Meditation Skill 00

Practising slow, diaphragmatic breathing helps interrupt the stress response by calming the factors that contribute to stress and anxiety. With regular practice, breathing with your diaphragm will become your body's natural way of breathing throughout the day, resulting in reduced reactivity in stressful situations. Training your body to breathe calmly provides a foundation for mindfulness of breathing in Skill 05, allowing you to relax more easily.

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• Set a countdown timer on your phone, set to do not disturb, and place it behind you. 
• Meditation Length: 20 minutes daily.
• Benefits: This Skill will desensitise your mind's tendency to respond to stress and anxiety in daily life. It will also help you make diaphragmatic breathing a natural part of your practice in preparation for mindfulness of breathing.
• Purpose: Retrain your breathing patterns to settle the experience of stress and anxiety in preparation for deeper states of calm and insight during mindfulness of breathing.

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Explanation:

• YouTube: Video Instructions.
• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation.
• A supportive 14-day Introduction Course to Calm can be found here.

I recommend practising this meditation to retrain your stress-breathing patterns and lower the experience of stress and anxiety for 3-4 weeks or until you naturally breathe in your belly rather than in your chest. This breathing technique changed my life and the lives of many others who were ready to develop a deeper understanding of their body and mind.

Tip: For insight, be curious about how breathing in your chest is related to stress and how it makes you feel. Also, explore slow, diaphragmatic breaths and how they can transform the feeling of stress and anxiety into one of relaxation and calm.

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Meditation Instructions:

1: Learn how to breathe with your diaphragm.

Start by lying on the floor. If needed, use a pillow under your head and a rolled blanket under your knees. Place both palms below your belly button, pressing slightly inwards so that you can feel the movement of your belly as you breathe. 

Slowly raising and lowering your abdomen will cause your diaphragm muscle to engage and get stronger. Lie down as described above and try these steps: 

• Gently raise your palms away from your body by slowly extending the lower part of your abdomen upwards. Then, lower your palms by slowly lowering your abdomen. 
• Next, notice that air is drawn in through your nose when your abdomen rises and expelled out again as your lower abdomen falls. 
• Take five slow, relaxing breaths by slowly raising and lowering your abdomen. Do this a few times until you are comfortable with the movement.

2: Gently slow down your breathing rate.

Slowing down the movement of your abdominal breaths will slow down your breathing rate, increasing carbon dioxide reabsorption and increasing the calming effect.

• Take ten more relaxing breaths by slowing down the movement of raising and lowering your abdomen. Keep this movement relaxed so that it feels comfortable.

3: Breathe from your abdomen into your chest.

Once you have done ten repetitions of breathing with your abdomen, the next stage is to learn to breathe from your abdomen up into your chest.

• Bring one palm to the top of your chest, leave the other below your belly button.
• Slowly breathe in from your belly button, extending your ribs out slightly and allow the breath to fill your chest like a balloon.
• At the end of each in-breath, allow your whole body to relax with a slow out-breath.
• Repeat ten times with slow, gentle breaths, free from strain.

4: Lie still and allow your breathing to happen naturally.

This final stage of lying still and doing nothing is essential in lowering anxiety as it reinforces diaphragmatic breathing; it will teach your body and mind how to relax deeply.

• Stop controlling your breathing, allowing it to find its own rhythm and pace.
• If your mind wants to control your breathing, distract yourself by being aware of different parts of your body touching the floor.
• Lie still and allow your breathing to happen by itself while being aware of its calming effect.

Tip: At this stage of meditation, thinking about the past and future, mind wandering and falling asleep are not a problem; your goal is to gently train your body to breathe with your diaphragm muscle to calm stress and anxiety that may be present when you begin your meditation.

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1. Experiencing struggle and strain. 

• Be careful of any over-effort or strain. Anxiety can generate the desire to try to fix and to control things within our lives. If you notice any struggle or strain, then stop what you are doing for a short while and allow yourself to relax before starting again. Breathing in the lower belly is enjoyable if it is done in a relaxed and gentle way. Avoid the urge to overinflate your belly or to try harder; slow, gentle movement is the key. Feel your way into this simple exercise. When the rhythm is correct, it will feel good, and the feeling of relaxation and calm in your body and mind will increase.

