Mindfulness of breathing - guidance from Pema Chödrön

I have been exploring mindfulness of breathing and my search brought me to an article called What is True Mindfulness? on Pema Chödrön' shambala.org website and I thoroughly recommend it to anybody interested in this practice. Here are three instructions from the article and between them they contain what you need to know about mindfulness of breathing:

"The key thing here is, try not to watch the breath, but try feeling it go in and out, so you feel one with the breath. Just see if from the beginning you can minimize that sense of heavy-duty watching it, and just feel the breath going in and out."

"Then start to emphasize the outwardness and the space that the breath goes into, and emphasize that more and more. And then just see if you can let that sense of outwardness and space begin to pervade the whole practice more and more."

"... the other part of our meditation instruction is to label any thoughts we have as thinking and just let go of them and come back to the outbreath. That instruction encourages us to interrupt the constant barrage of talking to ourselves."

(In the first two paragraphs she is reporting the words of Trungpa Rinpoche.)

There are a lot of other good things in the article  which I would recommend to anybody interested in mindfulness to read at this link.

Breathing with Sharon Salzberg

"Deliberately take three or four deep breaths, feeling the air as it enters your nostrils, fills your chest and abdomen, and flows out again. Then let your breathing settle into its natural rhythm, without forcing or controlling it. Just feel your breath as it happens, without trying to change it or improve it. You’re breathing anyway. All you have to do is feel it."


If  you' re into mindfulness of breathing, this article by Sharon Salzberg on the tricycle.com blog is for you. While you're there, take a look around the Tricycle website ... it's full of good things as is the Tricyle magazine on which the website is based.