![]() ![]() Therefore there is no reason to insist on that method in this particular context. Since the purpose of the very first exercise of breathing is to calm down, therefore I suggest to Western practitioners in coming from a stressed background that if they find the traditional way of counting the breath cycle of out and then a slight pause and then in confusing, and it makes them more stressed, that defeats the purpose. And so if the very first thing that you ask a stressed out Westerner to do when they arrive at a Buddhist center is to focus on a way of breathing, which is quite different from the normal way of doing, if they are already stressed, what it tends to do is to aggravate their stress, because it’s confusing. They have been working very hard on usually highly pressured jobs, and then had to deal with traffic and so on in order to arrive at a teaching which were in the evenings, which would not be the case when we’re talking about the traditional Buddhists in India or Tibet, or when we’re just getting up in the morning and sitting down and doing some meditation. But what I found from my experience is that Western people, particularly when coming to a teaching, are coming from a very stressed day. And because it requires more concentration and attention, it doesn’t leave very much room for thinking about other things, so it helps to quiet the mind. And the reason for using this cycle – I mean there are many reasons for using this cycle of out and then in – but here the main purpose of it is, that if we want to quiet our thoughts, since this way of counting is different from the way that most people usually imagine this cycle of breath, it requires more concentration. In this simplest manner of calming down we don’t hold the breath on the in-breath, although there are other methods that involve that. And we can make a pause on the out-breath, because then naturally we breathe in more deeply without forcing it. ![]() To calm down, the traditional way of doing this is to use the cycle of breathing out and then breathing in. It all depends on the actual purpose of the breathing exercise, the way that we breathe. Sometimes we hold the breath on the in-breath and sometimes we make a pause on the out-breath. In some of these methods we hold the breath and in some of them we don’t. Almost all of them, that I am familiar with, involve breathing through the nose, not through the mouth, and breathing naturally in a gentle way, rather than forcefully. In the Buddhist training there are many different ways of breathing and many different breathing exercises. ![]() The traditional Buddhist method for calming down is by focusing on the breath. ![]()
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