2. Feeling light-headed.

• Because you are not used to breathing this slowly, you may experience some light-headedness. Whenever you experience this, stop the exercise for a while and allow yourself to stay still until the symptoms settle down. Generally, after 10 seconds, this feeling will settle, leaving you feeling calmer and more relaxed. Once it has settled, you can resume your training. With regular practice, this light-headed feeling will gradually lessen and no longer occur. 
• ***See your doctor if light-headedness persists*** 

3. Feeling like you don't have enough air.

• If stress breathing is normal for you, then you may feel as if you are not getting enough air when you slow your breathing rate. If this feeling arises, it's okay to take a few extra breaths to settle it down. Once your belly breathing movement slows down, the sense of needing more air will gradually dissipate.

4. Your breathing feels tight.

• If you feel a tightness in your lower chest when you breathe in, you may be breathing in from the top of your chest downwards in an attempt to push your breath down into your belly. This will not work. The diaphragm muscle is dome-shaped and cannot be pushed down; it needs to be pulled. 
• It can be helpful to think of your diaphragm as an upside-down plunger. When you pull the handle downward, the plunger will suck in air, and as you push it back up, it expels it. To engage your diaphragm muscle, slowly raise the lower part of your abdomen upwards rather than trying to push air down into it from your chest. Placing your palms below your belly button, as in the instructions above, will allow you to feel the movement as you breathe.

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Progression in mindfulness of breathing can be accurately tracked by observing your ability to access the Meditation Markers. This can be done by developing insight into their associated Meditative Hindrances and changing the conditions that support them. 

Insight: We begin mindfulness of breathing by creating the conditions that support Marker 00: Diaphragmatic Breathing, to lower the experience of stress, by developing insight into and weakening the conditions that support Hindrance 00: Stress Breathing.

Meditative Hindrance: 

Stress Breathing (00).

Short, shallow stress breathing in the chest.

Stress breathing refers to taking short, shallow breaths in the chest when the stress response is activated, preparing the body to respond to danger by fighting or fleeing. When we are exposed to stressful situations repeatedly or have experienced trauma in our lives, our stress response can become habitual.  Stress breathing can then become our natural way of breathing throughout the day, putting our mind and body in a hypervigilant and hypersensitive state. This makes the development of relaxation and calm (samatha) difficult in meditation. It is because of this that many meditators have trouble being mindful of their breathing. By changing our breathing patterns from stress breathing to rest and digest (diaphragmatic) breathing, our mind more easily enters a relaxed state, and the pleasure of letting go in meditation becomes more accessible.

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Antidote: Be curious about what it means to find enjoyment in taking slow, gentle diaphragmatic breaths. Be curious about finding the sweet spot for you, where breathing feels free from strain and like a nice thing to do. This sweet spot, where you know how much to fill your belly and how slowly to move, is different for everyone. This is why you need to be curious about finding your sweet spot, because this is different for everyone due to various body shapes and sensitivities. A sign that you have found the right rhythm for you is that it will feel nice to do, and you will begin to relax in your body and mind. Also, after doing a series of diaphragmatic breaths in your belly, your body will continue to breathe with your diaphragm by itself, for the rest of your meditation.

Tip: When retraining stress breathing patterns, it is important to acknowledge that you are working with a habit. Because habit plays a role in stress and anxiety, you may find at first that diaphragmatic breathing (in your belly) only occurs for a short time after your meditation, before it switches back to stress breathing (upper chest) again. The habitual changing of your breathing back to stress breathing is normal and part of the process of changing a habit. To break a habit of stress breathing requires clear yet kind repetition of how you would like your breathing to behave throughout the day. When working with a habit, it's essential to maintain positivity and celebrate small successes, such as feeling a few moments of relaxation during meditation, rather than dwelling on what's wrong. Negativity will only lead to further deepening your stress and anxiety and not to the end of them. 

It can be helpful to check in throughout your day to ask one question:

• "Where am I breathing now? Is it in my chest or my belly?"

If your breathing has shifted up into your chest, then the stress response has been activated. This is okay; stress breathing and sensitivity to stress reactions are habits that can develop over time. Being a habit, there is an advantage that with deliberate exercises, you can change it.

How to reengage diaphragmatic breathing.

• SoundCloud: Guided Meditation on how to do it.

If you notice you are feeling stressed or anxious:

1. First, ground yourself in a present experience in your body by squeezing one hand in the other or feeling your feet on the ground. The nowness of your body will help to withdraw your mind from fearful thoughts.
2. Next, place your palms just below your belly button, pressing in slightly so that you will be able to feel the movement in your belly as you breathe.
3. Slowly extend your lower abdomen outwards, as you did in your seated meditation, to draw breath in through your nose. Slowly lower your abdomen back to allow the breath to go out through your nose, using this belly breathing movement like a pump.
4. Take five slow in-and-out breaths in this way, allowing your shoulders to drop and your body to relax, each time the breath goes out.
5. After five slow breaths, wait ten seconds and observe any changes within your mind, body and breathing for insight. This will help you to refine your technique and gain an understanding of the relationship between how you breathe throughout the day and feelings of stress and anxiety.

