Know each breath as long or short

Begin by simply knowing whether this in-breath and this out-breath are long or short, without making them any particular way.

Pourquoi ça marche

The first two steps of MN 118 ask only that the meditator know the breath as it is — long or short (Sujato renders the Pali as “heavily” and “lightly”). Because the task is to know the quality of each breath rather than to hold attention on a fixed point, it gives attention a small, repeating question to answer, which keeps it engaged. Fine-grained imaging work on breath-focused meditation describes the practice as a cycle of focus, wandering, noticing and returning; knowing each breath afresh is a way of making the noticing phase happen more often.

Comment faire

1. Sit with the body upright and at ease, and let the breath breathe itself.
2. On each in-breath, know whether it is long or short; on each out-breath, do the same.
3. Do not lengthen or shorten the breath to make it “better” — the instruction is to know it, not to fix it.
4. When you notice you have wandered, return by knowing the very next breath as long or short.
5. Keep this up for ten minutes before moving on to anything else in the sequence.

Données probantes

The instruction is the opening of the sixteen steps in MN 118. Hasenkamp and colleagues’ fMRI study of breath-focused meditation described distinct brain-network activity across the cycle of mind wandering, noticing, shifting back and sustaining focus — a mechanism study of breath focus in general, not of this specific instruction. (mechanistic)

The imaging study was small (fourteen meditation practitioners); it describes how breath-focused attention fluctuates, not whether knowing long and short breaths improves any outcome.

Sources

• Sujato, B. (trans.). Mindfulness of Breathing (Ānāpānassatisutta, Majjhima Nikāya 118). SuttaCentral.
• Hasenkamp, W., Wilson-Mendenhall, C. D., Duncan, E., & Barsalou, L. W. (2012). Mind wandering and attention during focused meditation: A fine-grained temporal analysis of fluctuating cognitive states. NeuroImage, 59(1), 750–760.

Erreur fréquente

Quietly controlling the breath to make it long and smooth — the text asks you to know the breath as it already is, and controlling it turns the practice into a breathing exercise.