practice › nuts and bolts considerations

breath:

Some traditions place great importance on the breath, as an aid to concentration, as a source of interesting observational data, as a way to affect thinking and emotions, as illustrative of the border or lack thereof between doing and non-doing, and more.

Additionally, some traditions place great importance on proper breathing, e.g. abdominal or diaphragmatic breathing, and more.

The methods in this document don’t place great importance on the breath, allowing the breath to correct itself over time. Sometimes it’s ok to deliberately attend to the breath and sometimes one’s attention (or etc.) will be magnetically drawn to the breath. Sometimes attention to the breath will be effortless and non-interfering, and sometimes attention to the breath will seem to "stop" or dysregulate the breath. Sometimes it’s good to gently and deliberately avoid attending to the breath or to forget about the breath as best one can, to let it settle down. And sometimes one might not think explicitly about the breath or "foreground" (or even "background") attend to breathing for a very long time, and this is fine. Sometimes breathing will be heaving or hitching, and this fine. Sometimes, one might briefly feel like they can only breath deliberately or that they can’t breath at all, and so on.

Long-run, one might barely reflectively attend very much or not at all to the breath, for thousands of hours or indefinitely, or at least do so only as much one might attend to anything else, generally, with respect to body, mind, and environment, etc., "in" the entire "phenomenological field."

Over time, all things being equal, with "right engagement" and right "non-engagement," breathing will tend to become ever-more-subtle, over time. This subtlety will be reflected in the barely perceptible use (or non-use) of all breathing muscles, from diaphragm, stomach/belly, chest, shoulders, and more. Sometimes the subtlest changes in posture are all that’s needed for "breathing."

What’s happening, here, is that breathing has "volitional" components and an "autogenic" component. And, over time, "volitional" components can get habitually convolved with the autogenic components, leading to overbreathing and other kinds of disregulated breathing. Through meditation, volitional components can be "deconvolved" out of breathing, leaving mostly just the autogenic component, which, generally, can take care of itself. (Note that this untangling, "deconvolving," may involve much of the rest of the system, too, so attention elsewhere than to the breath, may have long-run positive effects on breathing, and so on. It’s a global sort of puzzle, where breathing is only one piece and is indirectly affected, sometimes, by the rest of it.)

Deliberate or stereotyped attention to the breath, breath control (e.g. emphasizing inhalation or exhalation, or panting, belly breaths, even chanting, etc.), over hundreds of hours, can "tangle in" volitional components that need to eventually be untangled. (Sometimes this can be strategic, though, on a person-by-person basis.) Tingly lightheadness, needing to pee very often, issues with throat smooth muscle tone and sleep, can be signs that one is generally overbreathing, because of breathing’s connection to kidney function, autonomic regulation, and more. Aerobic and anaerobic exercise, such as jogging and sprinting, can short-term improve breathing issues, via effects on blood-gas CO2 tolerance. But, long-term, one must deconvolve volitional components from the breathing, as part of the global meditation puzzle.

Note: "attention," "foreground," "background," "in," "phenomenological field," are used very loosely in this section and are not technical or ontological commitments

Quick extra note: Sometimes spontaneous breath holding (or suppressed breathing without closing the glottis) can be a thing. And sometimes panting (rapid, shallow or deep breathing) or can be a thing. And a feeling of "chest tightness" can be a thing. And a feeling of "air hunger" can be a thing. And "gasping" can be a thing. And a tight glottis can be a thing. And a "collapse throat" can be a thing. And a plugged-for-no-reason nose can be a thing (one or both nostrils, or alternating). These factor into the discussion above. All of these can happen for physiological reasons (and those physiological reasons can happen in the course of meditation!), and they can all also happen from encountering pockets of "psychological memory," as it were. You might get any of this checked out by a doctor, none of this is medical advice, etc., and whether you do or don't do that, you might heuristically incline towards surrender, effortlessness, and letting it happen, as per the discussion. Slow walking, brisk walking, jogging, and sprinting, when possible (or equivalent---arm bike, swimming, stair climbing, etc.), can all be helpful for rebalancing the physiological side. The lower intensity ones, just picking one, might be done for forty minutes per day. The higher intensity ones might be done every three to eleven days, depending on what feels right. They arguably each affect a slightly different metabolic and respiratory regime.

Again this is not medical advice but on the physiological side (versus the psychological or emotional side):

breath holding, chest tightness, plugged nose, collapsed throat can all happen when one has been breathing too deeply or too quickly (exacerbated by being anxious or jittery) = blood carbon dioxide too low
gasping or yawning or sighing or panting can mean oxygen got too low
panting can mean something about the bodies acid/base balance might be (transiently or chronically) off. panting or altered breathing can come and go before or several minutes after orgasm and not signify anything problematic.

(note that the above doesn't mean you should do anything different in your practive re effortlessness and surrender. a general heuristic is to let the system rebalance itself, including "being moved," being breathed, etc., but, again, you might want to check with a doctor for some things.)

Finally: shoulder breathing? chest breathing? diaphragmatic breathing? (and posture? e.g. chest up and out? shoulders back? or everything neutral?) generally, all things being equal---let the body(mind) figure it out. best breathing under neutral conditions, after everything is mostly untangled might be fairly imperceptible with a tiny bit of coordinated muscle activity from both chest and diaphragm. and it'll be very responsive to any changes in physical or metabolic activity level. "belly breathing" is probably oversold, in my opinion non-medical opinion.

Generally, when all is well, the jaw is "magnetized" shut (teeth not touching or very lightly touching), or the tongue is "magnetized" to the room of the mouth, and breathing through the nose is effortless and barely perceptible (because breathing rate and volume are in dynamic equilibrium and therefore nose turbinates open). And of course breathing rhythms can change during exercise and emotional arousal, and also the mouth still might be open for thousands of hours in meditation, for all sorts of good reasons, though again will very long-run magnetize lightly closed, all things being equal.

And / but also see e.g.:

Nestor, J. (2020). Breath: The new science of a lost art. Penguin.

20230706 Bit of an update, here: Fully untangling volitional and autogenic breathing is important but then the volitional aspect of the breathing muscles, in interaction with autogenic component, and the rest of posture, movement, carbon dioxide and oxygen, and the skeletal muscles is still important. Just as movement of other skeletal muscles facilitates meditation, redo-to-undo, etc., the breathing muscles (diaphragm and multiple in chest, shoulders, also including neck, throat, jaw, tongue, palate, etc.), as well as breathing itself, can be an important part of further meditative untangling as well as ultimately participate in karmically free action. So, sometimes it makes sense to deliberately do things (as well as "be moved," of course) with the breath, etc., including deliberately inhaling or exhaling, infinitesimally or more than that, with all sorts of subtle variation in muscle activation patterns, and to affect carbon dioxide and oxygen, and so on, and lots of other things. See other sections about CO2 tolerance, and so on.