Bad at Meditating, Part 2

In an earlier post, I shared a simple way to start meditating when you’re really bad at meditation: take away everything other than sensing your breath. Forget about correct body position, chanting, etc., and just focus all of your attention on your breath for X minutes (under 10) or X number of breaths (maybe start with 25).

At the end of that piece, I asked, what is the shape of your breath?

I did not divulge the shape of my breath, because I wanted you to find your own shape. Did you? If not, stop and breathe a few dozen breaths right now to find a shape before reading on.

Got it? Ok.

This is the shape of my breath.

Like a slightly curved teardrop with the point near the bottom.

The round part of the teardrop represents how my lungs feel when full. Round, expanded, abundant. As I exhale, they get smaller and smaller, until they are like the point of the teardrop when the exhale becomes an inhale. My breath, to me, feels like a cycle that progresses along this teardrop-shaped path: up, up, up as I inhale, down, down, down as I exhale, all the way to the turning point where one breath ends and the next begins.

Are you with me? Good!

Now try this. Do it again and this time put your SELF in the center of your shape. I don’t mean your feelings, thoughts, looks, job, relationships, or anything like that. What I mean is, the perceiving unit inside you.

Only you have your perceptions. Only you are experiencing your life from the inside, seeing what you are seeing, feeling what you are feeling. What is doing all that seeing and feeling? That’s what I am talking about when I say your self. I mean your perceiving unit.

So. As you breathe and sense the shape of your breath, imagine that your perceiving unit is inside the shape. Your breath is tracing a path around you. Keep yourself there and keep breathing.

That is all.

Try it.

My next post on this topic will an amazing third layer that will make all this reading and practicing well, well worth it.