
Susan reached out, wanting to touch me. I stayed next to her. “Stay with yourself, Susan. It’s OK. I’m here.” She could bear to stay with the sobbing for a few moments. Then she tried to stop it again. Tried to get off the wave of breath.
“Stay with the breath, Susan. Trust it.”
After ten minutes or so, the waves of sobbing began to slow, becoming more internal. Finally, the waves subsided altogether. After a few minutes, Susan sat up and blew her nose. Then she took a seated posture next to me and closed her eyes.
Now, Susan was breathing normally, and more fully than I’d ever seen her breathe. For the first time, it looked as though her breath was really breathing her. The wave of emotion had cleansed her breathing—like a rainstorm clears the air.
Susan and I sat next to each other for another twenty minutes—meditating. By now, everyone else had left the room. Susan’s breathing was effortless and quiet. She was perfectly still.
Susan and I talked for a while afterward. She shared with me her surprise that I would want to be with her in this way. She was terrified that she might have overwhelmed me—that her need might have “disgusted” me, or pushed me away; terrified that too many moments like this would lose her my friendship.
“Susan, I don’t need you to be any particular way,” I said. “I’m interested in how you are. How you really are.” She was, I think, beginning to see that this was true.
I asked her what had triggered the wave of sobbing.
“I don’t know. It was like there was this huge gaping hole inside me. Like a cavern. It was terrifying. At times, the hole was full of something heavy. Lead. Cannonballs. A big weight. I felt both empty and horribly full.
“Then, after I cried, I felt loneliness in that cavern. And my mind was full of images of my family. You know how in my family everyone is in your face all the time? At the same time, I realized we’re so alone. For the first time, it seemed OK to feel this aloneness. And I knew you were right there next to me.”
Susan’s pattern of breathing was both a manifestation of, and a defense against these feelings of emptiness. It was an emptiness she had not previously been able to bear. The whole Goldstein clan, indeed, was in flight from this same experience of emptiness and aloneness. And so they preoccupied themselves with finding ways of feeling full. As a result, they blocked their sense of moment-to-moment aliveness. They entered into an unconscious conspiracy to avoid this aliveness at any cost, because feeling alive meant directly experiencing this gaping hole. The way Susan’s family loved one another, in fact, was to help each other avoid life. This was their unwritten contract—to distract each other from a life that seemed unbearable.
The ancient yogi seekers discovered that all of the secrets of resistance to life can be discovered in the breath. The way we breathe tells us everything about the way we live. When the mind is disturbed, the breath is disturbed. In book one of the Yoga-Sūtra, Patanjali describes many of the symptoms of affliction in the mind and body.
Sickness, apathy, doubt, carelessness, laziness, sexual indulgence, delusion, lack of progress, and inconstancy are all distractions that, by stirring up consciousness, act as barriers to stillness.
When they do, one may experience distress, depression, or the inability to maintain steadiness of posture or breathing. (1.30–31)
Dysregulation of the breath, or what yogis sometimes call “hard breathing,” is an inevitable side effect of afflicted mind. The precise form of this dysregulation is very telling. The breath will tell us when we’re angry. The breath will tell us when we’re craving. The breath will tell us when we’re lying, cheating, and stealing. The breath will tell us when there is any hint of duhkha present at all.
Yogis discovered as many varieties of breathing disturbances as Inuit discovered snow. In their book Vivation, authors Jim Leonard and Phil Laut have a particularly colorful list of these forms of “hard breathing”:
congestion of the sinuses; constriction, tension and excessive closing of the larynx; chronic inflammation of the bronchi; spasms of the smooth muscle of the bronchi (asthma); inhibited use of the diaphragm and the external intercostal muscles, thus holding on to the exhale and interfering with the normal rhythm; chronic tension and excessive use of the internal intercostal muscles, thus forcing the exhale and interfering with the normal rhythm; the bunching of the various fascia involved…1
For the most part (as in Susan’s case), disturbances to breath are unconscious. Each of us develops characteristic styles of breathing that chronically hold and pattern breath so that unbearable aspects of our emotional body are held out of awareness. Samskāras are patterned into the subtlest processes of breath.
