Why Some People Can’t Do Mindfulness of Breathing?

Mindfulness of breathing or ānāpānasati is actually quite simple and easy. It’s also a very effective way to calm down anxiety and incessant thinking. Yet, some people who are in need of this say they can’t do it. Some who tried end up with so much tension—especially just above the middle of their eyebrows—that they simply had to give up.

So, what’s happening here? I’ve met quite a number of such people and found out that it’s simply because they are doing it wrongly.

Nowadays, when Buddhists speak of ānāpānasati, they often mean concentrating on the breathing sensation around the nose tip exclusively. However, that is not how ānāpānasati is described in the Suttas.

There are a few differences:

1. 1. You do not focus exclusively around the nose tip. You just need to start by clearly knowing that you are breathing.

2. 2. After getting a hang of knowing that you’re breathing, you feel your whole body while breathing.

3. 3. After that, while breathing, you calm down the physical ‘efforting’. That means you release the unnecessary tensing up of the body, which you may not be conscious of earlier.

4. 4. When you’re done with that, the practice continues with training oneself in many other things: experiencing joy and happiness; experiencing and calming down mental fabrication; experiencing, gladdening, composing and liberating the mind; observing impermanence, dispassion, cessation and relinquishment—all these while breathing.

Practising this way does not require you to do an unnatural thing, i.e. persistently force your attention on a very small area in your body. It is much easier, and therefore does not create tension.

For a more thorough treatment of this subject, please refer to “Appendix 11: Ānāpānasati Revisited” in What You Might Not Know about Jhāna & Samādhi.

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