Re: Do we need to make an effort to control or should we not try to control our breathing during meditation?
sm2019 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 08, 2024 2:38 amSome people say, in meditation we need to make an effort to make our breathing subtle, deep and slow, while others say we shouldn't try to control our breathing, we should just observe it. What is your opinion on this?Best way is to try out all options and discover your own conclusions, keep an open mind. Some ways may work in some situations and not others.
I will say in my experience, over 30 years breath meditation and proficiency in jhāna,
I'd always leaned more towards letting the breath be natural and trying not to control it.
In hindsight, I regret that, and wish I trusted Ajahn Lee and Thanissaro's instructions to consciously breathe in a way to spread out breath sensations throughout the whole body.
Why?
Because trying to let the breath be natural and uncontrolled, tends to bias the breath toward shallowness.
And if you breath shallow for a long time, and your body is not strong, robust, it will tend to lead you towards drowsiness (after 20, 30, 60 min.).
So in my situation, and if similar meditators who are already pretty good at relaxed, singular focus, you should also have a longer term bigger view of the whole practice of good physical health, changing postures as needed, adjusting breath as needed to keep body and mind healthy, in order to get a deeper, longer lasting jhāna.
Remember the purpose of breath meditation, and kāyagata (immersed in body while remembering and applying Dharma), is that it drives out unwanted and unprofitable thoughts.
The physical act of being very attentive to breath (or other bodily activity) fills up the attention bandwidth and leaves much less room and energy to explore wrong thoughts.
So if you already skilled at stopping unwanted thoughts, worrying about "not controlling the breath" because the Theras advised against it, is unskillful, since you've already accomplished the main mission of ānāpāna and kāyagatā.
At this point, you should be more concerned of how to refine your practice to enter and deepen jhāna.
This is excellent advice. After lengthy periods of natural breathing which also led to shallow breathing overall (as you described above), I then had to undergo practices to rectify and fix up breathing in order to strengthen the body. This is a really important point, and rarely discussed.
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