Why Focus on The Breath?
On the breath, control, and looking for who’s controlling
Breathing is important in the practice of meditation because it is the faculty in us that is simultaneously voluntary and involuntary.
— Alan Watts, “What Is Zen?”
Starting With The Breath
Most guided meditation usually starts with the breath.
This is anapana, the first step in vipassana:
Focus on the breath.
Guides will often insist that the point of anapana is not to control the breath — that anapana is not a breathing exercise.
But I find such instructions endlessly frustrating and seemingly oblivious of someone who is presumably acting as a guide because they’ve become expert in the practice of being aware.
Because surely they’re aware of the fact that:
It is infinitely difficult to focus on the breath without also becoming in control of it.
But maybe this is why we’re told to focus on the breath.
What Good Does Breathing Do?
There’s nothing special about the breath in terms of its character in consciousness — it’s just another thing to notice.
But, as I’ve said before, the breath is special in the sense that, if you have to focus on something in meditation, then the fact that you can’t stop breathing means that the breath is always there to be focused on.
But perhaps it’s also special in that it’s the one sensation that is difficult to not control.
This makes it useful for two things:
It’s something you can use to train yourself on letting go of control.
And it’s a direct path to investigating what it means to observe the sense of being an observer.
The first of those is obvious:
When I focus on the breath, I’ll start to control it, and then I can try to not control it while not losing focus on it.
This is a difficult exercise, but a useful one.
The second is less obvious, but it’s connected to the first by the sense of control.
Just Breathe
To see this, let’s revisit the task of not trying.
Remember, this kind of relaxing is the active part of meditation.
For me, this relaxation — the not trying — is the same thing I trained myself to do when I’m playing sport or doing some other challenging task where there’s a potential for anxiety or doubt and I need to stop “trying” to hit the ball or the target or whatever.
It’s an ability to stop expecting or hoping, to be calm, to simply let things be and evolve and then be ready to interact with it all at the right time.
As paradoxical as it might sound: to meditate, there’s nothing you have to try to do.
So if you can’t not control the breath, then just don’t try to not control it.
Meditation isn’t ultimately about controlling or not controlling anything.
It’s about noticing, and the sensation of control is really just something to notice.
This is where we get to the second useful part of the breath being impossible to not control while focusing on it — to what it means to observe the sense of being an observer.
Losing Control
What is this sense of control?
Try now and interrogate the feeling of control by moving your hands.
Try closing your hand into a fist, stopping at some random point, and trying to find the sense of knowing when you’ll stop.
How do you move your fingers?
If you really pay attention, there’s nothing there between the sense of control as an object of consciousness and the sense of movement as an object of consciousness.
They’re heavily correlated, to be sure, but there’s nothing really connecting them.
You can feel your hand moving, and you know that you’re intending to do it, but it seems there’s nothing there that’s open to investigation that would reveal how it’s happening.
You don’t feel some decision emerge in the brain or a signal pass down your neck and through your arm to your fingers.
It’s all just happening.
You want them to move and they move, but the translation seems a mystery.
I’m not saying it happens by magic — it’s electrical signals along neurons — but there’s nothing in your experience representing that causal link.
Control Centre
The point of such an exercise is that it’s good for investigating the sense of control and realising that it’s just another object in consciousness.
And the breath, in this sense, is no different.
Techniques — like paying attention to the breath — are just ways of selectively distracting yourself long enough for awareness to find itself.
But the breath is set apart as a tool because there’s nothing like the breath for a consistent and reliable source of something near impossible not to control.
It’s just as easy for me to not control my hands as it is to control them — it’s just as easy to leave them be and be a witness to the sensations that are already there.
The problem is that when I do that, the experience of being an observer can easily persist unnoticed.
But because the breath is so ready to cling to my sense of control, then the work I have to do to get it unstuck — the change in perspective I’m forced to seek — brings the sense of control into strikingly obvious awareness, creating a strong sense that it’s just another object in consciousness.
And when I focus on that — when I observe the sense of controlling the breath — then I’m eventually forced to ask myself:
“Who’s controlling the breath?”
If the answer seems obvious, then you’re missing something.
Sure, I know I’m controlling the breath.
But who’s controlling it when I’m not?
And who’s trying to not control it?
And who’s observing the trying?
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