Yogis understood that disturbances to the breath are subtle, and that in order to perceive them at all, one must study them closely. Susan was an interesting case. As I studied her pattern, it appeared that while she was excessively focused on the in-breath (gobbling air), she had a hard time letting go of the out-breath. Her diaphragm was constricted, and the wave of breath did not penetrate down into the pelvic bowl and the lower half of the body. She was doing some strange combination of over-breathing and holding her breath. As a result, she was constantly on the edge of her seat, waiting for something bad to happen. The Goldstein clan was a frozen tribe: waiting to exhale.
Susan’s symptoms were aspects of what is now sometimes called hyperventilation syndrome. Hyperventilation means breathing excessively fast, or breathing too much air too quickly for the actual conditions in which we find ourselves. Trying to breathe too deeply, and too fast, releases carbon dioxide quickly. As a result, the arteries and vessels carrying blood to our cells constrict, and the oxygen in our blood is unable to reach the cells in sufficient quantity. This includes the carotid arteries, which carry blood to the brain. The red blood cells become “sticky” (hemoglobin holds more tightly to oxygen molecules) and are slow to release oxygen into the cells. The lack of sufficient oxygen going into the cells then activates the sympathetic nervous system, which makes us more tense, irritable, tight, and constricted.
“Complete breathing” is a very different animal. In a complete breath, we let the diaphragm pass through its entire range of motion in a free and natural way. In full breathing—sometimes called natural, or diaphragmatic breathing—the abdomen releases during inhalation, making a soft round belly, like the belly we see on so many statues of meditating yogis. But it is not just the belly that expands. When we’re breathing fully, we breathe into all the spaces of the body—back, sides, ribs, belly, pelvis, legs. The movement of the in-breath enlivens even the spine.
Full, relaxed breathing includes a long, slow exhalation as well. This is important, for it is precisely this relaxed exhalation that activates the parasympathetic nervous system, what we today call the “relaxation response.”2
When the breath is fully open, relaxed, and free, all aspects of the breathing system—lungs, diaphragm, muscles of the rib cage, and chest—are unconstricted in their movement, and the breath naturally finds a slow, steady rhythm. Though physiology texts state that the average breath rate for adults is twelve to fifteen breaths a minute, many serious practitioners of yoga breathe at a much slower rate. A study published in The Lancet suggests that a breath rate of six breaths a minute has certain benefits that higher frequencies do not have—and found that patients who slow their breathing down to this rate through breathing exercises have higher levels of blood oxygen and perform better on exercise tests.3 Yogis, likewise, found that a healthy “at rest” breathing rate is between six and eight breaths per minute.
Besides hyperventilation, it turned out that Susan had a host of other breath-related irregularities: Her mouth and jaw were chronically tight. Her throat felt constricted—as if there were constantly a “lump” there. When she sobbed, as she had with me, she felt these constrictions release.
Susan was the picture of the Hungry Ghost—with much of her energy stuck in the top of her body, unable to penetrate the block at the throat (the teeny neck). The wave of breath and energy could not penetrate into her pelvis and abdomen. The feelings there were just too dangerous, too overwhelming. From the neck down, Susan did not fully inhabit her body. She was, indeed, living like a ghost in the world. How did this come about? Susan’s patterns of breathing were formed long ago, probably in infancy, as a result of the fear, anxiety, and repressed hunger that so characterized her family life. But the patterns had now become divorced from their original causes, and had a life of their own—what psychologists call “functional autonomy.”
