Opening the Great Gate
Breath Meditation From The Base Of Our Being
I’ve been meditating for nearly fifty years now, but I’ve never stopped counting my breath. That was the instruction given to me by the Zen priests who were my first meditation teachers. It was undoubtedly meant to be like psychic training wheels for newbie meditators, but since my peripatetic mind somehow just kept wandering, for the next half century I just kept counting. So ingrained was the habit that the rhythm of my inner metronome sometimes departed altogether from my actual breath and traipsed off in a completely different direction to the beat of its own drummer.
Then some months ago I had dinner with a young friend who is also a meditator. I told her in passing that my practice was to count from one to ten as a means of tracking and catching myself when, somewhere around six or seven, my mind often began to wander.
“I used to count too,” she told me. “Then one day I tried not counting. I found it a very liberating experience.”
Shikantaza: Just Sitting
In Zen the simple — or not so simple — contemplation of one’s breath without counting is known as shikantaza, “just sitting,” and is regarded as an advanced practice attainable only by experienced meditators. Would half a century of hours and days spent counting on the cushion be enough to qualify me as sufficiently experienced? I decided to try it, and to my surprise and relief, after a few days of instinctively falling back to counting I managed to break a lifelong habit. The change was indeed liberating. It was as if counting my breath had inadvertently redirected my attention from the physical act of breathing to a mathematical abstraction. By counting my breath for the previous five decades, I had distanced myself from the very presence in my body and conscious awareness of the passing moment that meditation seeks to engender.
To my surprise I found that untethering my mind from the mental metronome didn’t immediately produce a tidal swell of undisciplined thoughts and feelings. Maybe that fifty years on my cushion had been good for something after all! Yet in place of counting breaths I still needed some means of keeping my attention from wandering. Instead of harnessing my mind to a repetitive mental exercise, be it counting breaths or reciting a mantra, I chose to focus on a heightened awareness of the interior rise and fall of my breathing. Under ordinary circumstances when we’re either sitting still or moving about, our breathing is quite shallow, neither inhaling air to our fullest capacity nor expelling it all in our exhalation. On average we breathe in a cycle of a dozen breaths a minute, which comes to just five seconds per cycle of in-and-out breath. And since it takes more energy to breathe in than out, we usually spend more time inhaling than exhaling. Most of the time we breathe within a narrow amplitude. Only when we exert ourselves in strenuous exercise do our lungs receive the full dose of oxygen that fuels our bodies and enlivens our minds.
Moreover, we tend to breathe high up in the body — from the throat in short, agitated breaths when anxious, from the lungs when somewhat more at ease, and only rarely from the diaphragm. Where we draw our breath from largely determines the frequency, intensity and quality of thoughts that pass through our minds. The higher and shallower our breathing, the more scattered and troubled our thoughts and feelings. The deeper and slower the source of our breath, the calmer and more spacious our thoughts, emotions, perceptions and sensations. When floating on the surface of turbulent waters we’re buffeted by every current. But as we dive deeper the currents flow more slowly. At the sea floor they scarcely move at all.
Deep Dive Breathing
Through extensive experimentation I’ve developed a technique and practice of meditation I call “deep dive breathing at the base of our being”. I came to it without reference to prana and other disciplined breathing exercises that have been integral to numerous yogic and meditative traditions for thousands of years. Instead I approached the practice with what Soto Zen master Suzuki-roshi called beginner’s mind. I claim no uniqueness to my approach. What I do observe is that after fifty years of meditative practice I’ve gone deeper and further than ever before into the groundedness and serenity I’ve long sought to cultivate. Here is the essence of the deep dive practice as it has evolved since I stopped counting breaths.
1. Sit up straight on a comfortable chair with feet on the floor or on a meditation cushion with legs folded. (You could also choose to practice this technique while lying on your back.) Feel your buttocks resting on the seat with a tactile sense of settledness. As you open the sphincter muscle, sense your breath flowing down your torso, through the open muscle and out of your body. The energy also flows into your legs and out the tips of your toes, and through your arms to the tips of your fingers. The sphincter muscle at the base of the spine is the master lock that once opened opens everything else. Once you’ve released this crucial set of muscles at the core and base of your body, your jaw, neck and shoulders, arms, legs and facial muscles are all released as well. Your entire body becomes an open reed through which breath and energy freely flow, replenishing every organ. Instead of having to push your breath downward, your chakra opens to welcome it from below.
2. Take in a few deep breaths, as fully you can reach, then exhale as deeply as you can. Open your mouth to fill your lungs to the largest capacity you can muster. Don’t hold your breath; just reach for its high point and let it rest there a few seconds before closing your mouth and slowly exhaling. Exert a gentle, steady downward pressure, but don’t push. Relax your diaphragm and let your breath fall of its own accord, as if being drawn down by gravity rather than will. When it reaches what feels like a natural bottom, don’t hold it but let it settle briefly in place, resting in peace at its natural base.