Apply this method a few times per day. Not obsessively, simply by just checking in at key times to see how you are feeling today.

Tip: Stress and anxiety can become habituated, and due to this, they can perpetuate themselves. The key here is to learn how to relax through your breathing, creating small gaps in this stress habit. By noticing when you feel stressed and reengaging your diaphragm with slow diaphragmatic breaths, you will begin to decondition any stress habit that may be present.

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You are ready to progress to Meditation Skill 01: Body Relaxation when:

• You experience a feeling of relaxation and ease after taking slow breaths in your belly, and diaphragmatic breathing in your belly happens naturally during your meditation and for a while after you have finished meditating.

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Each of us comes to meditation with different patterns of behaviour that have been developed in our lives to protect ourselves from discomfort and unpleasant situations. The first part of my life was consumed with OCD, controlling myself, controlling others, over-striving, triple-checking everything, and consumed with anxiety. Meditating with an obsessive mind means that when given instructions such as relax with gentle breaths, note your experience, focus on your meditation object that your mind will try to over control and over analyse these instructions. Below I have included a doorway into insight meditation that worked for me.

OCD is an anxiety-driven avoidance behaviour that is characterised by having persistent, recurring, unwanted obsessive thoughts and urges that drive us to perform in response to an obsession. This often manifests as ritualistic behaviour, where a person repeats rituals to appease the uncomfortable, repeated thought patterns and feelings. Obsessiveness appears in meditation as overthinking a meditation skill and a desire to perfect it, by repeating the same skill over and over, before moving on to the next one. Because of the obsessive thought loops and overstriving, it is difficult for a meditator experiencing OCD tendencies to find enjoyment in meditation, leading to them moving from one technique/meditation method to the next, and never getting anywhere.

I found creating gaps in the ocd cycle of my mind by sitting or lying on the floor and doing nothing for 2 minutes per meditation session, with a timer placed behind my back so I couldn't peek, worked well. And then making an agreement with myself to be with urges that came up and the uncomfortable feelings and thoughts they triggered, without doing anything about them, worked for me.

Without a specific rule or task to follow, such as relaxing, being mindful, or being aware of an object, but instead just sitting and doing nothing for a short time. This commitment toward short meditations gave me a feeling of "that was a good thing to do" at the end of each session. Simply allowing myself to be with the uncomfortable urges, thoughts and compulsions to act during short periods twice per day, without having to do anything with them, caused them to weaken gradually. 

As my mind became more comfortable sitting for this short time, I then gradually increased the time I would sit or lay still to 3 minutes. Microdosing short periods of doing nothing to create gaps in the cycle during my day. These short, microdosed meditations gave me a sense of trust in the process and myself. Then, something interesting happened; I started to enjoy my meditation. Before this, my meditation was always goal-oriented and driven by the desire to do something.

Once I found enjoyment in these gaps of doing nothing, my meditation length naturally increased, and the obsessing of my mind as urges and negative cycling thoughts became noticeably weaker within my daily life. I was then able to gradually bring in meditation techniques like softening and attention training into my meditation, beginning with mindfulness of body and then breathing, from a place of non-control and more contentment because my mind now found enjoyment in being still and letting go.

Meditation Instructions

Commit to two 5-minute meditations each day; the important part is to follow this through to build trust in yourself gradually. Your main goal at this stage is not whether you feel it was a good or bad meditation, whether it was comfortable or uncomfortable, but rather to build trust within yourself. The first thing you need to do to build trust is honouring your commitments to yourself.

Practice 2 x 2min daily meditations:

• Set a countdown timer on your phone (set to Do Not Disturb).
• Commit to sitting in meditation and doing nothing for the 2 minutes.
• Observe and be with the urge 'to do' something when it comes up and just be with it.
• Be curious about what it means to relax the feeling of this urge in your body.
• Gradually increase the meditation time to create bigger gaps as 2 minutes becomes comfortable.
• Buy a nice diary and write down what you experienced; gather data and learn from this.

Remember, breaking this cycle is not about having the perfect meditation; it's about committing to being with yourself for short periods each day and building trust with yourself by keeping that commitment. Sitting quietly with nothing to do will challenge the OCD apsect of your mind. Keeping the meditation times short will give you mind a sense of achievement and also teach it that is is safe to do nothing.