The breath we have always with us, as long as we live.
It takes no skill, no technique, no memory to return to the breath. It is gentle. It does not judge. It stays close no matter what we do.
Turn back to the breath. That is all that’s needed; and you will find that within is stillness, silence, the endless healing of what is.
Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…
There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.
Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life
Really, it is just this simple. There is next to nothing to it, this practice of ours. And yet it is the work of a lifetime, and the more we go on, the lovelier we discover it to be. There is something so juicy, so moreish, about this whole enterprise. Part of it seems to be that we uncover the essential impermanence of everything that arises; and that of course includes ourselves. Once this is seen – truly seen, not just accepted intellectually to be true – then there is nothing more to fear. To watch this unfold, from breath to breath, all the timescales from pulse rate to year’s end to geological epoch meshing like the gears of the Antikythera mechanism, unpicks in a moment our own house of anxiety in which we have been taught to live. Our long schooling in the myths of progress and responsibility, the weight of the future, the despair of failure – all gone in the lightness of the breath, the flicker of sounds from beyond the window, the actual presence of our body’s warmth against the good floor.
More than this, the webbed patterns of causality seem to come clear, bright wires against the dark softness of the breath itself; they are as they are, and yet all their vast geometries of causality are all right – deeply, inalienably all right. What is is the most precious gift, Merton’s diamond, the open ground of isness in this ordinary room, this plain body resting in just now.
In another way, of course, what I’m describing isn’t complicated or difficult at all. What you are really learning—and this begins with following the breath—is the art of doing less and less until finally you are doing nothing, just being as you are and letting your experience come to you. There are no distractions; you are mindful of your present experience just as it is. Nothing in particular is supposed to happen. You attend to what is there just because it is there. It is your life at that moment. We are used to doing things all the time, trying to change our environment, improve our situation, so it may seem difficult to do nothing. Actually, there is nothing easier. You just sit and let the world come to you.
Larry Rosenberg, appendix to Living in the Light of Death: On the Art of Being Truly Alive
Sitting by the window in the dusk this evening, I kept being drawn back to listen to the rain. It connected itself somehow to my breath, drifted between patches of thought, drew me back to itself softly – trickling in the guttering, pattering in the trees, the shush and splash of tyres out on the road.
Pema Chödrön, writing in Lion’s Roar:
One of my favorite subjects of contemplation is this question: “Since death is certain, but the time of death is uncertain, what is the most important thing?” You know you will die, but you really don’t know how long you have to wake up from the cocoon of your habitual patterns. You don’t know how much time you have left to fulfill the potential of your precious human birth. Given this, what is the most important thing?
Every day of your life, every morning of your life, you could ask yourself, “As I go into this day, what is the most important thing? What is the best use of this day?” At my age, it’s kind of scary when I go to bed at night and I look back at the day, and it seems like it passed in the snap of a finger. That was a whole day? What did I do with it? Did I move any closer to being more compassionate, loving, and caring — to being fully awake? Is my mind more open? What did I actually do? I feel how little time there is and how important it is how we spend our time…If you take some time to formally practice meditation, perhaps in the early morning, there is a lot of silence and space. Meditation practice itself is a way to create gaps. Every time you realize you are thinking and you let your thoughts go, you are creating a gap. Every time the breath goes out, you are creating a gap. You may not always experience it that way, but the basic meditation instruction is designed to be full of gaps. If you don’t fill up your practice time with your discursive mind, with your worrying and obsessing and all that kind of thing, you have time to experience the blessing of your surroundings. You can just sit there quietly. Then maybe silence will dawn on you, and the sacredness of the space will penetrate…
Another powerful way to do pause practice is simply to listen for a moment. Instead of sight being the predominant sense perception, let sound, hearing, be the predominant sense perception. It’s a very powerful way to cut through our conventional way of looking at the world. In any moment, you can just stop and listen intently. It doesn’t matter what particular sound you hear; you simply create a gap by listening intently.
