| | Hello all,
I am fairly new here. I started a practice of mindfulness in September, with periods of sitting starting sometime in late October/early November. I am mostly basing my practice of off the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh (who seems to advocate a kind of actualism/vipassana hybrid if you ask me, with absolutely no emphasis on maps), as well as the side trips over to the more workshop and technical oriented traditions here and in other Theravada realms.
Currently (last week or two) if you were to ask me I would tell you I am cycling between Desire for Deliverance/Re-observation/Equanimity on a daily if not hourly basis.The mid morning-early afternoon periods seem to be the roughest with me sitting around beating my head against the wall wondering what I am missing until I usually give up and just get locked into my breath, noticing the niceness of it. This typically lasts into the evening.
Well, yesterday I had a very "productive" day. I was pretty much constantly "locked-in" with my breath for the majority of the day, with basically no troublesome thoughts or emotions other than a short re-observation period in the morning. This led me to this kind of epiphany of sorts that I had last night, or at least it seemed that way to me. I could be going down the wrong track here.
I was reflecting on the Sutra on the Full Awareness of Breathing where it says "breathing in I am aware that I am breathing in, breathing out I am aware that I am breathing out." The thought occurred to me that maybe (a crazy idea) what I have always thought of as my in breath is actually my out breath.
You see, when I first started meditating the exhalation was longer than my inhalation, so of course I saw this as my out breath. But as time has gone on the in/out ratio has evened out and I noticed when I am walking I get into a theme where the exhalation seems to be anchoring the breath much more than the inhalation. Thus I was sitting last night and realized that my sets of breath now seemed to be emanating with the exhalation and that this movement indeed does involve an "inward" expansion of the diaphragm, with the inhalation involving an "outward" expansion of the said muscle.
What happened later of course threw a wrench into the whole thing because as I was experimenting with this novel concept the rise and fall of my abdomen seemed to be out of sync with the flow of air at the tip of my nostrils.
What is your experience with this idea? Am I on to something here or just entertaining delusion? lol |