As a result, Susan’s pattern of breathing was restimulating her anxiety, fear, and longing. The past was alive in the present through this unconscious pattern. Eugene O’Neill described this form of suffering: “There is no present or future. Only the past repeating itself over and over again.”4
In other words, the breathing dysregulation itself was holding Susan’s memories of a painful childhood, a traumatic family life. Psychologists sometimes call this form of physiologically-based memory an implicit memory. Unlike an explicit memory, implicit memory does not carry with it any sense of something being recalled. It is, rather, a kind of habitual, automatic, mechanized process that holds the memory without the emotional facts of the memory ever becoming fully conscious.
Implicit memory is the way the nervous system has learned to relate to the environment. Remember the cats and the stripes? Whatever the sources of Susan’s original breathing inhibition were (and Susan knew a lot about them through her analysis with Dr. Brenner), nevertheless here they were, today—alive in the body and the breath.
Implicit memories are laid down through a process called procedural learning—a learning of processes that becomes habitual, and reactions that become automatic and mechanized. This contemporary discovery appears to be a Western representation of some of the functions of samskāra: Habit. Automatization. Mechanization. The ruts in the road. Increasingly, Western-trained therapists are seeing, as yogis did two thousand years ago, that the results of procedural learning can only be effectively disrupted by what some call a “bottom-up” approach—direct physiological retraining. Insight is relatively ineffective in deconstructing habitual behavior.
Western psychologists have found that there are two primary ways of disrupting the results of procedural learning. They are, not surprisingly, the very two approaches taken by yogis.5
First, simply call attention to the process—without judgment of any kind. This, as we have seen, naturally begins to disrupt the automaticity of the pattern.
And second, engage in activities that intentionally disrupt the pattern, and engage in relearning more effective, natural, healthy behaviors. Intentionally reshape the way the nervous system relates to the environment.
In our investigations of her breathing patterns, Susan and I would explore both approaches.
Patanjali’s approach to working with the breath is simplicity itself. Remember the mother of all knots in the shoelace? Disturbed breathing is precisely this kind of knot. And the antidote is the same: Stop. Watch. Observe without judgment, without reaction. Allow awareness to become absorbed in the breath, just as it is.
When breath becomes the object of this kind of attention, a small miracle happens: the breath naturally settles. Patanjali says it like this:
As the movement patterns of each breath—inhalation, exhalation, lull—are observed as to duration, number, and area of focus, breath becomes spacious and subtle. (2.50)
In other words, as we bring awareness to every aspect of the breath—inhale, exhale, lull—the breath automatically begins to reregulate itself. In this technique, there is no attempt to manipulate the breath or to impose another pattern on it. Just notice exactly how it is.
This is simply a further manifestation of the yogic principles we have been investigating all along: concentration on the breath moves consciousness toward meditative absorption, with all the attendant effects of calm and interiorization. In the case of breath, concentration (and the resulting absorption) has another interesting effect. Absorption begins automatically to reregulate the breath—to move the breath toward its most subtle, healthy, and balanced version. In other words, the breath is a self-regulating function!
As author Chip Hartranft says in his commentary on Patanjali,
Whatever aspect of the breath one observes—its length, quantity, or region of activity—the effect is to make the unconscious conscious. Its rhythms no longer dictated by internal commotion, the observed breath begins to soften and spread out in each of its phases.6
Breathing therapists have noticed this phenomenon as well. They have found that simply teaching patients to bring their awareness back again and again to their breathing automatically leads them to self-correct deficient breathing patterns.
Psychotherapists have learned the same lesson, but have developed a different language for describing what happens—describing it instead in terms of procedural learning. Says one prominent teacher of this technique: “Observe, rather than interpret, what takes place—especially the body’s automatic responses—and repeatedly call attention to it. This in itself tends to disrupt the automaticity with which procedural learning ordinarily is expressed.”7
In the weeks that followed our prānāyāma lesson, I challenged Susan: notice the breath. While you’re in the car on the way to pick up Monica, simply bring your awareness to the breath. While you’re walking the dog, check it out: how, precisely, are you breathing right now? While you’re sitting staring at your computer screen—stop, and see how you’re breathing.
