Being obsessive, I've been trying to chase down the problems I have with allowing myself to Be Breathed™. I know the only real solution is time, but I've failed her courses before.

What I started doing is nothing more than an attempt to "get to know" my breath.

The specific cause of my curiosity was the fact that, although I could exhale via physical compression without "compensating" for a perceived lack of breath by clavicular or non-movement related diaphragmatic breathing (the case in point being the trinity squat), I couldn't allow the inhale to be completely passive. It just wasn't a completely natural result of backpressure.*

Not only that, but more curiously to me, while I could immediately tell when I'd forced an exhale I had no clue when I had compensated the inhale. In order to check how naturally the inhale had been I would stop after the inhale, close my throat, relax my chest and belly to release any "holding" exertion, and then open my throat. If I had compensated there would be a bit of a natural exhale when I opened my throat with my torso in a relaxed state.

Virtually every time, over and over, I found that I had no idea whether I had compensated - no sense during, no clear sense afterward. I couldn't call it. Only a passive exhale would tell me.

Later, during various activities, I practiced a minimal version of the chair routine from Be Breathed™ in order to see how sensitive I might become to the "state of my inhalation."

I found that, if I relaxed at the end of the exhale (not really the control pause because of the "cheater" step that follows), closed my throat, released the structural compression, and then opened my throat, I'd get an almost perfectly passive inhale.

I tried this about 20 times, and then tried to do essentially the same thing, taking time to relax on a real control pause (with my throat left open and soft), then releasing the compression. And poof. Back to having no clue.

Then I remembered this, from the book Zen Training by Katsuki Sekida :

Let's try an experiment that we call "one-minute zazen":

With your eyes wide open, stare at something in the distance: the corner of the building outside the window, a point on a hill, a tree or a bush, or even a picture on the wall.

At the same time stop, or nearly stop, breathing, and with your attention concentrated on that one point, try to prevent ideas from coming into your mind.

You will find that you really are able to inhibit thoughts from starting. You may feel the beginnings of some thoughtlike action stirring in your mind, but that, too, can be kept under control.

Repeated practice will give you the power to inhibit the appearance of even the faintest shadow of thought.

This inhibition can be sustained as long as the breath is stopped or almost stopped. Your eyes are reflecting the images of outside objects clearly, but "perception" does not occur. No thinking of the hill, no idea of the building or picture, no mental process concerning things inside or outside your mind will appear. Your eyes simply reflect the images of outside objects as a mirror reflects them. This simplest mental action may be called "pure sensation."

Two things struck me.

First, a potential answer to a question that I'd been thinking about a lot – Why is performance on the control pause so desirable? Or, as Coach Sonnon has written, why is it that "experiments [have] concluded that performance on the 'control pause' caused the least amount of arousal under stress..."

Second, I realized that in my very early work with Be Breathed™ the voluntary component (as opposed to the autonomic component) of my breath just won't shut up yet. I realized that something in me is concerned about getting enough air, and - at this point in history - unless I take specific steps to cause myself to stop thinking (at whatever level), "it" just feels compelled to interfere in whatever way it can.

These are just a few of the observations that have come out of my current practice. I hope that you find them helpful, and that they might spark some discussion on the RMAX Forum.

Blessings.

KD Jones

*On a Forum thread I was told by Coach Sonnon that the point is to focus on the exhalation, and that with refinement the rest would come. I believe it, and I will continue working that way. The thoughts here are not counter, but rather an adjunct, in pursuit of something curious to my mind.

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