I seem to be holding on to the breath or letting it go?”
The fastest way to unlock your breathing is to sigh, but
you need to do it well. So what makes a good sigh? We should
think of a sigh as having three parts: in-breath, out-breath,
and the pause at the end. If there’s no pause, it’s just a deep
breath, not a sigh. Deep breaths are good, but sighs are so
much more relaxing.
To get the hang of this, I suggest that you try doing an
exercise I call “Three Sighs,” and do it many times a day. Until
you have more experience, one sigh usually isn’t enough to
break through the locked muscle tension and reset your level
of arousal.
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THREE SIGHS
The exercise goes like this. You sigh three times. The first big
in-breath unlocks the tight chest. You then let the breath go
without forcing it, and wait in the space at the end until you
really need to breathe in again.
On the second sigh, it is good to have a fake yawn, and
don’t be surprised if this triggers a real one. A yawn slows
down the breathing considerably by lengthening the out-
breath. Don’t forget to wait at the bottom of the out-breath for
as long as is comfortable. This waiting really stretches the out-
breath. On the third sigh, focus on releasing the breath com-
pletely and waiting at the end, until the next breath comes of
its own accord. This whole process should take about thirty
or forty seconds.
The meditation is now over. When you go back to natural,
uncontrolled breathing you will find it has utterly changed.
Your breathing will have shifted from tight, holding, chesty
breathing, to looser, releasing, lower-body breathing. Your
breaths will also be slower and longer, which is a clear marker
of lower arousal, and your whole body will feel more relaxed.
It sounds easy, but without repetition and practice you
won’t get a great deal out of it. We don’t break habitual lev-
els of arousal that easily. They tend to rebound fairly quickly
unless you repeatedly reset them. I suggest to my students
that they try to do the “three sighs” at least ten times a day.
Here are some extra suggestions:
You can sigh reasonably well in polite company with
your mouth closed if you linger at the end of the out-breath,
thereby slowing your breathing down. However, if you have
the chance, you will get far more mileage from sighing with
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your mouth open. This will unlock the jaw, resulting in a passive stretch of the lower face muscles and therefore accelerat-
ing the process.
You will get even more mileage if you yawn. You can think
of a yawn as a turbo-charged sigh. A yawn will actively stretch
all the face, neck, and throat muscles. Yawning will throw
your shoulders back and open your throat to three times its
usual capacity. The out-breath will drop so much deeper, and
the space at the end will be that much longer.
A good yawn makes it quite impossible to maintain high
levels of arousal and muscle tension. It forces you to relax. If
you were a runner at the start of a race, fired up with isomet-
ric tension and ready to burst out of the blocks, but you then
decided to have a big yawn, you would lose all your explosive
edge. The gun would go off and you would come in last. No
amount of willpower and determination can maintain mus-
cle tension and arousal against a good yawn.
Try to do three sighs (openmouthed and with at least one
yawn) whenever you start to walk somewhere. Choose some-
where you can do it nearly every time: when you get up from
the computer, when you walk away from your car, when you
walk out your door.
Don’t forget to notice the mental benefit. After the three
sighs, you may find that your mind is unexpectedly clear.
Whatever you were thinking about before you started to sigh
will have slipped off the mental stage. If we neglect a thought
for ten to twenty seconds, it drops out of active mode into a
resting state.
For this reason, giving full attention to three sighs is a
marvelous way to detach yourself from a train of thought. It
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can be a punctuation mark in your day. You empty your head and prepare for the next activity. In neuroscience and sports
psychology, this is called a “preparatory set.” You see tennis
players do it all the time when they prepare to serve. They
sigh, bounce the ball a few times, and sigh again, in order to
bring their arousal down to the level appropriate for serving.
Only when they’re ready do they serve.
You can easily do the same between one activity and
another. A little exercise like this can bring you back into
the present, reset the appropriate levels of muscle tone and
arousal, and orient your mind to what is coming up. This is a
great physical and mental outcome for a thirty-second med-
itation.