“One more thing,” I said. “As soon as you remember to notice your breath, also soften your belly.”
Authors and meditation teachers Stephen and Ondrea Levine developed a simple and remarkably effective approach to the breath. “Develop the habit of soft belly,” they say. “Just soften your belly. As soon as you relax your belly, you begin to breathe more deeply. You become conscious of breathing.”8
So, I taught Susan the simplest prānāyāma in the world. “Soften your belly.”
I said to Susan, in effect: Don’t worry about advanced breathing, or manipulating the breath in any way whatsoever. That is for later, perhaps. Sramanas developed a complex and subtle repertoire of breathing practices and exercises meant to disrupt pattern and restore full and natural breathing—and these advanced techniques are taught today in many yoga traditions. But Susan simply needed to learn how to trust her own natural breathing. There was so much for her to learn just by watching the way the breath emerges.
“Could you learn to be present right now with exactly the way it is?” I asked Susan. “If it’s tight, observe that. Feel it. If it’s ragged, observe that. Be with it. How is it, exactly? Can you ride the wave of breath precisely as it is?”
I also taught Susan a technique to help with her practice of conscious breathing—a technique that we teach to most of our students at Kripalu Center. It was the same technique I had been applying with her the evening of our “breathing breakthrough” in the Sunset Room.
It’s called BRFWA, or Breathe. Relax. Feel. Watch. Allow.
Breathe Soften the belly, and bring your awareness to the breath. The body responds immediately. The wave of breath begins to flow into all parts of the body.
Relax Full breathing automatically initiates relaxation. In order to deepen this effect, it can be useful to coach yourself. “Relax.” You can consciously relax the muscles: The face. The brow. The belly.
Feel Actively begin to investigate the wave of feeling generated by this relaxation. Where in your body do you feel sensation, energy, movement? Investigate. Move toward the sensations and feelings, rather than away from them.
Watch As your thoughts quiet down and you enter more fully into your sensations, you may notice a witnessing awareness beneath, or “inside,” your experience. Allow yourself to identify with this Witness. The Witness stands at the center of experience, and is able to be with the experience, the sensation, the feeling, but not overwhelmed by it.
Allow Now, coach yourself to allow the wave of feeling to wash through you. No need to block anything. It’s all safe. It will not destroy you. It will not annihilate you. It will not hurt others. Stay with it. Stay with yourself.
It didn’t take Susan long to discover the surprising power in this practice. It allowed her to stop trying so hard. It allowed her to learn to trust the natural wisdom of the body. She could let go of effort rather than produce more. And for Susan, in almost every way, less was more.
After a while, I found Susan experimenting with this technique in yoga class. Sometimes, she would spread out her blue blanket at the back of class, lie down, and simply become attentive to her breathing. She felt soothed just listening to the teacher’s voice. She felt soothed just feeling the class around her. Here, she felt safe enough to experience her own body. Susan found that she loved to be alone in the presence of others. She knew that in this environment, no one would intrude upon her experience—as her family did. For the first time, she experienced a nonintrusive presence. She drank it in.
Increasingly, Susan could reenact the scene of our first breathing lesson. But now she could coach herself. It helped her to do this in the context of the class, because she felt safely held and soothed in their presence, as she had in mine that evening many months earlier. In our first breathing session, I had “loaned” Susan my witness. Now, the witness was awakened within her.
Susan learned that when she was relaxed and present, and when anxiety and fear had drawn back like the tide, her breath became soft, subtle, and effortless. Indeed, yogis found that when consciousness is not colored by duhkha, the breath is subtle indeed.
In the Yoga-Sūtra, Patanjali mentions this state of quiet, and declares it to be a preparation for the deepest meditative states. In his second sūtra on prānāyāma, as we have seen, Patanjali mentions the three movements of breath (inhalation, exhalation, lull). Now he tells us about a fourth pattern and its remarkable effect on consciousness.
