Meditation is an essential part of Buddhist practice. Breathing is an essential part of meditation practice (and obviously to stay alive!). There are a myriad techniques of concentrating during meditation, but the most common and traditional is concentrating using our own breath.
Our breath is the most powerful tool to concentrate and keep our focus on. Other techniques are focusing on an image, statue, a sound, or visualization, but these methods can easily make us lose our concentration once a distracting thought or incident arises. The easiest breathing method is counting our breath; count 1 for every inhale-exhale and continue counting until we reach 10, then start over. If we become distracted or lose count, begin again from 1.
As we progress with this method we can increase the increments from 10 to 20 and so forth, until we reach a stage where we can easily reach 100 or 1000 without any distractions. Don’t just count our breath, feel the air go in and out of the nose, feel our abdomen and chest rise and fall – because if we’re just boringly counting, we will be distracted by thoughts and lose our concentration.
To help us get ready for our breath counting exercise, we can first begin to “relax our breath.” If we have a clock, or at least a sound of a ticking clock in the background (I’m sure there’s an app for that), this will help us with this exercise.
To begin: make sure we’re in a relaxed and comfortable position. Meditation doesn’t require any specific method of seating or position, just be comfortable to avoid too much movement. With the sound of the clock, we’re going to take quick, short breaths – inhale for 1 second, exhale for 1 second, doing one each for every second. Let’s do this for about 1 minute.
Next, inhale and exhale for 2 seconds each. Again, do this for about 1 minute. Finally, inhale and exhale for 3 seconds each for about 1 minute. After this exercise, our breath should be relax, light and semi-short. This is where and how our breathing should be for meditation. From there we can being our breath counting exercise; focusing on the air that’s going in and out of our nose, and the rising and falling of our abdomen and chest.
If distractions do arise, our counting will most likely get lost and we will have to start over. This is not a bad thing, because we want to know that we’ve become distracted. Often times many thoughts and scenarios will pop in our head and we don’t notice for several seconds or minutes, and our meditation has been wasted. But when we are counting and we get distracted and lose count, then we will immediately know and remind ourselves to go back to our breath and counting. Eventually, we mind will begin to retain itself to lessen distracting and unwanted thoughts, and we will begin having clear minds and blissful meditations.
Smile and be well!