Five Minutes of Mindful Breathing

When I was younger, I meditated easily and often.

I’m not sure when and why I began the practice. It may have began in the yoga class I took with my mother when I was fifteen, or a few years earlier, when I began following a Neopagan, New Age spiritual practice. Either way, I did not find it difficult to sit or lay down, regulate my breathing, relax, and focus my mind for long periods of time. For quite a while I made a habit of doing so before bed each night. Perhaps, as a teenager, I was simply predisposed to inactivity and empty-headedness. Turning it into a spiritual practice didn’t take much effort.

I’m not sure when and why I stopped. Perhaps it was when I turned eighteen, became a Christian, began college, and for the first time grappled with such distracting influences as lust, love, and a significant social life. Whatever the ultimate reason, I got out of the habit, and quickly got out of practice as well. The next time someone suggested I try meditation as a way to relieve stress and improve my mood, it had been years. Although I acknowledged it was a good idea, something in me cringed at the thought, and cringes still. I’d come to value productivity, and had learned the worth of time and attention. Spending minutes on end merely breathing seemed neither practical nor desirable, even though I knew the benefits to be great.

This is not to say that I am so busy that I can’t spare a few minutes out of each day for inactivity, or that I am a paragon of time-management and productivity  I have dropped out of college, dealt with long periods of unemployment, and even while employed I have spent as much of my free time surfing the internet as I have doing chores or working on creative projects. It is not physical inactivity that I object to, but mental inactivity.

I have a distaste for meditation for the same reason that I prefer to listen to music while driving, and to read comics while falling asleep. In the absence of noise, pictures, words, and other stimuli, I am forced to deal with the contents of my brain undiluted - and I have come to believe that my brain is not an especially pleasant place. It is in darkness and silence that fear, anxiety, self-loathing, and regret most easily make their voices heard, so I tend to drown them out with distractions. When I am at my best, my distractions are art, work, exercise, and relationships. When I’m at my worst, my distractions are junk literature, video games, the internet, and other addictions. Whatever the quality of the distraction, it is a thick and effective buffer between me and myself - and, ultimately, between myself and the rest of the universe.

For a long time now I have known that my dependence on distraction is hindering my spiritual growth, and possibly hurting me in other ways. I have never been less in touch with my own feelings. I am already yelling before I know I am angry, and I am already crying before I know I am sad. I have trouble making decisions, acting on decisions I have made, and being fully present in any moment - even the happiest moments of my life. I know that I need to break the habit of distraction to really live as I am meant to.

As might be expected, I was in denial. I thought that meditation must still come easily to me, as it used to. That I could pick it back up whenever I wished. That I needn’t worry about setting aside a specific amount of time. I scoffed when I read a suggestion that I should write it into my schedule, sit in a quiet, secluded spot, and set a timer for five minutes. Why would I need to set a timer for such a thing? To pencil it into my schedule? All I had to do was do it.

Yet I couldn’t.

When I became a Buddhist, I was of course aware that meditation is one of the most well-known aspects of Buddhist practice, and my inability to even entertain the thought of it became more distressing to me. Still, it was a few weeks before I got around to addressing it directly. On March 13th, I began my evening with a list of several things I intended to do - small chores, errands, tasks both urgent and optional. On that list, I bashfully wrote “meditate”, and because I was still feeling ambivalent about the whole concept, added a “?” just to be clear that I wasn’t fully committed.

When I began to work my way through the list, I was tired from a relatively busy day after not having had enough sleep. I did a few small chores, then went to the kitchen to make myself some tea. While the water heated up, I thought about meditation, and how difficult it has been even to begin. When the water boiled, I poured it, and since I had a few minutes to wait for the tea to steep, I decided it was time.

I set the timer on my watch for five minutes, sat in a nearby chair, closed my eyes, and breathed.

In the silence and darkness, thoughts inevitably made themselves heard.
“I wonder how much time has gone by.”
“I hope slouching is okay. It’s hard to have good posture in this chair.”
“I should call George later.”
“Slouching doesn’t seem to be keeping me from breathing okay. Maybe a bit shallow, but who cares.”
“I wonder how much time has gone by.”
“What’s the point of setting a timer if I keep worrying about the time anyway? It keeps me from looking at my watch, but doesn’t keep me from thinking about it.”
“I should be making more of an effort not to think about how much time has gone by. Let the timer worry about the time, so I don’t have to.
“I should write about this experience for my blog.”
“I’m not very good at quieting my mind, am I?”
“It’s not necessarily about quieting my mind, not at this stage. It’s about quieting everything else. I can work on quieting my mind later.”

While all these thoughts came and went, I paid attention to my breathing, not letting my focus slip very far from it. And after a while, the thoughts themselves seemed quieter, gentler, less intrusive, and less frequent. Finally, I felt truly alone with myself, and it wasn’t nearly as frightening as I had feared.

I heard the door open, as my parents had returned from having been out for dinner. I opened my eyes, and slowly looked at my watch.

One second remained.