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Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Breathing; Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (1 of 5) Breathing - Gil Fronsdal

The following talk was given by Gil Fronsdal at Unknown Location in Unknown City, Unknown State on December 09, 2025. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Guided Meditation: Mindfulness of Breathing

Hello from Redwood City, the Insight Meditation Center. I'm delighted to be here with you. Given the topic of this week, which is going to be the basic instructions that I like to do here at IMC, we'll do mindfulness of breathing today. This is usually where the basic instructions begin.

People's relationship to breathing can be complicated. But the hope is that over time we learn to harmonize ourselves with the breathing. We find an easy way to be aligned, attuned, and intimate with the body's experience of breathing. There are many benefits from this, but sometimes it takes a while to learn it.

To begin, assume a posture that might support breathing easily. If you're somehow bent over so that the weight of your torso gets heavy on your belly and scrunched over, or your shoulders are rolled far forward making the chest a little bit concave, the breathing might be limited. Arrange the posture in such a way that the chest is more open, so there's breathing room to breathe. Have a posture that allows the belly to do something which some people might consider unbecoming: let your belly hang forward. A soft, relaxed belly.

Gently closing your eyes, begin with a global exploration of your body. Just let your attention roam around your body as if you're unifying and bringing together all the different parts by just feeling, sensing, and knowing. Feel different parts of the torso—the front of the torso and the back. Feel both sides, the shoulders, and arms. Explore the physical sensations of your head just to open up and expand a sense of your body so it becomes whole. All is included.

Feel the back of the head and the back of the neck, traveling down the spine to the tailbone. Feel the weight of the body. If you're sitting on a chair or cushion, feel the pressure on the tailbone or sitting bones. If you're lying down, feel the whole spread of weight on your back and down through your legs.

Then, in a way that is comfortable for you—just enough—take some fuller breaths. Not by forcing the breath, but by letting the inhale kind of spread and fill your whole torso in a gentle way. Relax the body as you exhale. Take a fuller inhale so you feel movement, pressure even in your back rib cage, and relaxing the body as you exhale with a relaxed belly.

As you inhale these fuller breaths, allow the belly to expand, to kind of balloon out as you breathe in. What's happening is your diaphragm is pushing down when you breathe in, and so it pushes all the contents of your belly down and out. Relaxing on the inhale, relaxing the belly.

Then, let the breathing return to normal without any special effort to breathe in any special way. Just feel the difference now between taking fuller breaths and having a more natural breath. If you're still controlling the breath, it's okay. Just feel the difference from before.

As you have an easy or more ordinary breath, feel again the gentle—or not so gentle—pressure down into your belly as you breathe in, and how there's a release of that pressure when you exhale. Even if it's just a little bit. Keep the belly soft, softening it when you can. Feel that gentle pressure that grows and releases in your lower belly as if it's gentle swells on a large ocean. Everything gets lifted by the wave—lifted and lowered. Everything above the expanding, contracting belly is resting on the waves. The belly supports everything above it in the torso.

Riding the wave of breathing in as a torso. The belly expands and contracts, releases, settles back on the exhale. As you exhale, relax the thinking mind, the tension associated with thinking. Let your thinking mind gently think about, appreciate, and recognize each inhale and exhale. Stay close to the body's experience of breathing, riding the gentle waves.

Maybe trust the meditation and the breathing enough so that you don't feel like you have to think about anything else. Give the thinking mind a break, letting go of your thoughts on the exhale, and letting go back into the wave-like alternation of breathing in and out. Be intimate with the body's experience of breathing.

Sometimes it's useful to do this globally, sensing a wider field of the body that has sensations of breathing. Sometimes it's more useful to find a little spot, maybe in the middle of it all, and stay very close to that spot of sensation as it alternates, shifts, and changes with breathing in and breathing out.

As you breathe in, feel in your body wherever there might be holding or resistance, bracing yourself against life. And on the exhale, gently soften. Soften the breathing body. Soften right to the end of the exhale. Let there be an allowing of the body. Breathing in, allowing and expanding, a growing of the wave of inhale.

For the next minute or so, gently, kindly allow the thinking mind to become quiet, slow, and gentle in support of feeling and sensing the body breathing.

As we come to the end of the sitting, appreciating that breathing is an intimate experience by which life is lived. This planet we live on has evolved slowly, and our life has evolved in harmony and in relationship to the atmosphere of this planet. We are creatures evolved to participate in the life-giving processes of this planet. Through breathing, we've evolved a deep connection.

May it be that as we breathe, we remember the deep, full way in which we live in relationship to what is not in ourselves but is part of this wider world. And may we care for this world. May we care for what's caring for us. May we care for what keeps us alive, keeps us breathing.

May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be free.

Thank you.

Dharmette: Introduction to Mindfulness (1 of 5) Breathing

So, hello everyone and welcome.

As I begin the first teachings for this month of December, I'm very aware of the journey that we've taken during this year on these morning teachings. There has been a long series most of the year going through first Samadhi¹, then insight, and then some of the deeper experience of insight to qualities of liberation, leading to liberation. Those of you who maybe participated with the whole year have an appreciation of this long journey.

One of the ways that I understand this practice, and the people who do the practice, is that there are two types of Buddhist practitioners: there are beginners and there are experienced beginners. We're always beginners. We're always starting again in a certain kind of way. It's often good actually to intentionally go back to the most fundamental basics of the practice as if we're a beginner, rather than assuming that we're always supposed to be at some deep, concentrated stage.

It's actually maybe not even useful to always be in some kind of meditative depth because where we learn the most—where we become freer—is starting over. We find our freedom, find our wisdom, and develop our capacities almost from scratch at times. Beginning again and again, finding ease, finding a certain kind of simplicity, and finding a kind of humility in being an experienced beginner.

