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RichardKennaway comments on Vipassana Meditation: Developing Meta-Feeling Skills - Less Wrong
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I have never been able to do this. The moment I notice that I am breathing, it becomes an entirely voluntary process, urged on by the slavedriver of the body demanding air if I let the process stop for too long. The result is that when I meditate on the breath, I cannot do other than exert conscious control throughout, and it turns into something like a pranayama or chi kung exercise.
I have a similar experience. In fact, when I was a kid, I would sometimes experience a lot of distress because I felt unable to relegate my breathing to autonomous control once I'd noticed it. I'm lucky this meme wasn't around back then. But I'm surprised that the effect is resistant to prolonged, regular meditation.
I had a similar experience. Not distress, but a sense of oppression at having to keep on doing this every moment of every day for my whole life. Of course, my attention would eventually leave my breath, but wanting it to would just prolong it.
Does this apply equally much to the situation where you're observing the way your breath feels, as opposed to observing specifically that you are breathing? If I think about breathing itself, I definitely take more conscious control, but when I pay attention to the sensation of my breath above my upper lip, that distracts me from the actions of breathing itself and it becomes more natural. Maybe not completely, but much more, and I figure the rest can come in time.
It does. When I meditate, my breathing rate drops to about 2 to 4 breaths per minute.
The irresponsibility in this thread is shocking. Deliberately slowing your breathing is not safe! If you're too good at it, you could induce hypoxia, which causes brain damage. Ordinarily you'd pass out before that could happen, but that is not guaranteed when you're putting your brain into altered states at the same time. If you really want to experiment with this, put on a fingertip oximeter first.
I haven't heard of people getting into trouble that way from meditation, though it seems theoretically possible. Do you have evidence, or is this a theory-based concern?
In my experience (I don't deliberately try to slow my breathing when I meditate), meditation leads to deeper, slower breathing. I don't know how well it would work to slow one's breathing to induce a meditative state.
I have deliberately slowed my heartbeat to go to sleep. The process is to notice my heartbeat, then imagine a slightly slower beat.
I do not believe this is dangerous.
I do believe that if there were measuring and competition, deliberately slowing one's heartbeat could be dangerous.
Theory-based. But I am not confident that incidents of slight hypoxia would be reported if they happened.
It may be that it's impossible to slow your breathing by enough to cause damage. However, even if that were true, there's still required a due diligence requirement. Four people reported having tried slowing their breath without even mentioning the possibility of injury, even to dismiss it.
... two breaths per minute doesn't seem sustainable.
I tried breathing as slowly and deeply as I comfortably could, and got 2 minutes 20 seconds for four full breaths without much effort. And I'm not even very athletic. Maybe I should try to keep it up for 10 or 20 minutes to see if there's any trouble.
ETA: 11 breath cycles in 6 minutes, then I got bored. It's very deliberate breathing, filling my lungs as much as possible with each inhalation, but doesn't feel uncomfortable in any way.
You can do 2 minutes 20 seconds for ZERO full breaths reasonably comfortably. :P
It isn't, but 4 is.
ETA: I have a string of meditation beads, 108 beads long. If I use it to count breaths, it takes more than half an hour.
Oh, that's a good idea. I've been wanting an excuse to make something like that for a while. But it does seem to contradict the keeping-still-ness.
What I do is curl fingers.
Count to 10 and back, curl 1 finger. When all 10 are curled, I begin uncurling. A full curl-uncurl cycle takes about 25 minutes for me, and is a good substitute for an alarm, I think. Little less stressful & abrupt at the end.
I guess I have the same question--how does this interact with the priority of keeping still?
I'm not sure. I'm very much new to it. I don't seem to notice any major difference between when I use an alarm and the finger curling.
2 actually is possible. I have even achieved it and that was without excessive training. At least, as I discovered later, without excessive training while I was awake. On a related note it is also possible to sustain 1 breath per 50 meters while running.
With both of the above it isn't a matter of mere psychology. The changes may have to occur down to the physiological level, along similar lines to altitude training. The oxygen absorption of the blood itself is altered.
Yvain has (had?) the same problem.
I had this problem for a while too. I remember I kept "letting go", and "looking through" the feeling of conscious control to center on the sensation of my breath. I think I ended up using that feeling as a cue to "look through". This relationship strengthened over time and eventually the problem went away.
Is there anyone else in this thread who does not have this problem? I don't seem to, and I wonder if I just haven't noticed it. With only the people who share the difficulty speaking up, I don't have a sense of how common it is, and therefore how likely it is that I'm an exception. On the other hand, the "you are now breathing manually" meme doesn't work on me, either, and neither does this observation of Yvain's:
So maybe there actually is a physical difference here.
I don't seem to have that problem.
It wouldn't surprise me if paying attention to one's breathing causes some change, and people who notice a change get concerned that they're doing meditation wrong, and this causes a downward spiral.
Fortunately, if there's a change I'm not sensitive enough to notice it.
Those who've reported that the involuntary processes get completely overridden while they're observing their breath seem to be up against a different problem.
This seems plausible from my personal observations.
Hm. It doesn't seem different to me. Care to elaborate on why you think it is?
In case one, the person intends to do neutral observation of their breathing, notices that their involuntary breathing has changed in some hard-to-define way as the result of observation, and, as far as I can tell, typically decides that meditation is too hard for them and gives up.
One person I've talked with about this also mentioned that observing her breathing also caused her to become anxious.
In the second case, observation disrupts involuntary breathing completely, and breathing has to be done voluntarily until attention drifts away to something else. People with this problem seem to stay with meditation longer, but I don't know if the problem is ever resolved.
I don't experience anything uncomfortable when observing my breath. Also, when I'm observing my breath and breathing at a normal rate, I have no idea if I'm consciously controlling the breath or just observing autonomous breathing. It feels like the inhalations and exhalations start by themselves, but I could be just fooling myself.
I don't meditate regularly, but I've been doing the breath observation meditation thing occasionally for something like 15 years.
I don't have that problem, and it's pretty rare for me to be able to induce physical sensation just by concentrating on it.
If you voluntarily do a large exhalation, can you wait for and allow an involuntary inhalation?
No, only in the sense that what I might do if told to by someone with a gun to my head is "involuntary".
(That's the 6th Tibetan, isn't it? The one that isn't so much talked about.)
It's also given as general advice by Steve Barnes and Scott Sonnon, but they respect the Tibetans.
If I were you and interested in being able to observe my involuntary breathing, I'd experiment with observing my voluntary breathing to see if I could find out what was going on there. This is tough, but it wouldn't surprise me if there's a key in what happens at the moment when you decide to observe your breathing.
This might (and I grant that I'm out there in hypothesis land) overlap some issues I'm working on-- a belief that I can't notice things as they're changing, so I have to stop them or slow them down.
I'd also take some yoga classes to find out whether the rest at the end of the class (Dead Man's Pose) has me tired and mellow enough to not take charge of my breathing.
On the other hand, I'm guessing-- I've always had at least some ability to observe my breathing.