Mindfulness Breathing
It’s not really deep breathing
It’s common to hear people talk about this idea of mindful breathing, at least in the circles I move in. Often, it’s connected to managing anxiety, stress and related things. I often read or hear people saying things like, “Practise your mindful breathing,” and I think to myself, “Yes! What a good idea!” until I hear them explain what they mean by mindful breathing. Then I think, “Oh. That’s a little disappointing …”.
I’ve come across two major forms of apparent ‘mindful breathing’. One is the box breath, which is an excellent form of managing your body’s healthy response to stress, conflict and anxiety. I have been using a variation on this theme to manage my own stress for a number of years now. The other is simply what you’d call ‘deep breathing’. This is where you take in deep breaths and exhale them out again. Neither of these is actually ‘mindful breathing’, although each of them can done mindfully. Let me explain; no, there is too much. Let me sum up.
Learning Mindfulness
When I really started studying and practising mindfulness, I began with John Kabbat-Zin’s famous book, Full Catastrophe Living, followed by Wherever You Go, There You Are. This helped me to grow my daily discipline of mindful meditation. I branched out further to other sources and one in particular that helped me understand mindfulness in the context of my own spiritual journey was Hieromonk Damascene’s beautiful work, Christ the Eternal Tao.
Further to this, I explored what Western science had to say about mindfulness. As it turns out, there is a whole subset of the psychological sciences that developed a concept of mindfulness quite apart from any Eastern philosophical influence. They have one or two minor differences but overall, through the process of observation and experimentation, similar concepts were arrived at. This research can be found overviewed in Ellen Langer’s two books Mindfulness and The Power of Mindful Learning. A third and equally influential work, for me, was White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts, by Daniel Wegner. Although these last three books are a bit older now (although there is a 25th anniversary version of Mindfulness, but I haven’t read it), the research and observations they bring to mindful living are impactful, profound and immensely useful. And I’d say, foundational.
They covered such key aspects of mindfulness as curiosity, acknowledging our current state without self-recriminating judgment and allowing ourselves to have our unwanted thoughts for a time without suppressing them. The big key, for me, when it comes to mindfulness, is this idea of simply paying attention to something.
Early Days
When I first began daily mindful meditations, I discovered something. It’s really, really hard to do. It’s a really difficult discipline to develop. At first, I was lucky to be able to sit still for more than three minutes at a time. And that was the lesson for me — not sitting still but learning that my body wanted so desperately to move around but I was not to be mastered by my thoughts. When an impulse to move came into my mind — when my back seemed to want to shift and squirm — then I could simply acknowledge that I had the desire to move and then redirect my attention back to the task at hand.
And what was the task at hand? It was simply paying attention to something. The first something I started paying attention to was simply my breath. That’s it. My breath.
Mindfulness, in this context, was choosing to meditate on the feeling of my breath as it traveled in and out of my nostrils. I would simply feel the sensation of breath moving in through my nostrils and then feel the sensation of breath moving out of my nostrils. When my mind wandered or I found myself thinking about my breath, I would say to myself, “That’s a thought about the feeling of your breath; that’s a thought about how long you have left; that’s the desire to move and shift” or whatever the thought was. I would acknowledge it, name it, and then I would bring my awareness back to simply feeling, without analysing, the sense of breath moving in and out of my nostrils.
It was emotionally discomforting and sometimes frustratingly so. It could feel like an eternity. The time would tick by, I’d be sitting there, and I was sure an hour or two had passed. You can probably see where this is going. In fact, I discovered that 30 seconds could easily feel like an hour if your mind is constantly fighting the sensations to move.
I learnt pretty quickly that using a timer was one of the best things I could do. I learnt to set my alarm to 5 minutes in the beginning. Just 5 minutes. Then I would pay attention to the feeling of my breath in and out of my nostrils. This way I didn’t have to worry about how long I had left, as the timer would go off when it was time to finish.
I also learnt that it’s easy to fall asleep when you’re trying to meditate like that! And you know what? I also learnt that it’s okay to fall asleep. You know why? It’s because the goal of mindfulness meditation is not achieve a certain state of awareness but to live completely and without denial of the state in which you are. It is to completely experience your moments. And so, if I fell asleep while meditating, when I awoke, I could simply say to myself, “I had a small nap,” and then return to the feeling of the breath in and out of my nostrils.