So for this week, I want to offer you the most basic meditation instructions that I like to give at IMC, since it's the common denominator. It's the common reference point for our community for how to practice mindfulness. There are many ways to vary it and change over time with different emphasis at different times, but this is the default of being a beginner, the reference point I'd like everyone to understand well.

That is to understand how to be mindful of breathing, of the body, of emotions, and of thinking. We will explore how these four areas can be brought together and practiced together so that the way we practice mindfulness includes everything. There's nothing that's left out. Mindfulness is learning how to have a mindful, meditative, contemplative awareness of the whole of our life. All aspects warrant attention and the care of mindfulness.

Part of the freedom that this practice brings is when everything is included. We have no sense that something that's happening should not be happening. I mean, if some things happen in the world and it would be best they didn't happen—and maybe they shouldn't happen from the point of view of wisdom—mindfulness itself is ready to include the challenge of that. For example, maybe you're late for an important appointment and you have a flat tire. That shouldn't happen. But the mindfulness practice doesn't have any idea like that. Mindfulness says, "This too is what to be mindful of. This too is what I open to, sense, and know where I find my freedom as I try to take care of the issue."

The way we begin here is with breathing. That doesn't work for everyone. For some people, breathing is a challenge for all kinds of reasons. In that case, we instruct people maybe to do something else as the default beginning point for the practice. For some people, it's mindfulness of the body, which I'm going to talk about tomorrow. For some people, it's mindfulness of listening to sounds, which we'll talk about more later in the week.

But for many people, breathing makes a good foundation. One of the reasons for this is that when we sit still, lie down, or stand still in meditation, breathing is generally the biggest movement that goes on. It's a rhythmic movement; breathing in and out comes and goes. For many people, it can be the most relaxing and most absorbing for attention to be with something that gently moves in a cycle—coming and going, rising and falling.

To be with the cycle of breathing, the wheel of breathing in and breathing out, is, as I often say, kind of like being at the beach. You can, for a long time, very relaxingly just watch the waves wash up on the shore and wash down. There's something about the mind where that kind of rhythmic pattern is very settling for the eyes and for the body. You can do it for a long time—watching a fire in a fireplace, or watching a flowing river. It's that kind of way.

Also, breathing is at the nexus of the whole of life. Just about everything has some connection to breathing because breathing is what keeps us alive moment by moment. The breathing and the oxygen that we breathe in gets used in the body in so many different ways. How we breathe is connected to emotions, to activities we do with our body, and to the thinking in our mind.

There is a reciprocal relationship. The more we're tense, the more the breathing tenses. The more we're activated, the more we activate breathing in some way. The more we're afraid, the more we hold our breath. But on the other hand, if we can learn how to keep our breath relaxed, easeful, soft, and quiet, that tends to soften fear, soften our preoccupations and activations, and calm the overactive mind. There's a way in which breathing is right there at the midpoint—the crossroads—of so much of our life. If you stay with the breathing, you'll learn a lot about yourselves. You'll feel, sense, and care for much of who you are.

The idea here is not that we're tracking the breath, but rather we're tracking or attending to the sensations that come alive and become active as we're breathing. So it's a sensory awareness exercise. Some people will emphasize more the sensory side of it, feeling the sensations. Some people will emphasize more the cognitive side of it—a clear, relaxed knowing of breathing in and breathing out. Some people do both. Both are probably going on all the time anyway. Different people find it most relaxing and settling to be with the sensations, while others resonate most with the knowing—letting the cognitive mind know the breath so that the thinking mind is not taking us away.

If there's a lot of thought, then either gently let go of it and let go back into the breathing, or have a little bit of a commitment to the breath. But have no more commitment than the commitment of your hand as you're stroking a cat. It's that relaxed, that soft, that easy. Just with this inhale, with this exhale. Some people have the image that the breathing is stroking you—breathing in and out, the movements of the breathing. But there's a commitment, a dedication: "This is what I'm doing now."

Some people find it helpful to relax the thinking mind, to soften the mind. When we do mindfulness of breathing, you don't want to be working it too much. You want to do some basic things to get settled in, to be focused, and be content with the way you're breathing at some point. Don't try to fix it or change it. Even if it's a little bit uncomfortable, even if you're controlling it, at some point what's important is not how you breathe, but that you're attending to it. You're getting to know it. You're sensing it. You're feeling it. You're developing more clarity of just being present for this, just this.

There's a simplification of the mind. The mind becomes simpler, not so sophisticated, not analyzing things or trying to engineer the practice, not trying to solve the world's problems, but just staying here, very, very simple. The benefits of simple attention are that it, over time, opens a door to three dimensions, or to a deeper experience of life, wisdom, and even love. At first, mindfulness of breathing seems excessively simple—like, "How could this even...?" It can be boring for some people. But learning to entrust yourself to the breathing over and over again, and letting the thinking mind become quieter so you become more sensitive to the depths of your experience, is powerful.

Breathing is at the foundation. Since we'll move on tomorrow, I would encourage you, if you have time—even for 10 minutes, maybe longer—to meditate again today with mindfulness of breathing. Through the day, find some choice points where you could just check in with your breath. Be with it for a little while. Maybe it's as simple as waiting for a red light to turn green, standing in a line, waiting for something to happen, or getting into your car. Just before you immediately rush off, sit there and do a three-breath journey. Just close your eyes and count each breath for three breaths, and then see what those three breaths do to you, and then drive off.

Make breathing a topic, a theme for today, and then you'll be ready for tomorrow.

Thank you very much. I'm happy to be back. May it be a day where you give lots of breathing room to yourself. Thank you.