When you are experienced in doing three sighs, you will
find that even a single sigh (ideally a yawn) can have a remark-
able effect. You sigh, stop, reset your level of arousal, and get
ready. A big conscious yawn will also drop you into a few
seconds of physical stillness and mental silence at the very
end of the out-breath. These moments of silence and embodi-
ment can be pivot points in your day. They enable you to feel
calm, focused, centered, and in control. When you move into
action, you can do so when you’re ready, in your own time.
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5
The Body Scan
[The monk] trains himself thinking: “Conscious of the
whole body, I breathe in . Conscious of the whole body,
I breathe out . Calming the whole body, I breathe in .
Calming the whole body, I breathe out .”
—Satipatthana Sutta
Dozens of meditation practices are based on paying atten-
tion to the play of sensations within the body. Some call
for systematically relaxing the muscles of the body from top
to bottom. Some focus on subtle blocks and energy flows, as
in yoga. In tai chi the focus is on moving the body in a fluid,
harmonious way.
Despite their variety, these techniques all have a similar
effect: they strengthen and harmonize the mental map of the
body (the body schema, discussed in chapter 3). “Scanning”
the body slowly—that is, undertaking a careful mental explo-
ration of the sensations present in the body—brings mind-
fulness of hidden tensions, and this alleviates many of them
within seconds. It is like gently combing the kno
ts out of a
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tangle of long hair—and discovering with amazement how
many knots there actually are.
A good way to structure a body scan meditation session
is to scan slowly and systematically, three or four breaths in
each place. For example, you could spend four breaths while
mentally exploring the sensations in each of the following
places: scalp and forehead; face; neck, throat, and shoulders;
arms and hands; chest; diaphragm; belly; hips; legs and feet.
That would keep you occupied for several minutes, and you
could easily vary this format at will.
After a slow scan, you can scan more rapidly up and down
to more generally integrate the body schema. Let your mind
explore tensions, blocks, imbalances, and discomforts when-
ever it seems useful to do so. Conversely, you can amplify
pleasant sensations by focusing on them. This can be very
enjoyable and rewarding work with remarkable psycholog-
ical and physical benefits. Although this may be hard for a
novice to understand, some people spend hundreds of hours
doing this.
Scanning in detail can so alter our perception that some
people will feel that they are sensing their bodies “as they
actually are” for the first time. They sense not just their usual
body, more clearly, but a kind of body that is qualitatively dif-
ferent. They feel an “energy body” of fluid sensations rather
than the usual lumpish flesh and bones. The state of mind
that induces this effect is often called “just watching” or “bare
attention,” but this is only half the truth.
Being mindful always improves some aspect of what we
are focusing on. This is the biological purpose of attention,
even if we don’t consciously target that outcome. Just to notice
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a subtle tension or a disturbing mood or a repetitive thought invariably leads to a reappraisal and adjustment, whether we
intend it or not. The act of sensing the body leads to highlight-
ing what is “bad” and orienting us to what is “good.” Attention
to the body helps us notice subtle deviations from the homeo-
static optimums and instinctively reorient toward balance.
This means that exploring the body in detail will integrate
and balance it in ways that we can’t even imagine until we
become proficient. This effect is continuous and subliminal
throughout any good meditation practice, and the results are
cumulative over time.
When being mindful of something induces a positive
change, psychologists refer to this as being an automatic or
“implicit” reappraisal rather than a conscious or “cognitive”
one. Because the transformation is not a deliberate act, it may
seem as if we’ve done nothing at all—as if we really were just
noticing something in a state of nonjudgmental acceptance.
In fact we did do something: We chose to become mindful
of that sensation in the first place. We focused on it for long
enough for an implicit reappraisal and an adaptive response
to occur. We probably wouldn’t continue with the “just watch-
ing” mode if that positive change didn’t occur. We always
need a subtle sense of reward to continue with anything we
do, even if we don’t consciously register it.
After ten to fifteen minutes a good meditator will usually
feel that he or she has arrived at some degree of body-mind
stillness (what the Sutta calls passaddhi). At this point the formal instructions can and usually do take second place to
a deeper kind of guidance from within. Beginners are often
apprehensive about getting the instructions right. They are
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afraid that if they tweak anything, the promised magic will fail. What will happen if they breathe through their mouth
instead of their nose? Or if they accidentally touch their
thumbs to the second fingers rather than the first? Thousands
stop meditating altogether because they can’t afford the pre-
scribed time span of twenty minutes or forty minutes or an
hour, depending on where they got their first instructions.
