Drew Miller:
Hi Benjamin,
I suspect this phenomena of "suffocating" when you "ignore" the breath will pass and change with time and continued practice. It is often suggested to attend to particular aspects of the breath including sensations of rest, calm, peace, and joy during concentration practice or anapanasati(e.g. mindfulness of breathing). Perhaps the aforementioned sensations are present in the breath if you continue to investigate despite the unpleasant sensations (e.g. suffocating). It's definitely ok to breath intentionally (e.g. controlling the breath) if the unpleasantness gets too intense.
This sounds very similar to some pre OBE phenomenon as well as the classic 'old hag syndrome' where people feel like they are paralyzed and suffocating to death. People feel this suffocating but yet no one ever dies or even wakes up blue and near death. That's because even though you may feel suffocating feelings, you are in reality still getting plenty of air. Claustrophobics will attest to the fact that you can feel suffocation even when you are intaking plenty of air. The feeling of suffocation, although often paired with lack of air, is not dependent on it, it's a separate phenomenon of feeling.
What happen is if your awareness shifts just a tad further away from your body than normal, you may no longer be able to feel your lungs breathing as well as you usually do or maybe not even feel them at all. But there is a part of the mind that is programmed to think that lack of breathing sensation means impending death so that part may sound the alarm big time! Then the more you worry about not breathing, the more you notice if you don't feel any breathing, it becomes a viscious cycle. Thoughts have power and if they are leading you in a spiral, then the way out is to find thoughts that lead you out of the spiral. Believing many of the things that others have said would lead you out, like remind yourself you are in reality getting plenty of air so don't worry. If you believe that , it will work. Also if you tell yourself it is a passing phase, and believe it, that will also work. Or you can tell yourself you are getting plenty of air, or tell yourself that your body knows how to breath by itself even if you don't feel it, or tell yourself when you are disconnected from your body, you don't need to breath. Or you could remember all the other times when you felt that but were in fact fine. I went through this same hassle when learning OBEs. I would get 'out' and then feel like I was suffocating ot death. But I got tired of getting defeated by the feeling and found one of two methods worked for me. First I just told myself that I didn't need air since I was not in a body anymore. That worked but I still felt a bit uneasy. So later I tried telling myself to simulate the feeling of breathing when out of body, that worked best for me. When in a lucid dream or OBE, you can have a lot power over sensations. So if I felt suffocating, I told myself to simulate the feeling and then I would take a few big huge breaths of (simulated) air and forget all about the problem and move on with whatever other projects I had in mind. This killed the fear and after a while, I forget to notice when I lost contact with my lungs. It was a phase and once I learned the way out, it no longer bothered me.
Once you snap out of it once, it gets easier the next time becuase you remember the success from the last time and it makes it easier to believe you can do it. It's a matter of mental discipline to work on thinking the kinds of thoughts that are useful and not the kind that aren't. You are not really going to suffocate so the game from after that is you in a contest with your own insecurities. That may sound like I am belittling your problem, but IMO, one's own mind is always the hardest opponent any of us will ever have. ;-P Many meditators of great experience have said they have had OBEs during meditation so I dont' think it's really a stretch that many of the experiences in med. and OBE would be similar. But Ive never heard of anyone stuck in the suffocation prob for years and years so apparently you either quite or eventually get past it. Maybe if it goes on long enough, it just loses it's power to bother you and once that happens, it will extinguish by itself anyway.
-Eva