Meditation-Mind Blog

 

Counting your breath sounds like it might take quite a while. In truth, it’s a technique you can use for just a few minutes or continue for an hour, if you choose. Breath counting is a very simple meditation technique which provides excellent practice in keeping your mind focused. Practicing this technique offers lessons in maintaining concentration, noticing your thoughts without judging them, and returning your mind gently to its task.

Once you get the hang of it, this is an excellent meditation technique to use in any situation when you need to calm yourself. Visiting your dentist? Try a few rounds of breath counting. Just heard your bank bounced your check? Breathe and count.

The idea here is to count each breath for a series of 4 breaths and then to repeat that pattern of counting each breath for another series of 4 breaths, continuing until you reach 5 rounds of counted breaths.

The Technique
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As with any meditation, begin by getting yourself in a comfortable position. Close your eyes if that’s appropriate for your surroundings.

Now as you breathe in slowly, think “one” to yourself and then repeat “one” as you breathe out.

With your next breath, count “two” as you inhale and repeat “two” as you exhale.

Continue by counting “three” as you breathe in and repeating “three” as you breathe out.

And complete the first round by counting “four” as you breathe in and repeating “four” as you breathe out.

Go on to your next round of breath counting in the same way, counting “one” as you breathe in and repeating “one” as you breathe out and so on, repeating the pattern: In-1 — Out-1, In-2 — Out-2, In-3 — Out-3, and In-4 — Out-4.

Proceed with each round of breath counting until you’ve completed 5 rounds.

If you should lose track of your count at any time or you notice stray thoughts entering your mind, just let the thoughts float on by and gently return your mind to focusing once again on counting each breath, beginning again with “one”.

You can’t lose with this technique. During the process of learning to maintain your focus for longer and longer periods you also learn to look at your thoughts without judging them each time you gently return your mind to counting each breath. It’s all practice, no matter whether you’re maintaining your focus or learning to gently return to focusing.

As with all meditation techniques, you can modify this to suit your tastes. You might want to count to 5 or 7 or 10 instead of 4, for example, before you repeat the pattern.

Or, instead of repeating a series of 4 counted breaths, you may choose to set a goal of counting 50 or 100 breaths, noticing how high a number you can reach before you lose focus and return again to one. The task here isn’t so much to reach a high number as it is to give yourself plenty of practice at maintaining your concentration, observing your thoughts without judging them, and guiding your mind to a focused state.

In addition to helping to train your mind, each time you practice breath counting, you may also notice that you’re feeling much more peaceful than when you began.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 18th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Meditation Techniques, Stress Relief. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.