One of the most basic meditation instructions is to count each out-breath until you reach, say, ten, and then start over. Noticing how you’ve lost count because your awareness became fully identified with thoughts can be very illustrative. I understand it as a mindfulness exercise (don’t lose count) and an awareness exercise (notice the breath).
One can probably hardly avoid being presented with an exercise like this at some point. I personally think this is a bit unfortunate, since this whole meditation ordeal can be understood and practised, sometimes with less struggle, in many different (and arguably more direct ways), too.
I struggle a lot with this and related exercises 1. My chest and belly will feel incredibly constricted, the stomach hurts, the breath comes and goes in irregular spurts. There are two interesting points that made this a little bit easier for me. However, before we get to that: I am still convinced that this is simply not a good exercise for me and I do not need to be doing it very much. This is an important point, because meditation is not about sitting in a certain way or doing (or being “good”) at a specific exercise2.
One thing that helped is something I discovered rather quickly: Do not do the exercise with my full attention. Instead, try to also be continuously be aware of, say, the sounds around me, or my body. Still, the exercise would still be quite unpleasant for me and I did not push it.
Now that I came across this exercise again in the context of this mini-retreat, I made another neat observation. It becomes much easier when I count to just one. In other words, explicitly note each out-breath and, for example, count “one”, or just observe it closely 3. It seems like the fact that there is this story/task that over-arches multiple breaths 4 already makes a big difference for me. It feels like simply the expectation that after one, there will be two, and then another number already affects my breath (as an expression of my state) so much that it feels incredibly constricted and painful. I am deliberately not saying “This makes by breath constricted” because it is more like on a rather low level my entire mode of operation changes and the breath is an expression of that.
Funnily enough, this fits quite nicely to what this kind of practise is all about: To fully witness the current moment. More precisely, awareness/attention is not (completely) in counterfactual/hypothetical/planning/projecting mode, but space (hopefully lots of it) is left for consciously experiencing life as it is happening right now.
Footnotes
-
So yes, the previous statement is just to make me feel a bit better about all this ;) ↩
-
Quite to the contrary, in fact. ↩
-
Of course this quite defeats one of the ideas behind the exercise, which is to lead you to a situation where you say “oh snap, I forgot what number I am at”. But to this I would respond that you might just as well notice that another breath has passed without you really noticing anything about it. Granted, this is a bit higher-resolution. ↩
-
And, as such, already abstracts away from present-moment experience towards the higher-level idea of a sequence and a me whose existence spans multiple breaths and can either keep count or not, etc. ↩