Now here’s the thing: As I was breathing and paying attention to the feeling of my breath in and out of my nostrils, I did not seek to change my breathing pattern in any way. I sought the opposite. I sought to allow my body to breathe itself. It’s hard to do. So while I was being mindful of my breath, I did not slow down my breath, take deeper breaths, soften my breath, speed it up or anything. Mindfulness, you see, is a form of non-intervention. It is simply watching something as it occurs and being completely immersed in it.
So when I was practising mindful breathing, I focused on feeling the breath from beginning to end and back to the beginning again, without any intentional intervention on my part. If my breaths came in quick succession, I would allow them to and simply feel that. If they suddenly became deep inhalations, I would allow them to be just that and feel them. When they returned to slower breaths, I would allow them to. I wasn’t there to adjust or control my breathing. I was there to pay attention to how it felt, to be fully immersed in that feeling without choosing to change anything. Mindfulness is not changing what you experience. It is acepting what you experience and watching it with non-judgmental curiosity.
Progressing Days
As I practised the habit of meditating mindfully, I began to explore other means of practise. The next stage for me was to learn to do a body scan. This is where I would pay attention to one part of my body, and then another, and then another, all the way up my body, until I had paid attention to the whole of my body. At first, I chose large parts of the body: the sole of the foot, the front of the shin, the knee cap, the thigh, the buttocks, the neck. As I progressed and as I was able to meditate for longer periods, I would focus on smaller portions of my body.
All along, I would use the same drills: when my mind was distracted — and it would be, because that is part of the process of meditating mindfully and entirely necessary to grow in mindfulness— then I would acknowledge that, attend to it, name it (“That’s a thought about last week’s training sessions; that’s a thought about what will happen with paying our bills next month”) and then simply return, without conedmning myself for having those thoughts, to the body part I seemed to remember being up to. I would simply sit there and try to feel everything that was coming from that body part.
Did it feel tingly? I would simply feel that tingle. Did it feel warm? I would simply feel that warmth. Did it feel comfortable? I would simply feel that comfort. Did it feel nothing? Then I would attend as wholeheartedly as I could to that feeling of nothing. The whole process was not one of trying to change anything; it was a process of simpy experiencing my body in that moment. It was, truly, a process of learning to allow my body to be as it was, without interpretation, judgment or the need to change anything.
I knew that, for the time that my timer was ticking, I was able to simply pay attention to my felt and lived experience without any need to change or adapt anything. I simply learnt to be.
Now here’s the thing: This relates so keenly to the idea of mindful breathing. When I was doing my body scan, I was not adjusting my breathing in any way, shape or form. At least not intentionally, certianly not voluntarily. I simply allowed my body to breathe itself, deep or shallow, fast or slow, and I would attend not to my breathing but to whichever body part I was up to. Simply feel all the sensations I could. Simply let them exist without need for explanation, justification or interpretation.
Applying Mindfulness
I saw little benefit to my mindfulness. Especially at first. I simply believed it was important to cultivate because I was told that by health professionals and I had read enough evidence to show it was worthwhile. But I never saw the actual benefit for myself. I kept at it because for so long I had not lived mindfully. I had lived mindlessly, running from one thought to the next, thinking about the past, regretting the past, living the glory days, or fretting about the future, creating fantasies of glory days to come. This moment here, this now, however, was not so lived in. And I was sick of it.
It was my wife who pointed out how much better I was since starting my practise. After some time of practising it, she noted how much calmer I reacted to things now. How much more even I was in my emotional reactivity, how I lived a life less as a reaction to things and more as an intention. She noted how much of a difference the mindful practise made to my life and how if I went for a few days without it, the old habits would creep back in. I never saw that.
This was a good lesson for me to learn. Many people have said to me that they tried mindfulness and it didn’t work. I am curious: how many of those people have looked for some internal transformation only to be looking at the wrong thing? Maybe our internal change is not enough to give the clarity we need. Maybe the changes begin externally for some people and we need to be in conversation with our loved ones and those who see us most often in our more vulnerable states. Maybe they see changes we don’t.
Anyway, I realised then that I needed to do more than just practise mindfulness. I needed to integrate it. I needed to apply it with intention. Because mindfulness meditation, though beneficial, is only a conditioning tool. How can we apply the principles we learn during our practise in the activities of daily life?
