Hi all -

Been reading the discussion board quite a bit and hoping I can get some help with concentration practice. I'll describe my current practice first, then follow with some background on my previous experience (short version: quit practice in dark night). Apologies for the length - just trying to give any potential commenters enough info to work with.

I am paying attention to sensations of the breath at the tip of the nostrils, but I've gotten a bit frustrated with it. While I am generally with the breath in some fashion (in the better sessions, mind-wandering is not a huge issue) it's difficult to be clear on the actual sensations. As best as I can understand it, these are the reasons:

1) The sensations in my nostrils don't quite map to the breath itself - much of the time all I can really sense is a burning sensation deeper inside the nose that comes on sometime after the inbreath starts, and continues until sometime during the outbreath. (I can tell the beginning and end of the breath from other sensations that are not my focus... probably the pressure changes in the chest).
2) Most of the time I can't feel anything at the nostrils on the outbreath at all. Holding the focus on through the absence of sensation is difficult - this is where I most often lose focus.
3) There is a vague and intermittent image of the nostrils as if viewed from inside my head that seems to somehow interfere with my perception. I don't have enough concentration yet to truly know when it is there and when it's not. For some reason it annoys me...
4) That's when it's fairly good... sometimes it seems like I almost have a blind spot in the center of my focus, and I can barely find my nose at all. Occasionally I'll just give up and a few seconds later the object appears fairly clearly along with the rest of the body sensations ... until I focus on it again. I think Daniel mentions something like this post A & P, but I'm so far out of those days it seems more likely I'm back at the beginning.

So it seems the basic problem is that much of the time, I just can't clearly see the object I've chosen (or at least what I think is supposed to be there!). I will say it does seem to get slightly better when I up the practice frequency a bit - getting on the cushion at least twice a day sharpens things up, though it doesn't solve the problem. It could be that I just need to practice more often and more steadily (right now I do a half hour in the morning, get in another half hour at night 2-3 days a week, and extend the morning sits to 45 minutes on the weekends). But when I did a non-residential weekend retreat recently, I couldn't find the breath at all after a couple of sits and ended up spending most of the retreat just trying to be aware of frustration.

Because I tend to jump around (switch methods and objects) when I'm frustrated, I forced myself to do exactly this practice for the last month. Now it's time to re-evaluate. If I can I'd like to fine-tune and keep going with this practice as it feels like I have a bit of momentum with it. At the same time, I'm planning to play around a bit whenever I can get in an extra session and try some other methods. Suggestions for any of this would be most appreciated.

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Background
At the risk of overdoing it, here goes: I did close to ten years of zen koan practice with a strong daily practice and a lot of intensive retreats. My actual practice was almost mantra like, breathing and sounding "Mu" internally. While it felt like I went deep in some way, I never got through the first koan, but when I tried Vipassana things opened up very fast and I may have had an A & P experience on the first Vipassana retreat (hearing bells and noticing little flashes of light everywhere, dreams of suns exploding, lots of relative insights, thinking I might be enlightened). This was a Spirit Rock retreat, and though I practiced zealously, it was a pretty loose, made-up practice as I remember, just following sensations as they arose without any noting, doing a lot of walking meditation that would turn into free-form movement. If I heard anything about the three characteristics it didn't stick - I certainly wasn't looking for them. Went back home to take on the world and crashed really hard, unfortunately managed to keep "doing my own thing" and elude good instruction (even during 6 weeks at IMS!) and after flailing around for about 5 years finally gave up consistent meditation practice for more content-oriented work - the Diamond Appraoch. I did try the concentration meditation they do for a year or so, focusing on an imagined object in the tantien area, but as with my current practice, found it frustrating...no discernable change in concentration despite regular practice. Ten years passed, and I still wasn't satisfied, so in the last year I started going to the local meditation hall and sitting again, Culadasa-style this time (described here) Through one of the yogis there I was lucky enough to run across Daniel Ingram's book and through it this website. These last gave me a bit of perspective and helped inspire me, sixteen(!) not-very-happy years after that possible A & P, to see if I can finish the job.

Thanks,
Nick

Perhaps try open awareness on the cushion or in a comfortable upright chair.

Allow the mental faculty to attend to sensations as a companion to the sense faculties sight, sound, taste, touch, smell (e.g., car horns, crows, radiator heating up, mucous in the throat, ear ringing, sensations of itch, etc). When the mental faculty adds its own creations, such as thought(s) and/or feeling(s), allow the mental faculty to become aware that it is adding something to open awareness, then allow the mental faculty to release its creations and return to open awareness as a companion to the five senses or to enter a nap while the sense aperatures each take in what is available to them individually.

Also, welcome to the DhO, Nick.

Further to the consideration for open awareness (as an alternative to breathing meditation for a moment), open awareness allows the five "voices" of the sense faculties to have attention and recognition, and it allows the mental faculty to also perk up when it wants and to recognize itself.

After a bit of open awareness meditation, then the narrower "voice" of breathing meditation can more naturally become apparent. Its subtle topography can be discerned from the "bigger", now-more-familiar topography of open awareness.

