What's the "breath" in breath-meditation?

Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Dhr. Seven, William B., Wisdom Quarterly

Breath: New Science of Lost Art (James Nestor)

While looking for a meditation group in the Hollywood area, I found Dharma Buddhist Meditation. I'm primarily interested in breathing meditation because I studied and practiced holotropic and pranayamic styles of breathwork and read a great book called Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art by Nestor.

Reading it changed how I see the breath. It's not just some mechanical process that helps our meat suit get oxygenated. It's a powerful tool that's inextricably intertwined with the body’s consciousness or spirit ("breath"), or whatever we call it.

Yet, I still have no clue what’s actually happening when I do any kind of breathwork (pranayama) practice. The handful of sessions I did, I did alone. I could only go for about 25 minutes before getting tired or stopping.

I want to learn about the breath and give my time and energy for someone else who could benefit from having someone be there for them. I also think I am motivated to breathe longer and feel more emotionally supported if I could have someone there for me.

I’ve only scratched the surface, the first 1% of understanding the breath. And Dharma Buddhist Meditation events would be a great way to share my intention, attention, and learn from others.

Dharma Buddhist Meditation

Soon we'll have mask-free events again!

DBM has ecstatic breathwork events from time to time.

Shamanic healing involves more than pranayama. This has been a popular offering. We will probably do a third very soon with a smaller group. It's been like herding cats to have a circus of people without experience in the sacredness of this event.

I can say this in hope its helps your Quest. The breath is not the gross thing, as you note. It almost has nothing to do with it. Oxygen doesn't keep us alive. If it did people in the fourth absorption (jhana) would all die, as they do not breathe but are quite alive and conscious for hours.

The Sanskrit word prana seems to be the Pali pana; thus, we get ana-pana-sati, "mindfulness of in-and-out breathing."

An enlightened teacher once shocked me when he told me "the breath" is not the subject of breathing meditation. Of course it is! It's right in the name! No, he corrected me. It's the "subtle breath." I had seen this subtle breath when I calmed way down.

It was like a butterfly under my nostrils, so subtle it seemed to me my body were being maintained by osmosis of oxygen or prana molecules, by transpiration rather than the action of a gentle bellows, because I was so calm I was not heaving or breathing in the ordinary sense of sleeping or being awake.

What is "the breath"? It's a mystery called "the holy spirit," Latin spiritus. The breath is the animating principle in life, what moves the body. The breath mirrors the mind, and that's why we take it as the object to allow calm.

Merge with it, absorb, and there will be silence, bliss, and progress. It is not the endpoint but the beginning.