3. When the impulse to take in another breath returns, rather than give in to it, nudge your breathing gently deeper. Your first impulse may be to come up for air but we actually have more breath in us than we think. Don’t force yourself to stay down. Simply calm your initial impulse to come up sooner than you need to. When you need it, take in a mini-breath, a fifth or less of a full inhalation. Then, relaxing your solar plexus, you’ll find that your breath can drop still deeper. Remain there briefly, not holding your breath but relaxing into a state of deepening repose. When the impulse to breathe returns, take in another mini-breath, then let yourself resettle. When at some point after a few minutes you feel the need to refresh completely, open your mouth and take in a full measure of breath. Since I began experimenting with Deep Dive Breathing I’ve been able to continue breathing slowly and evenly at the base of my breath far longer than I ever imagined I could. Where the average exhalation lasts just a few seconds and stays at its bottom only fleetingly before rising again, I easily remain in a cycle of breathing at the base of my being for several minutes at a time with no urgency to take another full breath. As I practice the technique I find myself not so much pushing my breath down as letting it settle, a release from below as much as a nudge from above. That’s a crucial distinction. What one is practicing in this form of meditation is not a triumph of mind over matter but dwelling at the base of one’s being.
4. As you dive deeper, consciously relax the muscles in every part of your body — your arms and hands, legs and feet, face and forehead, neck and shoulders, and most of all your perineum, that core muscle at the base of the spine located between the sex organs and the anus whose relaxation releases all the tension flowing down from above. This is a crucial region of the body in many yogic, spiritual and religious traditions, especially kundalini and tantra. It is also the first or root chakra (muladhara in Sanskrit), the foundation for all the others higher in the body. I call it The Great Gate because once released, it releases everything else in both body and mind.
Coming Home To Ourselves
The sensation of settling in place produces an emotional release as well. It’s like a sigh of relief when all the tensions of one’s life and mind, the yearnings and strivings to be elsewhere or be better, are gently surrendered in self-forgiveness. It’s coming home to ourselves in the present moment, accepting ourselves, our lives and the world as they are, an unconditional embrace without reservation or regret. Deep dive breathing takes us to our ultimate ground of being — an experience of release and relaxation, clarity and stability.
Deep diving is not a steady state but a dynamic stillness, the sensation of balancing uncertainty with buoyancy in an ever-shifting equilibrium. I frequently kayak on the turbulent waters of San Francisco Bay with its constant churn of colliding currents. Paddling there is a wonderfully kinesthetic practice, teaching one to maintain one’s equilibrium in the midst of chaos. The essential awareness begins not in one’s mind but one’s hips. If I were to try to think through each move I need to make to compensate for the buffeting from any given swell, by the time my instructions reached my hips I’d be capsized by a new swell coming from an altogether different direction. Instead I’ve learned to trust the intelligence of my hips as they respond in real time to the unpredictable churn without forethought or premeditation.
This stability and centeredness emerge from the same core of being as deep dive breathing. When the bay’s currents and winds abruptly turn tempestuous, I turn my attention to my core and take refuge in the base of my breath. That centering brings me back to the innate buoyancy of both my kayak and my body, supplying me with the infusion of well-grounded confidence that enables my hips to do their intuitive balancing free of intervention or questioning by conscious thoughts too distant to provide effective guidance. For one who in his youth was so cerebral that friends said my center of gravity hovered like a lopsided halo somewhere above the top of my head, it’s a relief to find it now at the base of my spine and the core of my being.
Deep dive breathing is not an athletic feat nor a competition with oneself to see how long one can stay down. The temptation to turn it into yet another goal to be achieved for its own sake is a sinkhole all its own. The focus on the breath is just a means to center one’s attention on the present moment. To obsess about “staying down” is to fall into the same trap as counting breaths: the count rather than the breath becomes the focus of one’s attention. All these techniques are just fingers pointing at the moon. The moon should be our real object of contemplation, the finger just a directional signal.
Leading As Well As Following The Breath
Leading as well as following the breath instinctively rivets one’s attention on a primally physical act in ways that the mere counting of breath does not. It’s not an abstraction but an irreducibly physiological phenomenon. The dynamism of the stillness one finds at the base of one’s breath and being is so compelling precisely because it’s our most essential act — taking in the oxygen that is our lifeblood — without which we would die within minutes. To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the prospect of expiring in minutes from lack of oxygen concentrates the mind wonderfully. The objective here is not to flirt with death but to settle deeply into one’s ground of being, to rest in peace without having to die to do so. Life surges back with the very next in-breath, along with an extra measure of gratitude for the air one is free to breathe.
Practitioneers of Zen meditation and the martial arts train themselves to breathe from their diaphragms and even lower in their bodies as a means of lowering their center of gravity and creating a stable foundation for both stillness and movement. In Japanese martial and meditative traditions the region of the body one seeks to cultivate as the base for breathing is called the hara (soft abdomen). It’s the area defined vertically by the lower edge of the sternum (the base of the spine) and the upper edge of the pubis. The hara is regarded as the reservoir of source energy (Yuan Qi or chi), the vital center of the body as well as its center of gravity. Many martial art styles, including Aikido, as well as body therapies like shiatsu, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais and QiGong, emphasize the importance of “moving from the hara,” the locus of one’s being. Some of these disciplines include specific breathing exercises to deepen one’s breath and expand the hara so that even when one exhales the circumference of the belly doesn’t contract.