Thank you Katy... you are seconding my own inclination to try open awareness to balance out the tendency to get cranked a little tight with the breath focus. I'll be curious to see if it develops much precision - or to put it another way, I may have to be on the lookout for whether such practice gives me too much room to be lazy and imprecise. I guess if I can maintain a keen interest and curiosity about what's actually happening, that's less likely to occur.

Forget the tip of your nose, its only there to look down past

Sustainably losing the feeling of breath is a good thing - that's where it transitions over to a more benign concept of respiration. Any "feeling of breath" is merely your nerves being activated by turbulence in the air passageways. By refining the breath mechanisms until they are smooth enough to breathe with no turbulence, you're getting a surprising amount of energy back.
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I designed an air passage activation exercise, only as a means of identification, and from the perspective of activity, derive inactivity. So start at the tip of the nose and see how it and only it affects the movement of air. See how the nose flaps actuate air movement. The crown of the nose. Each set of sinuses. Deep in the back of your throat. The trachea, larynx, down to the bronchi; the lungs themselves...the diaphragm also. By spending just a little time seeing how local muscular action can affect the flow of air, then you know exactly what to let go of - all of it. You can liken it to a cylinder in a car's engine with the piston moving the contents. The cylinder walls do not change size, right? What if they did...the whole process would grow exponentially in complexity. The idea with this exercise is to realize that you dont need to use anything above your diaphragm to motivate the flow of air when in meditation.
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With that notion considered, now think about the motion of the diaphragm itself. In the middle of it there are the foramina through which vitals pass through; the aorta, vena cava, esophagus (where the vagus nerve passes also.) On top of the diaphragm we have the pulmonary ligament connecting to the diaphragm and running alongside the pericardium, attaching to the lung. This gives us prescient clues about calming the zangfu down with meditative breath - we dont want to interrupt the smooth functioning of the cardiovascular system by having diaphragmatic tension restrict the aorta and vena cava - such tension will also stimulate the vagus nerve, which reflects and feeds back with the other cranial nerves.

As I troubleshot this dynamic in my own body, I realized at some point that I was descending the diaphragm somewhat in the middle of it - and when my breaths got slow enough, a single hiccup would manifest that sought to resolve the competing musculotendonal tensions - since I had already let go of my air passageways, there was no air pressure buffering provided, something the sinuses normally provide to ensure smooth air flow - so I had reduced the processes far enough that all that was left was those musculotendonal differences.

The fix for that was to consider the psoas in the diaphragmatic movement. The psoas muscle is probably the closest structure we could point to as the kua. Looking at the anatomy of the area you can see that the crura at the bottom of the diaphragm blends in with the anterior longitudinal ligament that runs down the front of the spine; the psoas blends in alongside the lumbar spine. And from one of the old martial secrets we have the third fundamental component of breath, the huiyin, the perineum. In such a consideration, the front of the abdomen really plays its part as a 'martial modifier' of sorts - the more power that needs to be manifested, the more it can be used, but when striving for a minimalist longevity breath where "the breath externally disappears" it is quite plain that it is a secondary structure, the use of which drops off as the breathwork makes efficiency gains.

By involving the psoas, that allows the breath to penetrate deeply 'into the dantien.'

So, when I started out with all this stuff, one notion that struck me was that nobody ever told you how to begin a breath. Sure, just breathe in, right? Well, as we look closer and closer, the notion of protocol came to mind - part of anapanasati is training breath protocol. I discovered the correct motion for the diaphragm is to begin a descent at the very bottom rear of the diaphragm, this is where the psoas helps out - so the motion starts at the bottom and each part of the diaphragm follows smoothly in its descent. So the bottom rear starts out and continues descending for the entirety of the inhale, the rest of the diaphragm descends in a smooth wavelike fashion that goes very smoothly past the foramina - most gentle on the aorta and vena cava, done smoothly produces no extra stimulation of the vagus nerve. Just the middle 70% of range so that no extraneous input is garnered.

A couple other things to consider is that the olfactory bulbs act as air meters - the more quickly air moves past them, the more it stimulates the olfactory nerves. (Not to mention, just like a hose, the more air pressure inside, the more firm the wall of the hose need to be to accommodate the air flow. Your air passages act accordingly.) There is also an oxygen meter of sorts, so low blood o2 will also trigger increased heart rate and the urge to breathe.

So one angle of this is to "execute the perfect breath for the given cardiovascular state." When first sitting that will probably involve the front of the abdomen a little more, imho there is nothing wrong with the contrived motions to assist in bringing the bodily processes down to a lower consumption state, mindful awareness should tell you to what extent you may dial back the extraneous motions in favor of the fundamental diaphragm-psoas-perineum dynamic.

Another good trick that brings it all together is focusing the consciousness at the "seat of awareness" at the ni wan, or the midbrain. Not only does it help one let go of the sinuses and not use them to facilitate breath, it helps bring together the one-pointed concentration-focus that arrests the "core-root-energy" and puts it to use, limiting the amount of energy potential available for things like thought-stream-energy to manifest. (Below a certain threshold there isnt sufficient energy potential for it - and by doing the practice often, it retrains the path of least resistance for this core-root-energy into focused awareness, as opposed to letting it linger until something spontaneously manifests.

No objects necessary, the mind becomes clean and clear by using focused awareness to deny the thought-stream-energy the energy potential it needs to manifest in the first place. Time flies when you're having fun! ;)