I’ve meant to do a series of charts to illustrate specific things in meditation for a while now. Finally I got ahold of my daughter’s iPad and gave it a go. Here’s what I came up with to illustrate visually the range of feeling of the tingling breath in your nose as you meditate.
This graphic shows the awareness of the mind on the tingling of the breath in the nose as you inhale and exhale. The green parts show where you are aware of (and feel) the air in your nostrils as it moves rather quickly through your nose. The yellow section shows where the feeling is rapidly fading. The red section shows that portion of your in-breath and out-breath where you just cannot feel anything at all.
This is the NORMAL cycle of focusing on the tingling in the nose, or as some people say, focusing on the breath.
The obvious question becomes, what to do when you don’t feel the tingling of the breath in the nose? Aren’t you supposed to focus 100% on the breath feeling? What if it disappears?
This is one of the real conundrums of meditation on the breath and something that every meditation teacher deals with over and over as students insist there is no feeling at all of the breath. Recently a reader told me he doesn’t feel the breath at all. Not ever. He asked what to do. Well, in that really extreme case you can focus instead on the expansion and contraction of your chest as you inhale and exhale. Pick a spot – probably the chest muscles that you feel expanding and relaxing, and focus there.
Or you can choose your diaphragm. Or you could choose a larger target in your nose, but I prefer the chest method as next best.
In regular meditation like that depicted in the chart graphic above, what would you do when you don’t feel the breath at all?
Since it’s such a regular occurrence that people don’t feel the full cycle of the breath, we have a simple solution and have already written a page to help you: How to Meditate when No Feeling of Breath?
Implementing it is difficult for some time until you get used to the idea, but here it is quickly. I’ve already done a meditation video about it here on YouTube: What To Do When You Don’t Feel the Breath in Meditation? >