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Luke_Grecki comments on A Novice Buddhist's Humble Experiences - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: Will_Newsome 04 October 2010 10:40AM

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Tags: epistemology philosophy luminosity techniques

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Comment author: [deleted] 15 October 2010 06:18:21PM *  0 points [-]

My biggest problem when meditating is that when I focus on my breath, I switch to breathing consciously, and I can't consciously get it right.

Here's some advice from a guy named Ajahn Brahm:

A common problem at this stage is the tendency to control the breathing, and this makes the breathing uncomfortable. To overcome this problem, imagine that you are just a passenger in a car looking through the window at your breath. You are not the driver, nor a `back seat driver', so stop giving orders, let go and enjoy the ride. Let the breath do the breathing while you simply watch without interfering.

I also had this problem for a while.

Comment author: Yvain 15 October 2010 07:01:34PM 0 points [-]

I discovered something interesting regarding this yesterday. I mentioned that when I breathe too much, I get paraesthesias (feeling of numbness and tingling).

Well, now I've noticed that checking to see whether I have paraesthesias also causes paraesthesias. I don't know if this is true of everyone, but just thinking "I wonder if my face is tingling right now" causes my face to tingle quite perceptibly.

I think this was at the root of a lot of my worries over breathing "wrong".

Comment author: erratio 15 October 2010 11:38:21PM 0 points [-]

I did something like that the other week. I was lying in bed and I noticed a band of tingly numbness across the top of my head. I decided to try to deliberately extend the feeling across my whole head and got a bunch of perceptible twitching in various facial muscles as a result.

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