As realization dawns, the distinction between breathing in and out falls away.
Then the veil lifts from the mind’s luminosity.
And the mind is now fit for concentration. (2.51–53)
The mind and body are now prepared to enter into the deeper stages of meditation practice—with all their attendant powers and possibilities.
Susan and I walked up to the orchard. It was a cold day in December, and the sky was steely gray. We found our usual spot at the top of the orchard, and sat on some rocks, with Kripalu and Lake Mahkeenac spread out before us. For a while, we sat and munched on peanut-butter cookies—and sipped tea from my stainless steel thermos.
Susan and I were both pensive. It had been almost a year and a half since our first picnic on the ridge together as a group. Remarkably, it had been a year since Susan’s dramatic near slip in the Stop & Shop parking lot. Perhaps our perch high above the lake prompted long thoughts in each of us—thoughts of our time together as a group, thoughts of our practice and its effects on our lives. Or perhaps the approaching holidays had prompted this introspection. I knew that Susan would soon be heading to New York, to spend Hanukkah with her mother and father.
Susan said to me, “You know what’s funny? I feel things more now than I used to.”
She looked at me seriously. “I feel my hunger.”
Susan declared this as if it had occurred to her for the first time. She continued, now directing a long gaze out over the winter-bare Berkshire Hills: “Strangely, with all those compulsive eating problems, I realize now that I never really felt hungry. Just compelled. Driven. Obsessed.”
She laughed as she turned back to me. “You know—I used to think obsession was a feeling. But now that I’m actually feeling things, I see that it’s not really a feeling at all. For me it was actually a way to block feelings.”
She nibbled on the cookie. “Now I taste food, too.”
Susan was exactly right. Her cravings had been “acted out.” Not felt. And now she was beginning to see one of the central problems with this acting out: acting out behavior splits us off from the feelings driving the behavior. Acting out means that we’re lost in the chain of thought, feeling, reaction, action. We’ve momentarily lost the battle for freedom. We’re automatons.
For Susan, a central goal in her practice of yoga (and also in her psychotherapy treatment with Dr. Brenner) was to bring these oral longings and hunger into awareness—to slow down the obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions that for so many years had tumbled inexorably out of her complex chaining reactions. It was obvious to me that she was beginning to interrupt them earlier and earlier by simply feeling them.
Susan was discovering that hunger and need are just hunger and need. She did not have to feel so afraid or ashamed of them. They did not make her a monster. She was not going to devour anyone. She saw, more and more, that she was an ordinary person, having ordinary feelings.
Susan’s credo in this work had become the one she spoke shortly after her near slip a year earlier: “No matter what the feeling, it’s always better to feel it.”
Susan had begun to discover a crucial difference between craving and savoring. In craving, we vainly attempt to possess the object, to devour it, to have it. In savoring, we find pleasure in simply knowing the object.
With this discovery, Susan was approaching one of the most liberating insights in the wisdom tradition of yoga—an insight that clarifies our confused relationship with the object world. Yogis saw that human beings wish to devour, to possess, to have objects of pleasure—people, places, and things. They saw, too, that objects cannot really be possessed. However, objects can be known. And it turns out that it is knowing the object that creates happiness.
We might say that “savoring” is the happiness created through the simple act of knowing an object. This savoring creates a different relationship with objects. But it also creates a different relationship with time. In the experience of savoring there is no time pressure. There is no pressure for more. There is no pressure to possess the object. “The life of sensation is the life of greed,” says Annie Dillard. “It requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet.”9
Contemporary neuroscience is beginning to help us more fully understand this very difference between savoring and craving. It seems that these two processes are on different circuits in the brain. Neuroscientists have found that all forms of craving involve abnormalities in the production of powerful brain chemicals called endorphins and dopamine. Interestingly, these abnormalities are generic to all forms of craving—craving for food, for sex, for shopping, gambling, and for highly addictive ritualized behaviors of all kinds.