I have come to love the noises through the window where I sit to practice. They are plain, familiar sounds: traffic, birdsong, the wind in the trees along the back of the garden, voices, the odd metallic clang from the yard by the old reservoir… Early in the morning, or on evenings like this one, they become their own lovely lacework realm of sound, intricate and nourishing, their texture as real as each breath, as the sensations of my body resting on the good floor. What more could one want than what is, in each instant that it’s heard? Everything is here; this precious instant is gift and grace; there is no next or before, and from that all healing springs.
I think sometimes we are in danger – I know I have been – of undervaluing simple curiosity. I love to – and don’t often enough – come to practice full of curiosity, aching to see what I will find in the stillness.
There was a period in my teens when I went through a fever of discovery – Bertrand Russell, surrealism, the Beat poets, WB Yeats, CG Jung, Charlie Parker, Johnny Griffin, Charlie Byrd – over a period of maybe three or four years. I remember my own first frightened attempts at writing, consumed by curiosity and terror in equal measure. Whatever would I discover? But I couldn’t stop.
Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
To follow that faint tracing, to find out where it leads – ah, the hunger to follow, see what is there, to see what is. So many times I have been sidetracked, but it is always there: the hunger, the utter delight. It is what draws me back to practice, time and again.
This evening, in the grey light falling over the room I love, I was just threading the edges of breathing when the noises from the road – the road at the end of the long garden, past the other apartments and the hazels and the birch trees – were somehow transfigured. Traffic sounds: shushing, purring, stuttering; voices; dogs’ desultory barking – they all became delicious, rich and nourishing. As sustaining as breath itself, they were a wonderland of sound as intricate as lacework, a mathematics of passing as playful as the squirrels who sometimes chase each other between trees behind the garden. Without touching what I felt I was so grateful, without even knowing the words for it.
In simple stillness – absolutely simple, plain stillness, not in the least special stillness – there are uncountable treasures. Just what is is infinitely precious, unrepeatable, necessary. Not having a reason, the heart cries out at the glory of it.
Remember, you have been learning to allow the breath to flow naturally without imposing a model, form, or ideal on it. Now, with the same art of allowing, you open to your own life, your own experience, and watch everything reveal itself. As you sit, the entire mind-body process displays itself from breath to breath, and you watch it all arise and pass away, come and go. You are learning to refine the art of seeing, which is nonreactive and equanimous—a clear mirror that accurately reflects whatever is put in front of it…
There’s no such thing as a distraction, because whatever happens—that’s it. The same emotions that you see in your sitting meditation—whether peaceful, anxious, or full of doubt—provide you with the perfect materials for practice. What arises will vary from moment to moment. The breath, however, remains constant. Even when a powerful energy such as loneliness or agitation visits, the breath remains present. Perhaps it is in the background, quietly, in-out, in-out, while your awareness is mostly involved with loneliness or whatever it is that has naturally captured your attention. In this method, you take advantage of the breath’s constancy. It is such an obvious fact, and yet one that most of us often forget.
Larry Rosenberg with Laura Zimmerman, Three Steps to Awakening: A Practice for Bringing Mindfulness to Life
Contemplative practice is an odd activity – it is so easy to fall into what we have learned to call distraction, and yet it is even easier to judge ourselves for becoming distracted. “Call yourself a meditator?” we sneer to ourselves, “you couldn’t concentrate if your life depended on it!” And yet, as Rosenberg says, really there is no such thing as distraction. There are only thoughts, that come and go, because that’s what minds do: they think. We have only to observe – and if we find ourselves tempted to follow trains of thought, to observe the temptation. Soon enough, the mind distracts itself from its distractions – and if not, the faithful breath is waiting for us to come back.
As long as we are alive, the dear breath is with us. There is such comfort in knowing this, if only we can remember. There is nothing, save gentle death itself, that can take the breath away from us: not illness, not sorrow, nor even happiness or anticipation. Always the breath is waiting, infinitely patient and kind. It is the soft weight of life itself, our companion from the minute we are born. All we need to do is trust it, like the steady tide on the wide shore of being.
An Open Ground 