On the Importance of Breathing Less
Meditation and the Sudden Way
Last week we discussed the idea of entrancement; the way in which the world implants ideas into our minds, which we continually reinforce by repeating them to ourselves. This week we are going discuss the most reliable method for breaking the trance: Meditation. Meditation gets talked about a lot these days, but what I have to say here is almost certainly something you haven’t heard before.
“Using symbols and using conscious intelligence has proved very useful to us, it has given such technology as we have but like all good things they have their disadvantages and the principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality…and meditation is the way in which we come to feel our basic inseparability from the whole Universe and what that requires is that we shut up, and that is to say that we become interiorly silent.” Alan Watts
In the last several decades meditation and mindfulness have been pushed onto the public as a sort of self-improvement program. Mediation is something you “should” do because it’s “good for you.” While it is true that meditation has shown the power to decrease depression, help regulate mood and anxiety disorders, improve focus and concentration, increase grey matter in the brain, and reduce pain better than morphine, if you meditate for these reasons, you’re missing the point. To quote Watts again:
“Meditation doesn’t have a reason. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment. And therefore, if you mediate for an ulterior motive, that is to say, to improve your mind, to improve your character, to be more efficient in life, you’ve got your eye on the future and you’re not meditating…one meditates for no reason at all, except the enjoyment of it…meditation is supposed to be fun…it’s a kind of grooving with the eternal now, brings us into a state of peace where we can understand that the point of life, the place where it’s at, is simply here and now.”
A big part of why meditation is sold as a self-improvement project in the west, is that modern western ideas about meditation are derived largely from the Buddhist tradition, where the “point” of meditation is a process of gradual progress towards enlightenment.
As much respect as I have for Buddhist philosophy, we’ve received some very bad advice on meditation from the Buddhists. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve talked to who say that they’ve tried to meditate but they can’t get into it because they can’t stop their thoughts. A Buddhist meditation teacher might say something like, “the point of meditation is not to stop your thoughts, but to observe them dispassionately without getting involved.” But people intuitively know that the point of meditation is to quieten the mind, and the Taoists have given us excellent advice on how to still the mind: in order to still the mind, we should breathe less.
“The perfect man breathes as if he is not breathing.” Lao Tzu
“There is deluded awareness and there is undeluded awareness–ignorance consciousness and wisdom consciousness. How do we leave the one and enter into the other? Just observe clearly, and when your breath grows quiet you then become accurately aware.” Secret of the Golden Flower
“Since you can cause movement by vigorous action, how could you not be able to cause stillness by pure quietude?” Secret of the Golden Flower
“Whenever you sit, you should quiet your mind and unify your energy. How is the mind quieted? The mechanism is in the breathing.” Secret of the Golden Flower
“Generally speaking, when the ordinary breathing is stilled, the true breathing is spontaneously activated. The way breathing is stilled is not by forcefully holding it so that it does not come out. It is a matter of absolute emptiness and utter stillness; the steadier the mind, the subtler the breathing.” Anthology on the Cultivation of Realization
Breathing less sounds like a strange idea, especially since we’ve been told our whole lives how important it is to take a deep breath. The truth is that nearly everyone today is breathing too much. This has been common knowledge to pulmonauts for a very long time, but in 2020 this idea was mainstreamed by James Nestor in Breath, which became a New York Times Bestseller. In chapter six, titled “Less,” Nestor writes that modern Americans breathe twice as much air today as we did in the past.
Why does this matter? Because, counterintuitively, the more we breathe, the less oxygen gets into our cells. This is due to a physiological phenomenon known as the Bohr effect: higher levels of carbon dioxide in the blood allow more oxygen to be released from red blood cells into the body’s tissues. This has profound effects on the entire body. The following quote comes from the world’s all time bestselling physiology textbook:
“All chronic pain, suffering, and diseases are caused by a lack of oxygen at the cell level." Dr. Arthur C. Guyton, M.D. "The Textbook on Medical Physiology”
On a physiological level, when you sit down to meditate, and you consciously decide to breathe less, your carbon dioxide levels rise, and more oxygen gets into your brain, and your thoughts slow down and eventually stop. The constant stream of mental chatter most of us experience is a result of under-oxygenation of the brain. When the brain is starved of oxygen, neurons start to fire randomly all over the brain:
This MRI shows oxygen levels in the brain during hyperventilation and normal breathing, with the red and yellow representing high oxygenation areas and dark blue representing low oxygenation areas.
You’re probably familiar with the concept of someone who’s having a panic attack breathing into a brown paper bag. This method works because it recirculates carbon dioxide into the body, oxygenating the brain and calming the stream of uncontrollable anxious thoughts, which occur due to random neuronal firing that came about as a result of hyperventilation.
Hyperventilation is defined as breathing more air than necessary to meet your metabolic needs, and by that definition the vast majority of Americans are hyperventilating. This means that when we sit down to meditate, most of us are assaulted by a stream of incessant mental chatter which makes meditation unpleasant. As we discussed earlier, there are a whole host of benefits that come from meditating, but it’s going to be much harder to get those benefits if you don’t find meditation to be an enjoyable experience. When you learn how to make your breathing subtle, you can enter advanced meditative states very quickly. This is known as the sudden way. Alan Watts describes the difference between the gradual and the sudden way like this:
“In the whole domain of ways of liberation, there are routes for the stupid people, and routes for the intelligent people, and latter are faster. This was perfectly clearly explained by Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Zen in China, in his Sutra where he says the difference between the gradual school, and the sudden school, is that they both arrive at the same point, but the gradual is for slow-witted people and the sudden is for fast-witted people. Can you, in other words, find a way that sees into your own nature, that sees into the Tao, immediately?”
If you’re interested in meditation, or if you’ve tried it in the past without much success, I recommend trying the way of reduced breathing. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by the results.
Below is an excellent guided reduced breathing meditation. I highly recommend it. And if you’re interested in learning more about this topic, please visit my website where you can find a short eBook about reduced breathing: Triangle Breathwork