When experiencing an addictive craving, the brain releases massive amounts of endorphins. For a compulsive gambler, for example, this endorphin rush can be stimulated just by thinking about the behavior—thinking about the gambling tables, or the racetrack. The endorphin rush brought on by thoughts of the behavior is so pleasant that we want more of it. So, we imagine ourselves at the gambling table. This repetition of thoughts strengthens craving. The next step in the process, however, creates an addictive spiral: it turns out that endorphins stimulate the activity of the high-octane neurotransmitter dopamine. As dopamine floods the system—in the midst of this addictive hit—the number of receptor sites sensitive to dopamine decrease. This process is called downregulation.
With downregulation, we find that we’re less sensitive to the thoughts of a night at the tables. We’re dulled to it. Just thinking about a night at the gambling tables does not create such a rush anymore. In order to get the hit, we have to actually do the behavior. We have to actually do the teeniest bit of gambling. That will give us the rush. But after a while, just doing “the teeniest bit of gambling” doesn’t give us the same rush, either. Now, we have to do it more, harder—and with higher stakes. A gambling spree.
Here is one apt description of this increasingly well-understood process: “The absence of a pleasurable sensation in conditions that were formerly sufficient can cause a mild feeling of let-down after receptors have been down-regulated. The increased requirement for dopamine to maintain the same electrical activity is the basis of physiological tolerance and withdrawal associated with addiction.”10
This means, simply, that the more of the substance (or the object) we get, the more we need in order to replicate the hit of brain chemicals. Once we are caught in this addictive loop, we find that it is harder and harder to actually enjoy a formerly stimulating experience or object. Now the cycle of craving and grasping is more deeply conditioned (the samskāra is more deeply grooved). We want more and more. But we enjoy less and less. So in the ramping up of the process of craving, the circuitry of wanting is strengthened, and the parallel circuitry of liking, or savoring, is concomitantly decreased.
Eventually, we end up in the Hungry Ghost realm—with those huge stomachs and mouths, and very teeny necks. We feel empty and hungry all the time. We can never really feel full. Any fullness we do feel is the fullness of duhkha—of unsatisfactoriness.
Nonetheless, there is good news in these neuroscientific discoveries. Because the obverse appears to be true, as well: the more we practice liking and savoring—what I have called “knowing” the object—the more the circuitry of craving is weakened. Why? As there is less dopamine being pumped into the brain, there are eventually more receptor sites for this neurotransmitter. Upregulation! The brain becomes more and more sensitive to pleasurable sensation. We enjoy more and more. But we crave less and less. This fantastic discovery again lends support to Patanjali’s view that we can practice the positive, or non-afflicted, states, and thereby increase them.
Susan was slowly learning to organize her experience of life around savoring her natural breathing—and, likewise, around savoring food rather than craving it. Slowly, across the months, I watched her make this shift—the shift to the wave of breath, to the present moment. Slowly, her war with her body was coming to an end. She was learning to trust life.
When hunger is our frame of reference, says psychologist and author Mark Epstein, “the body is experienced as an alien entity that has to be kept satisfied, the way an anxious mother might experience a new baby. When awareness is shifted from appetite to breath, the anxieties about not being enough are automatically attenuated. Just as a nursing mother learns to trust that her body will respond to her infant with milk, so meditators who shift to a breath-based foundation learn to surrender into the ebb and flow of their own breath.”11
When we begin to discover, explore, and identify with the breathing body, a shift happens. We have a direct, moment-by-moment awareness of ourselves as breathing beings. Our relationship to time is changed: we no longer run breathlessly after it, but simply stay with it, breath by breath. And as we identify with the subtle breathing body, we begin to see the subtle body of the world, pulsing with the same life force that initiates our breathing.
Then, as Patanjali says it, “The covering of light is removed.”