The mystery of breathing

There are many ways that we can think of how we transition into meditation. One way is to just sense that we're turning attention towards some particular experience, some more immediate experience of the body or the breath or something else. Another way of thinking about it is as a process of becoming more subtle, bringing more sensitivity, more attunement, more detail to our awareness and the way that we experience ourselves. And another way to conceive of what we're doing is as a descent from knowing into not knowing. And letting go of the kind of mental projections that we lay over our experience. Descending down through that to a much more immediate, fresh way of experiencing. And in a sense, these three can be seen as doing the same kind of thing. As we bring attention somewhere intentional, there will be a kind of lessening of mental projection and an increase in sensitivity. Awareness lingers somewhere for a while. So as we make this transition, we can conceive of it in any of these ways or in all of these ways. Turning towards a more embodied, immediate sense of experience. Bringing awareness into the body and doing this with sensitivity and attunement. So we can sense a much more vivid picture of what's happening. And leaving to one side all the things we think we know about what it is to have a body, to breathe, to experience. So tuning to your body in this way, this fresh, immediate way, it can help to deliberately bring awareness to some parts of the body, just to bring us a bit more deeply into connection with the body. So you might sense the ground beneath you where your body meets this. The sensations of pressure, support, resistance. You might sense the areas of tension in your body. The face may hold some tension, maybe the shoulders. Look for tension elsewhere as well. You don't need to do anything with it. You don't need to tell it to relax. It may on its own. And noticing the areas that feel more relaxed and spacious. If you're not sure where to look, try the hands, the thighs, the cheeks. Some of these regions of the body that have less going on can be felt to be more spacious. And sensing in the fingers and the toes the many subtle sensations that help us to tune to a subtler kind of awareness. And noticing too the movement of the breath. For now, just meeting the breath as it is, receiving it for a few moments. As we do this, just check in with your emotional atmosphere. Sensing any identifiable emotions, anything that you would give a name. And whether or not there's anything nameable, sensing in a more subtle way, the kind of emotional texture that's present in your body. Even if it's subtle, neutral, vague. It's always some way that our emotional state shows up in how the body feels it. And then spending a minute or so with this whole body, letting your awareness be wide to take it all in, all of the flickering sensations, like light flickering on a screen. And the sense of the texture, the flavour of the screen itself, the whole space it. And then we're going to tune back into the breath and see if you can keep some sense of the wider body as we do this, so that we don't kind of shrink down over the breath. Instead, we just kind of encourage the breath to be in the foreground. We can sense it in the whole body as this process, exchange, this movement that every part of the body is touched by. And for now, we can just practise welcoming the breath, tuning to it in this spacious way. If the breath feels tight or jagged, sometimes if we just create more space, include the whole body and tune into this sense of the breath more as this current, this flow of the whole body, this can really help to ease out any discomfort with the breath. So welcoming, enjoying, savouring it. I'm gonna ask you some questions about your breath. These aren't so much things to find an answer to, but ways to enter more into the sense of mystery, the sense that we don't really understand what our breath is, what our experience is made of. So the first question is, where are you in relation to the breath? Or where is the breath in relation to you? Can sometimes feel like the breath is, like, in front of you. Is it really? Where's the you that the breath is in front of? Are you outside the breath? Are you inside the breath? If this question is confusing, just stay with the confusion rather than worrying about answering it. We don't really want an answer. We want to just look, experiment, play. Where is the breath in relation to you? Next question. Is the breath one thing or many things? Is there one thing in my experience that I can draw a circle around and say, this is the breath? Or are there many things that make up my experience of the breath? Or are neither of those descriptions really appropriate? Again, allowing yourself not to know, allowing yourself to be confused. We're not so much inviting the rational mind to give an answer, we're inviting it to recognise its limit. And the third question, what shape is the breath? Where does it travel from and to? There might be an easy answer like, well, it comes in the nose and goes down through to the lungs. But this is a projection of the objective onto the subjective. In your experience, does the breath really move in this defined shape? Last question. What is aware of my breath? Sometimes there can be this sense that my head is the thing that looks. And so somewhere in my head is a thing that is aware of my breath. Do you have this sense? If so, just question it. Is that how it works? Is there a little person inside your head that's looking out at the breath? You could try on other ways of experiencing this. Perhaps the breath is held in a field of awareness. So it's like the whole screen of my consciousness is kind of the thing that's aware of the breathing. You might even sense the breath as something that's kind of self-known. It's just aware of itself, it knows itself. Not trying to settle on any one of these as the right way. Undermining our sense that we understand what goes on in the territory of our subjective. Again, just allowing and welcoming confusion, blankness. I don't know. This sense of I don't know is really valuable. And you may stay with any of these questions if they feel helpful, if there's more I don't know to be mined from them. Or you can just rest into this sense of mystery. The body and the breath, what are they really? Immersing yourself into the mystery of breathing, being willing for it to be a mystery and seeing if it's possible to enjoy this sense of mystery, sense of freshness, lightness that can come with it. If there's a sense of kind of groundlessness as well, if there's any fear associated with that, just caring for that. You can always come back to a more solid sense of the body if you need to. It might be possible to tune into a kind of exhilaration with this sense of, I don't know, being on some ride where we don't really know what's coming up. You might notice that when thought comes in in a more defined way, it sort of creates something that obscures this sense of mystery. It's like it. It's a kind of structure that claims to be more interesting, demands attention in a different kind of way. And if we're curious and attentive, we can kind of notice that it doesn't do a perfect job of this. And the mysterious kind of cloud-like experience of the breath and the body can maybe still be sensed in the background. We'll spend the last couple of minutes in silence, just receiving and welcoming the breath with this sense, the freshness of mystery, immediacy. I don't know what it is, I don't know where it comes from, I don't know what it's made of. I'm just here to receive.