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The meditation landscape in the West is a vibrant but confusing place. Tibetan practices emphasize elaborate visualizations or sophisticated analytical meditations, whereas Zen strips meditation down to the bare bones, giving you minimal instructions like, “Just sit.” Some Theravada teachers emphasize rigorously cultivating mindfulness to the exclusion of stable, focused attention, while others insist that intense concentration leading to deep meditative absorption7 is best.
The Mind Illuminated
John Yates, Matthew Immergut, Jeremy Graves
Simply training yourself to breathe through your nose, Douillard reported, could cut total exertion in half and offer huge gains in endurance. The athletes felt invigorated while nasal breathing rather than exhausted. They all swore off breathing through their mouths ever again.
The United States of America has a very powerful military and the most advanced weapons in the world, but the American people don’t feel safe. They feel very afraid and vulnerable. So there must be something else—a way to take genuine refuge, so that we can really feel safe. We have to learn to build safety with our in-breath and our out-breath. We have to learn to build safety with our steps, with our way of acting and reacting, with our words and our efforts to build communication.
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