I recall a group of us Zen students in Golden Gate Park many years ago watching with amusement as three diminutive Zen masters standing together removed their outer robes while watching a baseball game and revealed Buddha bellies so large and low the roshis resembled a group of women nine months pregnant. All were lean but for their bulging protuberances. When I asked a Zen priest why their bellies were so bulbous, he told me it was because they had trained themselves to breathe not from the chest but from the lowest region of their upper body.
Breathing at the base of one’s being can be likened to the way a fish’s gills undulate when it is poised at the bottom of a fish tank. When you watch a goldfish in a fishbowl, you see that it is simultaneously in a state of rest and rhythmic movement. Breathing at the base of one’s being is just that kind of steady state, both restful and alert, actively witnessing rather than seeking to grasp, gazing rather than looking. Once one has established this settled ground, thoughts and feelings continue but with less frequency, intensity and capacity to distract. It’s as if one has cleared the sky of all but a few passing clouds. A welcome spaciousness suffuses one’s mind and heart.
Wide-Angle Awareness
When I began to sense this openness of mind, I started to refocus my newly one-pointed attention on particular objects, starting with my own body, then moving outward to sounds and other phenomena in the wider environment. Focusing on my bodily sensations, I used my heightened awareness to relax and release whatever tensions remained locked into the muscles of my legs, arms, shoulders, neck, face and perineum. But the larger aim in shikantaza is to turn one’s spotlight into wide-angle alertness, the kind of “choiceless awareness” that Indian sage Krishnamurti long advocated. In our ordinary consciousness, we tend to focus on one thought, feeling or object at a time, and that something is usually the one thing that most either attracts or repels us. This attraction-aversion awareness greatly distorts our perspective, magnifying the significance of a single phenomenon within the full scope of the present moment and ignoring the wider context. Our minds flash a spotlight on the sole object of our attention and leave all else in darkness. This obsessive fascination or revulsion closes down other options and opportunities, including those that might resolve whatever challenge we face.
The larger objective of “just sitting” is to cultivate a balanced awareness of the present moment, giving no special preference to any particular thought, feeling, object or sensation. Instead of reaching out to grasp the object of our attention, we become active receptors or antennae, receiving without discrimination or judgment all that comes our way from the worlds within and around us. This is far easier said than done. We humans seem hardwired for obsessive attention, zeroing in on our targets like dogs sniffing out their territory or predators chasing down their quarry. Maybe we need to cultivate an eagle’s-eye awareness. When soaring high above a landscape, hawks and other birds of prey watch with a wide-angle awareness that has no specific object in mind. They see the entire landscape at once and only hone in when some particular anomaly attracts their attention. In training our minds for choiceless awareness, we temporarily resist the impulse to zero in on any particular thought, feeling or object and seek instead to remain as much as possible in a non-grasping, receptive mode. We are more witnessing than focusing.
I can’t say I’ve come close to mastering this state of being. To do so requires overriding our default settings. We’re both obsessively focused and deeply distracted as individuals and as a species. But deep dive breathing meditation offers an entry point by clearing the mind of much of the detritus of excess mental and emotional activity, the space junk that obscures the innate spaciousness of our minds and constricts the openness of our hearts. Turning the one-pointed focus that deep diving produces into wide-angle witnessing is a quite a feat. The kind of effort required to dive deep into our ground of being is intended, like learning a musical instrument, to lead to effortless immersion and improvisation. Once one is “in the zone,” as musicians and other creative artists experience it, all boundaries between self and other, I and my creation, melt away, and what is left is a merging of observer and observed, creator and creation, witness and witnessed. I’ve been there before, many years ago both on psychedelics and in meditation. In both states of being it changed my entire way of perceiving the world.
Feet On The Ground, Spirit Soaring
Half a century later in my seventies, I’m mercifully better grounded. Nowadays I like to experience life with feet on the ground and spirit soaring. I subconsciously carry the practice with me into other activities. Even unattended by my attention, my breath finds a new resting point in a slow-moving oscillation around a still point at the base of my being. Trapped in a traffic jam, I turn off the radio and drop into slow, deep breathing. What is ordinarily a source of frustration loses its charge and becomes an emotionally neutral zone, simply what is. In a difficult conversation with my partner, I initially find myself feeling defensive, then remember to take a deep dive into the base of my breath while continuing to listen. I become responsive rather than reactive, the tension between us subsides, and the tenor of the conversation shifts. The conflict dissolves.
I write here not as one having mastered a revolutionary technique to liberate the mind and heart but as a lifelong explorer of inner and outer worlds reporting back with provisional findings from a personal frontier. Despite fifty years of practice I’m somehow still in kindergarten, simply learning to sit still and open my mind and heart to the world around me. Coming home to the base of my being may be a good place to begin.
