1989-04_13 Anapanasati_ Full Awareness of Breath Series - Tape 9 Q&A 1

Talk: 19890413-Larry_Rosenberg-UNK-anapanasati_full_awareness_of_breath_series_tape_9-33812 Start_time: 00:14:00 Display_question: What do I do about my chest feeling tight during breath awareness? Keyword_search: breath, chest, shallow, tight, tightness, breathing, oscillations, steadiness, independent, mind, meditation, phone, unwaveringness, balance, nostril, samadhi Question_content: Questioner: I sometimes feel I reached that point, and my breath is also very shallow. And I'm not sure how you define the difference between shallow and fine, but my chest is barely moving, and a tightness can come at that point. I don't think I'm thinking about fear, but my chest gets tight because it’s barely moving. Larry: Yeah, but you feel it moving. See, that's a little different. In other words, there are signs that you're still breathing, aren't there? Questioner: It almost feels like it comes to rest, but it's heading in that direction. Larry: Yeah, yeah. Questioner: And I don't like the tight feeling, so I tend to move away from it. Larry: Okay. Now the tightness is in the body or is it the breath itself? Are you following it all in the same place? Like, is it all the chest? Where are you following the breath? Questioner: Following the nostrils. But I'll notice that the tightness is developing. Larry: Yeah. Okay, that's a little different; it's related. There, in other words, see, you don't have the sense that you're not breathing. You know you're breathing. It's just it's starting to really become not too easy to detect. And let's say there's a physiological, there's some reaction in the body. There, if it's become problematic, like any other distraction, you can just go to it, investigate, just bring awareness to it. Now, at least sometimes, just keep going. In other words, you see that the power of the samadhi practice is in developing this unwaveringness. Maybe this is a good time for me to talk about the balance. Break_line: Remember, I'm talking about a samadhi practice. It's very important that you know what you've set for yourself. If we were doing something else, what I'm saying wouldn't apply. And just for you to check your own practice. If you're trying to develop a mind that's unwavering—and that's what we're doing, we're trying to develop a mind that's very steady. Always in life, there are things that keep pulling us away from what we're doing. It's not limited to meditation. You want to wash the dishes. There's phone calls and ideas about what you're going to do next, and then you go to what's next, and you think about what you just finished. So that all day long, something is always tugging at us, keeping us from being undivided. So it's not a new thing. That's the way our minds are, and the way life is at this point. Does that sound familiar? Break_line: Yeah, no, I want to make sure that we're talking about the same thing. Okay, now, the samadhi practice is developing a steadiness that increasingly is relatively independent of conditions. That means, when we're trying to do one thing, there are all these other conditions that pull us away, invariably. Now the whole point of samadhi is that the steadiness becomes such, independent of what's going on. There's a tightness in a chest, there's a loud airplane or no sound, or you're in the jungle, or you're in Grand Central Station, or there's happiness, or there's depression, or you tell me—that's the whole point, is that the oscillations are still there. The dog runs after the bone is still going on. There are all these creations coming out of the mind, which are saying “We're more interesting and more important than the breath” or whatever your object is. And the samadhi practice is unwavering. It's a real surrender to one object. Looked at another way, it's renouncing all of this other stuff, temporarily, letting it go. So that, from the point of view of developing samadhi, if you could get into the spirit of that, the whole point is that we go straight ahead for the next ten thousand years, as one teacher told me. It's not just an hour sitting. Break_line: But then again, as we know, sometimes things start raging inside of us, and what I'm saying just makes no sense. It's not practical. And so, there's the suggestion to investigate. Now, try to understand that if you're trying to develop samadhi and you're investigating every five minutes, then to some degree you're really defeating your own purpose. So that I would favor just coming back to the object time and time again. And, when you need to—and you're going to have to be the judge, and I imagine there are some sittings when you may have to do it more often—but, by and large, limit it. Don't be investigating all over the place, which is a good thing, but it's a different practice. So you're taking the strength out of what we're developing here. So you be the judge. Now, what I'm talking about is not so much that some other part of the body or is, let's say, like there's a tension in the chest, but that you literally don't feel any breathing happening, and there's fear if you don't know what that is. Who else has had that experience? End_time: 00:19:00