[Gem]

I understand that this thread is not super advanced and it lacks mystical tones, but since this focuses on the reality of your life, it's only the reality as experienced by you - the ways of attentive breathing and how that pertains to the reality of your own life.

The reason I talk about breath is breathing is universal. Everyone is breathing. Anyone can feel what it's like to breathe. And everyone can pay close attention to what breathing feels like. Thus, everyone can meditate with breath no matter who they are.

Another reason is, the breath happens automatically. You do not have to do your breathing. It's a 'happening' flow, so you can be the pure observer of breath (and stop trying to make something happen).

Another reason is, the breathing is operating at a very deep level of consciousness. Even when you're blacked out, unconscious or in deep sleep, breathing is still going. However, you can also purposely speed up or slow breathing, or make it deeper or shallower. Thus it is a surface conscious activity as well as a deeply unconscious one; so it serves as a bridge that crosses from the surface to the deepest depths of conscious awareness.

Another reason is, breathing keeps every cell alive. Hence, the feeling of breath exists from a mundane, dull level all the way through to being extremely refined.

Since it both has deep consciousness origins and affects the body down to a molecular level, it has two affects. It serves to hone a dull and erratic mind into a quiet and extraordinarily sensitive one, and it allows pure awareness to pervade and become conscious at the subtlest levels of the life-form.

Maybe no one here practices breath awareness, or doesn't want to start practicing it, in which case there is no point to the thread, but I thought in a spiritual forum this practice would be quite common, and I suggest it is a really sound method.

Sorry if I don't dress it up as special, but that's not what I'm like. I don't appreciate spiritual posturing personally, so I don't want to come across like that to others, but besides my personal taste, there are also other reasons I tone down the woo. One reason I keep it low-key is this meditation is not about the sort of spiritual experience you want to have. It's about the actual experience you are already having. Both your present experience and the experience of presence. Another reason is, if I did woo too much it could arouse desires in people. Desires are not needed to be aware of what your real-lived experience is actually like, which makes them an unnecessary distraction. It's about the immediate truth as you experience it, and the desire for truth will expel all desires pertaining to what you want. This is because you cannot will the truth, but you can be willing for it.

In the meditation, you feel the air coming in and the way it feels is the truth as you experience it. You are content and do not wish it felt another way. Instead, you want to know more about it, so you examine it more closely. The mind becomes more deeply absorbed in how it feels (naturally dispelling distraction and thought) and mind also becomes concentrated to feel the finer nuances of your breathing. It naturally follows that mind is both quietened and concentrated and increased in sensitivity by these means.