The usefulness of the breath in meditation is spoken about in many different ways,
In many different traditions.
Most prominently,
Of course,
It shows up in the various sects within Buddhism.
The most obvious thing that we can say about the breath is that everyone has one,
And it's always around.
Much of the time within Buddhism,
Practice of mindfulness is divided into two branches,
Samatha and vipassana.
The word samatha is most often translated as calm abiding.
It's in this branch of practice that the idea of one-pointedness of mind shows up.
The word vipassana is most often translated as insight.
Samatha practice is often thought of as a preliminary to vipassana practice.
However,
Distinction between these two branches is only ever conceptual.
It is in fact extremely difficult to practice only samatha or only vipassana.
Far more often than not for the practitioner,
The two come as a package deal whether we like it or not.
Using the breath as an example by which to illustrate the difference between samatha and vipassana practice,
We could say that in samatha,
The breath is used as what is often called a meditation support.
Or another word that works in this place is the word anchor.
We can think of the breath as an anchor for the mind.
So it's this kind of practice in which we return our attention to the breath when we find that our attention has wandered.
This can be thought of as mental training.
In vipassana practice,
The breath is just one of many objects that can be examined.
And we can break this down even further by saying that we could examine the physical sensations of the breath.
And we could examine the mental formations that we create around the breath.
And in fact distinguishing between the actual physical sensations and these mental formations,
The ideas that we have around the breath is a very rich and interesting vipassana practice.
A rich and interesting insight practice.
Right into the nature of mind.
Because here we see,
When we look deeply enough,
What is quote real and what is mental fabrication?
Of course we can do this with the breath,
But we can also do it with any other phenomenon.
The reason that samatha is often thought of as a preliminary to vipassana is that whilst the attention is scattered,
Whilst the attention is wild,
It's quite difficult to practice insight.
It's quite difficult to examine phenomena or to examine the mind.
And so a practical way to make use of this distinction between samatha and vipassana is to examine what's happening in your experience when you sit to practice.
Observe the quality of your attention.
And if it needs some reining in,
So to speak,
Then samatha practice is appropriate.
A common way of doing this is to count the breath.
Any way of doing this is just fine,
It will achieve the same result.
I enjoy counting 1 on the in-breath,
2 on the out-breath,
3 on the in-breath,
And so on until reaching the count of 10,
And then perhaps starting again.
Invariably if I have chosen to do this,
Then at some point vipassana practice will naturally begin in that some quality of experience or some mental fabrication will be worthy of examination.
And with the mind steady enough,
This examination can begin.
This examination is the real goal of practice,
In that this is how we end our dissatisfaction,
Our resistance to experience what the Buddha called Dukkha,
Which is also translated as stress,
And as suffering.
The trap that lies beneath us in practice is the feeling that we must discipline ourselves into some condition of perfect concentration before we're ready to examine our experience.
States of deep concentration,
Also called jhanas,
Can be useful,
But the issue with these deep states of concentration is that typically our dissatisfaction is waiting to pounce on us as soon as we come out of our trance.
This is why the Buddha said that first jhana is adequate for bringing about the cessation of dissatisfaction.
It's in this first jhana that we're best able to observe our experience.
Indeed,
In those deeper states of concentration,
There's not very much experience around to do.
Let's be skillful in our practice.
Let's make wise use of this conceptual distinction between samatha and vipassana.
Let's remember that they go together.
And let's end our dissatisfaction.
