120: Zen versus Daily Life part four

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Breath
A breath of fresh air —
becoming ever more rare.
Is it the End Times?

Continuing our exploration of what aspects of Zen training we might reasonably incorporate into our daily life activities, we turn to the aspect of breathing. This we listed under the rubric of the biological: meditative breathing versus everyday situations. With an initial caveat to remember that we are not talking about breath control, but finding and following the natural breath in various circumstances.

Beginning with how we are instructed to breathe while sitting in zazen, the very fact that we are following instructions skews the process in the direction of controlling, but, much like Master Dogen’s “backward step,” we relinquish our tendency to control, while merely observing the breath as dispassionately as we learn to observe our own thoughts. The body is doing just fine with controlling the breath, thank you very much, and we would do well to stop interfering.

Nonetheless, because our habits of breathing have become as conditioned as our habits of thought, wiser and cooler heads have compassionately defined our approach to breathing as an adjunct to calming the mind. So we are told to begin with a full exhalation, pushing the breath out through the mouth in short bursts, the so-called “bamboo breath,” for the short sections of a bamboo culm, until the lungs are empty. Then allowing the in-breath to fill the lungs entirely. This amounts to a palliative to our tendency to palpitate, breathing rapidly and shallowly, in the upper part of the lungs.

Various ways of focusing our attention on breathing cycles, such as counting them in some simple way, are suggested as provisional methods for corralling our wandering mind, sometimes referred to as “monkey mind.” So already we can see that we cannot separate the “physical” or “biological” dimensions of the method from the psychological. Zen, and zazen, are one holistic practice. But we cannot address it in words in a holistic manner, language itself being dualistic.

However, after taking it apart intentionally, it will put itself back together naturally, in a more harmonious manner. As Matsuoka Roshi would often say, “When the posture, breath, and attention all come together in a unified way, that is the real zazen.”

This process of unification — or, to use Dogen’s term: merging — is not something we can force, of course. It has to take its own good time to integrate into our natural frame of mind, which again follows from assuming the natural upright sitting posture, and following the natural breath. The body knows this posture, and the body will show you this breath, if you but allow it to.

So, likewise, carrying the breath over into daily life also becomes a process of following, or observing, the breath as it naturally adapts to circumstances. We all experience this process during what Grandma used to call her “daily constitutional” — her morning or evening walk in the great outdoors. When setting out, if we pay attention, we may note that we are inhaling once with every four steps, exhaling with four or more. Then after a while, if we continue at the same pace, the breath picks up to every three steps, then two, then each step may coincide with an inbreath or an outbreath. In other words, we end up panting at a brisk pace. We may even have to sit for a moment to “catch our breath.” While sitting, the breath starts slowing back down as we build up the oxygen deficit that triggers the rapid breath.

At this point of relatively extreme exertion, you may be able to feel, and even hear, your heartbeat, at its more rapid frequency, and louder pulse. When sitting in zazen, this is the point at which I recommend switching to counting the heartbeat instead of the breath. You will notice that your heart is beating so many times per breath cycle: maybe four beats per inbreath, four per outbreath. If you continue paying undivided attention, you may note that the outbreath is becoming longer, the number of heartbeats extending, to perhaps six or so. You may also realize that the pulse itself is slowing down, as the breath is becoming fuller, again replenishing the oxygen the body needs.

Let me model this process for you, following my own natural cadence synchronizing my heartbeat and breath, which slows to about five cycles per minute. Your results may vary. “In — two, three, four; out — two, three, four; in — two, three, four; out — two, three, four; in — two, three, four; out — two, three, four. And so on.

It should be obvious that this same focus of attention on the breath will carry over into other situations, where our level of physical exertion is not exaggerated, but our emotional reactions may be triggering an acceleration of our heartbeat. Such as stressful meetings at the office, or encounters with perceived enemies or threats, even conflictual exchanges with family and friends.

Remembering to turn our attention to our breath, and in turn to our heartbeat, we can recognize that our feelings of discomfort or anxiety have a physical, biological source: a rapid heartbeat. And that our way of dealing with it can be on that level, rather than on the social level of argumentation and interpersonal conflict. We return to the inner, so to speak, to confront the outer. Turns out there is no separation of those apparent binaries.