Stretching Mindfully
I love my stretching! I began to explore the process of stretching in a way that is absorbed with the sensations in the body. I began to explore how sitting in a stretch position can feel, truly feel, and whether the desire to come out of a stretch position was because my body was truly in danger or if it was simply something I was not use to. It occurred to me that holding a stretch position had a similar kind of neurological discomfort to sitting still in a meditative pose for any length of time. I was not my thoughts — I didn’t have to move when I sat down and in the same way, I didn’t have to move out of the stretch position, either.
So I played around with sitting in gentle stretch positions. What sensations did I feel? I played around with sitting in deep stretch positions. What sensations did I feel? I practised allowing my attention, my awareness, to rest lightly and singly upon the sesnations in my body as it stretched, to feel the sensations and to discover that my body was quite capable of telling me when it was time to come out of the stretch. I practised bringing my awareness back to the strong and many sensations being created within my stretched tissues and discovered that this was a discipline I could apply to many situations.
Mindfulenss became a means of experiencing the body’s internal communication relays in real time and to focus my awareness on them and them alone. It wasn’t always easy. At the end of each session, however, I found myself calmer, more focused and alert and more at home in my body. But I learnt to rarely stretch with that as my goal. They were just common by-products of stretching mindfully.
Moving Mindfully
I began to explore the idea of moving mindfully. This means to move and simply let as much of your awareness rest lightly and fully upon the sensations of your body as it moves. When you find yourself thinking about other things, you simply acknowledge the thoughts and bring your awareness back to the sensations.
It is to be expected that you’ll start thinking about things. It is to be expected that you’ll be distracted. You will have other thoughts enter and you will find it increasingly difficult to focus and that is all a healthy part of learning to do something mindfully. Without the distractions, without the recurring thoughts and images, there is no need to practise mindfulness!
So I learnt to move mindfully.
An example would be when walking down the street. I may walk and try to bring my awareness simply to the feeling of my arms swinging, my legs moving, my feet landing on the ground with each step. Simply attend to the various sensations in the body without interference. Without intervention. If I breathe fast, I breathe fast and feel it. If I breathe slowly, I breathe slowly and feel it. If I stumble in my step, I simply feel the stumble, name it as a stumble, and continue on feeling the walking sensations. This practise is one of continually bringing my awareness back to the sensations being produced in my body, to acknowledge that they exist and to allow them to exist.
I can do this when lifting weights, when driving, when riding, when walking, when running, when pushing a trolley through a shopping centre. All movements can be mindfully experienced — fully experienced — without intervention. Simply allow them to be. Simply experience them.
Final Thoughts
This brings me to my final thoughts, which amount to the common theme in all of this. When I am mindfully attending to something, I am not inervening in it. I am not seeking to control or change it. I am simply seeking to focus on it, to allow my awareness to rest lightly or fully on that thing. This process of focus, this means of attending to something, is one in which I do not seek to re-arrange anything. I simply acknowledge what is and experience it fully.
This is how I know box breathing and deep breaths are not, in and of themselves, mindful techniques. They are techniques that require you to change something. They require you to monitor your breath and your muscles of breathing and adjust their contractions, to force your breath to do what you want. They are not being mindful. They are being forceful, or being in control, or moderating the body’s current state of existence. There is nothing inherently wrong with these things. As I said at the beginning, I use box breathing and I use slow and deep, controlled breathwork on a daily basis. But I avoid thinking that doing this breath work is the same as doing mindful breathing. And I certainly never call them mindful breathing out of habit. They are not.
They can be mindful. They can done mindfully and you can pay attention mindfully to the process of adjusting your breathing, but if you are truly choosing to be mindful, then you’re choosing to allow your body to simply exist without interference. Truly mindful breathing is that which simply pays attention to the breath in the moment and allows it to be. It is simply feeling the breath travelling in and out of the nostrils; feeling the breath change its rate, from fast to slow and back to fast again. It is doing this for a given time and being fully immersed in the feeling of your body in the process of breathing.
So when we breathe, to do it mindfully, is simply to do it paying attention to the feeling, the experience, of breathing. It is being completely present in the moment of breath. This is wonderful and can bring you from living in the guilded halls of your past or the ever-changing possibilities of your future and grounding you, for a time at least, in this present now.
Surely that’s a nice way to live.
