Breathing Meditation

* Breathing Meditation *

To begin the breathing meditation, you will focus on visualizing the air travelling in through your nose, down your throat, filling your lungs, leaving your lungs passing back through your throat, and back out your nose.

- Consider this process as fundamental to giving you life. Realize that with each time you take in the air you are symbolically taking in the whole world, and as you release the air, you trust that it will eventually come back. Remember that you trust your life with it. Consider yourself unattached to or unconcerned with whether or not the air makes it's way back in to your lungs. You sit back and just trust in the process.

- If you find your mind drifting off into other things (like what's for dinner?, or that project is due pretty soon) simply firmly but gently take your mind back to what you are presently doing. Take yourself back to the activity.

START HERE: Do This Body Relaxation Technique Before any Meditation! The Method

1. As you take each deep breath, feel the sensation of air entering and leaving your nose. Notice that the air entering your nose feels slightly cool, and the air that’s leaving your nose feels slightly warm. This is key.

2. Get to really feel this sensation. Take a few deep billows of air to familiarize yourself with this.

3. When you’re ready, you will mentally count each repetition you take. You will do this slowly 21 times, each time focusing on the feeling. Once you make it to 21, start again.

4.Try to repeat the cycle 5 times.

Important Notes

- When you start this meditation, its best to start with 1 cycle of 21. After the first meditation, you can double the amount of cycles of 21 for each sitting (e.g. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16) until you reach 10-15 minutes. Once you reach the 15-minute mark, you can just dwell on the feeling and sit there enjoying the delicious energy flowing through your body that results.

- Of course, you can do this meditation for as long as you like. Try to meditate daily; five minutes a day is better than 10 minutes every two days. At this point you will have mastered the breathing meditation. Be patient, because it takes years for many to build the discipline to accomplish 20 minutes of continuous meditation.