As we extend the discussion to a more granular breakdown of time and action, as also suggested in the early going of this series, we see that we can apply this hyper-focus on breath to the many disparate events we confront in daily life, such as the different dayparts, as the restaurant industry identifies them, when the menu of interest changes: morning; afternoon; evening; nighttime — featuring breakfast, lunch and dinner, and so on. A focus on breath may go a long way to tempering our appetite for food, as breathing is a greater source of vital energy than is our intake of food. Not that we can live on air.

But if we pay greater attention to the daily chores mentioned earlier, such as taking our meals, while shopping for the food, with the additional angst occasioned by inflation, and other anxiety-inducing demands such as maintaining health and hygiene, housekeeping, and pursuing our livelihood, including the commute to and from work, focusing on the breath throughout cannot hurt, and may actually help.

Next time you are on the expressway, in rush-hour traffic, just turn your attention to your breath for a while. See if you are not surprised by the rhythm and possibly raggedness of it. You might have a sense of remembering, “oh, yes, of course, I had forgotten there for a moment,” caught up in the aggravating circumstances of the moment. Mindfulness is primarily a process of remembering. Remembering what is important, what is actually happening in the moment, what we can, or should, pay attention to, in spite of the innumerable distractions we encounter.

Again, by extension, we remember calendar events, and mark their passing with rituals, protocols and celebrations, such as birthdays and anniversaries, on an annual basis; more frequent occasions such as weekend routines, holidays and vacations. In fact, we time our lives against this sequence of repeat events, which have little or no basis in brute reality — there is no such thing as a “weekend” in nature, for example — but they have a certain reality in the social sphere. If you do not think so, just forget to wish mom or dad happy birthday next time. So what does this have to do with breathing?

All of these ways of marking time reduce to daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual events. But as the 8th century Ch’an poem, Hokyo Zammai—Precious MirrorSamadhi, by Tozan Ryokai, founder of Soto Zen in China, reminds us:

Within causes and conditions, time and season, IT is serene and illuminating

The emphasis is mine, capitalizing the “IT” in this statement, which is traditional for translators’ choices in rendering the importance of “what” (J. inmo) these teachings are pointing at. It is the inexpressible, the ineffable, the essence of all phenomena, the noumenon. From Hsinhsinming—Trust in Mind, the earlier poem by Kanchi Sosan:

Understanding the mystery of this one-essence
we are released from all entanglement

So there is something else afoot, amid all the comings and goings of daily life over time, and inherent in all our conceptual markings of it: a more fundamental frequency, the pulse and breath of life and consciousness itself, or Mind with a capital “M.”

Throughout, and underlying, all of these changes experienced as varying concepts of time, there is a fundamental frequency, manifested biologically as heartbeat and breath, in a polyrhythm of complementary counterpoint. Remembering, and returning to, this basic tempo, and using these events as a daily reminder to do so, will help to tune us into the groove, following the metronome built into our body and mind.

This idea is not just based on my fevered imagination, or an overweening obsession with breathing and heartbeat. Buddha himself was said to have taught, paraphrasing, that “The mendicant, inhaling, realizes that they are inhaling. Exhaling, realizes that they are exhaling,” or something to that effect. Why would such a stupid-simple teaching be important, or necessary? Precisely because, usually — we don’t. As long as we are breathing, and our heart is beating, we don’t need to know. The brain simply turns off any conscious awareness of autonomic processes — until it doesn’t. When they stop, for example. Then all of our attention is suddenly on the heartbeat, and the breath. Serious as a heart attack, as we say.

So why not pay attention to this teaching, while we have the luxury of doing so voluntarily? Not only is the breath and heartbeat the rhythm section of our band — they comprise a barometer of where we are at the moment. Not only in terms of time, but also temperature (as in “chill” or “off the charts”). Following the breath, and your heart, will lead you to the Original Frontier of buddha-mind.

Next time we will attack the most complex of the three dispositions of body, breath and attention — that of paying attention to attention itself, with its implications for living the Zen life in the social sphere of community, or Sangha. Stay tuned, meanwhile, to your breath. And heartbeat.