Find Happiness 37: How Watching Your Breath Helps You Find Inner Peace

If you have ever read about or practiced meditation, it is likely that you are familiar with the prescription for watching your breath. You may have wondered why this exercise is beneficial, and I will now give you the answer, based on my first-hand experience.

First a definition: the state of inner peace, as widely defined, is a state of inner stillness. You are aware of your thoughts coming and going, and you act on them only when you feel like it. If you do not feel like it, you continue to watch the particular “call to action thought” until it fades away. Your mind can no longer dictate terms to you.

Watching your breath helps put you in the above state.

Prior to taking steps for attaining inner peace, you are seemingly bonded to your mind. It is as if your mind is a flying carpet and you are glued to it. You feel your mind is “you”. It is the boss; wherever it goes, that’s where you go. In a way, you are its helpless passenger.

The fact is that you are not glued to the flying carpet. You are actually on the ground, motionless and still, watching the flying carpet. You have to “unglue” (i.e., separate) yourself.

I will digress for a moment: you are glued not only to your mind, but also to your breathing. You think your breathing is an essential part of “you.” You feel that “you” rise and fall with it.

The same skill that is used for separating yourself from your breath is what is used for separating yourself from your mind. If you learn how to separate yourself from your breath, separating yourself from your mind is a snap.

Watching your breath helps separate you from it. This is because when you watch your breath you get into a subject-object situation. You are the subject, and you are watching the breath as an object. You therefore in a way necessarily separate yourself from it.

And how exactly do you “watch your breath”? Simple. You watch the air flow in and out of you. This means you watch the air entering your nostrils, flowing through your nose, going down your throat, entering your lungs, and then watch the air flow in the reverse direction until it exits your nostrils.

Conclusion

Inner peace teachers ask you to watch your breath so that you can develop ”separation skills.” Once you have honed these skills on your breath, teachers typically direct you to apply the same skills on your mind.

I hope you now understand the mechanics and the rationale behind breath-watching. The important thing now is for you to start practicing it yourself!

To your mental freedom,