One of my old-time meditation buddies – who practiced Tibetan Buddhism and eventually ordained and moved to India – used to say, “Let’s sit and breathe!” when it was time to meditate. I try to always remember that basically, that’s all ya’ gotta know to do this.
The trick in meditation and in success at “taking it off the cushion” is to remember to breathe. Much of the teaching and training done in any style or fashion of meditation involves ways to help us just remember.
Remember to breathe!
Yes, that’s it. Remember to Breathe! This is in fact the title of a wonderful web site I have recently discovered. Remember to Breathe is web site dedicated to that proposition, a site that provides as clear and pure an explanation of the process of mindful breathing and its wonders as anything I’ve seen in my long journey. In plain English, without esoteric or technical terms, Don and Jan describe how to approach this process and some great resources to help one along the way.
They also put the whole thing in the context of brain science – in a very understandable way – which makes it clear why — however you come to this, whatever cultural expression you look at — the essential elements are solidly part of the human experience.
With a long background in teaching yoga, breathing, and meditation as well as psychology, art and music, they seem like an amazing resource. Don has been commenting on my blog posts for some time now, and we’ve become online friends, but I just discovered his website – seems he was too modest to mention it in our conversations.
If you’re interesting in learning to meditate or want to improve your practice, this is a site to visit. Remember to Breathe!
Thanks Don!
Shunyata's Apprentice 
my goodness, how nice:>)) Thanks John, it’s been a delight getting to know you too.
Hi folks, half of the RTB team here (Don here; Jan’s on the phone at the moment)
hope this doesn’t sound like shameless self promotion, but we’re in the midst of creating an e-course which we think is actually much better than the site.
one of the things that’s always bothered me about the way meditation/mindfulness is presented is it is so individualistic, about dealing with my stuff, my suffering, my health, etc. So we created “The Most Important Page” to emphasize that it’s about all of us, together (there’s a great story about a small italian american community, Roseto, PA, on that page)
When we were putting together this course over the last 2 months, we kept trying to figure out how to get the society part to be an integral component of it. It just kind of clicked last week.
So week 3 is about our “instinctive programming’ – mostly our survival instincts related to the most ancient part of the brain, that relate to our habitual additions, fear, anger, food, sex (and rock n roll, maybe??).
But the focus there is on all the ‘inner” things we can do to deal with these things. But you’ve still got world class scientists figuring out just the right mix of fat, sugar and salt to get us hooked (“bet you can’t eat just one”) and world class marketers figuring out the lighting, sound, etc of the pop ups on our phones to get us addicted to everything else.
So week 4 is about what it is in society that makes our instinctive programming go so haywire, and what we can do about it (not just in our own lives, but in the society at large).
The most fun part is collecting stories that illustrate this. That’s what I’m doing today. So our main story for week 4 is about the town of Albert Lea, that decided that they didn’t want their residents to be left to their own devices in their struggle to be healthy. They ended up creating one of the most “walkable” cities in the country.
And I’m working on putting together some of Sherry Turkle’s stuff on how technology (like cellphones which we can’t bear to be parted from for more than a minute) is making social connection so much harder. Haven’t quite got the angle to make it a story yet…
well John, hope you’ll forgive me this extra long response. And Pema Chodron said it very well – ‘just 3 long breaths.” She said everyone tells her they dont’ have “time” during the day to pause, even for 3 breaths.
So,
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br…………..eathe……….:>)
Hope to get into some of those resources soon! The e-course sounds great! I loved the story of the stone cutters, looking forward to more! …I have no idea how many people actually read my posts. People tend to follow and not ever come back… but maybe some people will be inspired! My wife has been doing kundalini lately, totally from what she discovered on Youtube, etc. As you can imagine, there’s not much access to real classes in any kind of yoga, much less kundalini, here where we live! So people are turning to web sources, etc for this kind of thing. — Thanks for reading and commenting! Looking forward to meeting you folks in person one of these days!