Waking Up in a Busy World: Full Awareness of Breathing

Thursday, May 19, 2022

Full Awareness of Breathing

"The Full Awareness of Breathing, if developed and practiced continuously according to these instructions, will be rewarding and of great benefit"

From the Discourse on the Full Awareness of Breathing/Plum Village

Yesterday I wrote about dealing with my puny little woes using the first eight steps of the Buddha's Mindful Breathing exercises. Those steps focus on the body and feelings. I have a tendency, in case you didn't notice, to want to finish what I start lol.

The next eight steps deal with concentrating and contemplation on our mental formations and on certain things we are taught. Mental formations are all the thinking, feeling, perceiving, judging, narrating, labeling etc etc that goes on in our heads. Some of that would be considered "positive" and some of it "negative" but we need to remember that both "positive" and "negative" are judgments and therefore mental formations in themselves. The steps are:

9. Recognize and be aware of the state of your mind as you breathe noting any mental formation that comes up into your conscious awareness. Maybe it will be a feeling like anger, or a thought like "I am not good at this" or a judgment like "That is wrong" etc Though we do not want to get lost in story and narration, we might gently recognize that "This is a thought" or "this is a belief" or " this is a feeling"
10. Then we attempt to gladden the mind by breathing in and out with that in mind. We call up the seeds of mindfulness, joy, happiness, and peace etc from store consciousness
11. Then we breath in and out in order to steady the mind and create balance and harmony once again
12. Finally, in regards to our awareness of mind, we breathe in and out to release the mind of its tensions...and its focus on the mental formations.
13. We focus on certain "notions" here to make them "insights". Notions are things we are taught and conditioned to believe and insights are things we experience fully and "know". The first notion we contemplate until it becomes an insight is "impermanence, the ever changing nature of all phenomenon" including what goes on in our minds. As we watch our thoughts, for example, come in, flutter around, go from here to there then leave ...this notion of impermanence becomes an insight.
14.Then we contemplate the notion of "detachment" or "dispassion" or "non-desire"seeing how our fruitless attempts to grasp and cling to what we thought made us happy never did...how it leads to more suffering, for example.
15. We contemplate "birth, no birth" or "cessation" or "Nirvana" until it too advances from a mere notion to an insight. We can contemplate water in our minds, for example, and see how water can go from many forms , from the water in the lake to ice in the lake, from the earth to the sky in the form of evaporated mist and then to the clouds and from the clouds back to the earth in the form of rain. It is forever changing , never really beginning and never really ending ...just going around and around. Who we are between these forms was never born and will never die...the form changes from one year to the next, from one incarnation to the next ...but who we are doesn't.
16. Finally we contemplate letting go, releasing all all our notions that no longer serve. We release the notion of us as the observer as well and learn to see the non duality, the inter-beingness of our existence, of all existence. There is a line in the Vasisthas that comes to mind here: Renounce all notions and then renounce the renouncer of these notions.