The body schema is a fully integrated, real-time map of
the state of the body. It is highly dynamic and rich with feed-
back mechanisms. That is to say: Relaxing the scalp will help
relax the feet. Unlocking the jaw will reduce cortisol output.
Noticing sadness will soften the face. Breathing out will lower
blood pressure, and so on.
The body will naturally gravitate toward homeostatic set
points if we let it. It never forgets what perfect health and
well-being feel like. Buried in the depths it holds a detailed
template of that goal. It compares where we are at in any
moment against those foundational templates. The body
knows where it needs to go. It continuously makes judgment
calls: This feels bad. This feels good. If I do this, it feels better.
We accelerate this process by being well focused and mindful
of the sensations within us.
“Homeostasis” means having optimal tone in every mus-
cle group, optimal functioning in every organ, optimal bal-
ance, and arousal, and so on. The process toward homeostasis
is subtle but very dynamic, and it never stops. We can dimly
sense this inner intelligence at work, even though most of it
occurs out of sight.
The mind also has homeostatic ideals and will grav-
itate toward them when we let it. This process is mostly
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preconscious, but most people do have at least an instinct for what a healthy, balanced, well-functioning mind feels like.
It is a memory, if nothing else. When we meditate, we can
intuitively direct our attention in ways that feel compatible
with these inner guidelines. If we are mindful of what we are
doing, we will also be able to evaluate whether this inner play
is truly useful or just another distraction or escape.
BODY SCAN VARIATIONS
People often achieve a good degree of body-mind stillness and
wonder “Is this it? Is this all there is?” This is the time to let go
of whatever we were led to expect, and follow our imagination
instead.
The possibilities are limitless. We may feel an inclination
to go deeply into one place; or to notice an arising emotion
or memory trace; or to integrate an emerging image or color
into the scanning; or to notice weird little bad sensations or
peculiar new good ones; or to catch a visceral insight; or to
realign ourselves in imaginal space; or to examine a mood; or
to shift from one body-based practice to another; or to exam-
ine a problem through nonverbal feeling; or to just have fun
with what we find. To playfully enjoy what feels worth doing,
whether in meditation or not, has a very strong antidepres-
sant effect. It may be the best antidepressant of all. Here is a
list of body scan variations.
Scanning Down or Up
Scanning down from head to feet is a relaxing approach to the
body scan. It works with the releasing effect of the out-breath,
but it can make you sleepy. Scanning up, starting distantly
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with the feet and untangling sensations on up through the core of the body and into the head, is more energizing. It is
more likely to keep you awake.
Scanning in Stages
It is useful to deliberately scan through the same stages repeat-
edly. This will train you to accurately target your attention.
How you divide the body from top to bottom is up to you. You
are likely to have more divisions if you scan slowly, and less if
you scan quickly. You can also scan by visualizing what you
understand of your anatomy.
Slow Scanning
To scan slowly, taking fifteen minutes or more from top to
bottom, is good for beginners. We shouldn’t underestimate
how long it takes to actually “see” what is happening deep in
the body. It may take weeks before you can sense each place
in any detail.
Rapid Sweeping
After a slow scan it is good to sweep in rapid and somewhat ran-
dom fashion up and down the body. This leads to subtle changes
that improve balance, open the body, and integrate the body
schema. Fast scans are economical in terms of time invested,
and you’re likely to do more of them once you get the knack. I
do dozens of quick scans each day. Most of them are less than a
minute long, and some consist of just a single sigh.
Scanning Only the Upper Body
The face, shoulders, and chest are psychosomatic areas. They
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tense up easily but also relax fairly quickly. Scanning just the upper body can be more satisfying than going all the way down
to the feet. You get strong positive feedback from the upper
body that what you are doing is working, and this encourages
you to continue. This isn’t the case lower in the body. The but-
tocks and thighs, for example, will automatically relax if the
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