Sensitive to the Whole Body, I Breathe In

The whole body breathing class, now concluded, was very worthwhile. I’m doing this to begin with because I get a headache two seconds after I start to focus on the sensations of breath at the nostrils, not uncommon in this type of practice. It’s caused by straining; unfortunately, I am utterly incapable of noticing my breath without at least subtly trying to manage it.

I know I’m doing it, but so far I haven’t been able to stop. I often try to sneak up on my own breath—to notice it before I get a chance to try to enhance it in some way, but it’s hard to do. It’s like that thing where when you look at something or other with a microscope you change it, so there’s no way to see it in its natural state.

The one meditation retreat I go on each year in recent years is a concentration retreat. The one instruction at this retreat is to focus on the sensations of breath at the nostrils, period, for eight days in years past. This year it will be nine days, and next year ten. That is the official instruction, but last year, Eugene was one of the teachers, and he had a group of people doing something a little different.

I didn’t find out until the last day of the retreat, as some of us were walking down to the parking lot, that what they were doing was whole body breathing. The instant I heard the term I knew I wanted to do it, and this is what I’ll be practicing at concentration retreats from now on, and what I have been doing for the past several months in my daily practice, since Eugene’s one-day class on the subject at Spirit Rock.

Eugene pointed out in the class that just finished that the Buddha never said, “Pay attention to the breath at the nostrils.” He said, among plenty else: “One trains oneself, ‘sensitive to the whole body I breathe in; sensitive to the whole body I breathe out.’”

For some reason, I never once got a headache at a vipassana retreat, whether it was 10 days long or 28 or somewhere in between, even though you start with noticing the sensations of breathing and may spend most of the time doing that, along with noticing other physical sensations, thoughts, emotions, intentions, etc.

The wife of my meditation friend, David, said they ended up having to leave the recent daylong whole body breathing retreat, too, due to the smoke. It is definitely good to persist through all sorts of things when meditating, as the commenter who got the three replies very correctly said, but, as Eugene said, it’s good to use your common sense, too.

One woman at the Thursday night class asked how you know when just to notice your experience and when to do something about it. Eugene told an anecdote about how when he noticed his heart was racing, he didn’t just sit there noting, “Heart racing, heart racing.” Instead, he summoned help. It turned out his heart was in spasm, and some medical personnel were able to get it to stop.

I put walking out of a smoky room in the same category, at least if you have asthma or allergies. After all, it’s not like the only place you can be mindful is sitting on a certain chair in a certain room. The idea is to be mindful around the clock, or to aspire to such.

I have learned very worthwhile things from sitting with physical pain in particular. After several successive days of searing back pain at one retreat, I realized that my mind could be completely happy despite the burning sensations in my body, which seemed like a useful thing to know.

But it is possible to take this too far. At another retreat, which I think was either three or four weeks long, my shoulders began to hurt. I sat with it, and it got worse and worse. By the time I left the retreat, I was in agony, and it ended up being a couple of years before it was resolved.

It turned out I was holding my shoulders in the wrong position, too far forward, and when I thought I was letting them relax, I was actually letting something inside rip, day after day. In that case, it would have been smarter to seek medical attention right away, though there was no way for me to tell this pain was actually being exacerbated by sitting. (However, it was kind of entertaining to tell the various doctors and medical folks who ended up treating it later, "Well, I did it meditating." So macho!)

The Spirit Rock teachers are very good about physical limitations. If you have bad, or old, knees, you sit on a chair. They don’t insist that you sit on the floor, as I’m sure is the case at many monasteries worldwide, maybe particularly in Zen, maybe particularly in Asia. If someone has back problems, he or she lies on the floor. The point isn’t to hold a particular physical posture, but rather to be mentally present.

Eugene mentioned several times that if we are having a difficult physical sensation while practicing whole body breathing, we can breathe with it. But since noting my breath at the nostrils or sometimes even attending to the rise and fall of my chest gives me a headache, I asked him during a break in our final class if that could mean feeling the breath, say, in my foot (i.e., feeling energy in my foot, not literally the breath) while feeling the difficult sensation, and he said sure, but that he would encourage feeling the breath in my belly, even if it’s extremely subtle; that is, feeling the breath in my belly plus feeling the difficult sensation.

I’ve been experimenting with that and so far it doesn’t seem to cause a headache, and it also pretty readily reveals if any part of the core of the body is tense. I know this is going to be a helpful thing when formally practicing and in general.

I’ve suddenly started having trouble sleeping, or staying asleep. When I woke up this morning three and a half hours too early—you might think, "Oh, I must have gotten enough sleep, so I’ll get up," but I’ve learned this is almost never true for me—I focused on my breath in the pit of my stomach and voila! I was asleep again right away. And if I hadn’t fallen asleep, then it would have been a practice period, which is also fine.