circular breathing and anapana

[nine tailed fox]

there is a method of Anapana where you focus your awareness on the moment where the in breath turns into out breath and the out breath turns into in breath

 

there is a gap between the in breath and out breath

 

but in Daoism there is one method of circular breathing where you try to eliminate any gap in breathing

 

you want to merge the in and out breath into one breath

 

both methods are contradictory

 

what will happen if a person practice both methods ?

[Seeker of Wisdom]

You can't practice both at the same time because anapana requires trying to do nothing but focus on the breath as it flows by itself - it's a shamatha practice.

 

Do them as separate practices, and you'll develop shamatha from anapana and also the benefits of circular breathing.

[nine tailed fox]

You can't practice both at the same time because anapana requires trying to do nothing but focus on the breath as it flows by itself - it's a shamatha practice. Do them as separate practices, and you'll develop shamatha from anapana and also the benefits of circular breathing.

 

i was also asking about doing them separately

 

but both are contradictory

 

even if you do them separately, will you get any benefit ? what if it does harm instead of benefit ?

 

one practice tries to eliminate any gap in breathing while other tends to expand them

 

if you practice them both (separately), how will you progress ?

[Jetsun]

Circular breathing is essentially like Pranayama so it will shift your energy in a contrived way, while anapana you are just seeing what is true and allowing the qi to harmonize naturally. You might be able to do both but their intentions do contradict a bit so it could confuse your energy and body if one minute your allowing it to reorganize and heal itself naturally and the next you are forcing things to happen.

[joeblast]

i was also asking about doing them separately

 

but both are contradictory

 

even if you do them separately, will you get any benefit ? what if it does harm instead of benefit ?

 

one practice tries to eliminate any gap in breathing while other tends to expand them

 

if you practice them both (separately), how will you progress ?

That's almost like saying horse stance and moving qigong are contradictory I understand what you're saying though, mindful practice helps integrate the protocol into the subconscious muscle memory, so the more (and more aware) you practice a method the better ingrained it will become. However, both are exerting focused awareness over the mechanisms - so at root you are doing a mindful awareness practice with either. Keep working at them, if you do wind up doing both in a session, make the circular the last method and enter deep stillness as one should after most any energetic practice.

 

Keep investigating more deeply, trying to smooth out those transitions yielded much fruit for me and led to insights like how to begin an inhale or declaring the most fundamental mechanisms to focus on for longevity breathing to be the diaphragm-psoas-perineum dynamic

[ChiForce]

Just to point out, the purpose here is to slow your breath as much as possible, to the point of not breathing. Hence, your thoughts would stop. You can then reach to samadhi. What matters how you breathe anyway since the breath must stop at one point.

[joeblast]

I'd like to clarify "not breathing" - because some form of "breathing" takes place no matter what stage you're at. After "the breath externally disappears" and the movements are well internalized....after the threshold of turbulence is breached and the flow of air is so fine that it doesnt even trigger a neural response....after the 'skin' is ebbing and flowing with the respiration....after that has expanded beyond perception and one finds himself in a bubble of awareness outside of space and time - there is still the subtle rising and falling of superlatively streamlined breath mechanics.

 

So the olfactory nerve, when it gets stimulated, produces a 40 cycles/sec neural resonance - it is part of a neural chain of events that happen coincident with the neural firings, and the potentials simply rise higher into the brain and produce thought. These are the things that told me "fixing the spirit at the seat of awareness" arrests the root-core energy-potential that manifests thought-stream-energy. But along with the "condensing the shen at the upper dt" (same) or the end result of "looking down the nose" - it is only partially so effective without the additional ingredient of "no olfactory nerve resonance." Once I recognized the ingredients it initially took me a further 2-3 months of nightly at least 1hr (2 much better) meditative breathwork anapana streamlining before everything I mentioned here manifested. Been in practice, out of practice, a good 8-10 times since discovering that and for me the path is well identified, it just takes a little time to walk up to that part of the path again, more quickly than at first since the troubleshooting has been done

[寒月 Hanyue]

there is a method of Anapana where you focus your awareness on the moment where the in breath turns into out breath and the out breath turns into in breath

 

there is a gap between the in breath and out breath

 

but in Daoism there is one method of circular breathing where you try to eliminate any gap in breathing

 

you want to merge the in and out breath into one breath

 

both methods are contradictory

 

what will happen if a person practice both methods ?

 

Contradictory or complimentary?

 

I agree with JB that the breath is a way of working with the attention or mind ultimately.

 

It is considered that when there is no breath, thoughts stop. Hence the apparent 'pause' is viewed as a way to gain insight into this still state. With say square breathing you then have four points of observation between the state of breathing and that of mind.

 

In circular breathing, which is related by some to fetal breathing, certainly to newborn baby breathing, as well as the breath patterns that occur within deep sleep states. Here the four points are merged to the point of being indistiguishable, you lose the 'pause'.

 

The square breathing for me, leads to a deeply relaxed but awake/aware state. The circular breathing leads into a deep state that often falls into other things, and I'll leave that at that.

 

Either way you want to learn to feel the inner and outer breath and then drop that distinction.

 

I personally feel that the 'pause' is an illusion anyway.

 

Breathing patterns like the above do different things if you follow them. In Daoism and Buddhism you start from natural breathing, the patterns that arise whether square, triangle ,or circular are simply allowed to arise and shift.

 

As for "anapana"

 

Master Nan Huai-Jin

 

"anapana meditation. Strictly speaking, anapana refers to contraction and expansion, rather than just breathing…Let’s review the terms again. “Ana” means breathing in and “apana” means breathing out. As I have said in the last session, a fetus does not breathe through its nose. It therefore does not have the in-and-out breath. Yet, the fetus has a “momentum” that continues to power life through a movement of expansion and contraction. This is the phenomenon of birth-and-death… At birth, as the baby’s umbilical cord is cut and its mouth cleaned, it will first exhale with a crying outburst and then it inhales. From that moment on, the in-and-out breathing continues until the final moment of death and then the person breathes out their last breath.

 

What the Buddhist sutras didn’t elaborate clearly… is this: the fetus does not breathe through the nose or pores; its life is sustained by a continuous movement of expansion and contraction, or how energy functions. The goal of anapana meditation is to cultivate that “movement,” not to cultivate the in-and-out of the respiratory breathing. This has to be clear from the outset."

 

Namgyal Rinpoche

 

"the meditation on breathing, on the basic dharma of prana or energy flow. Anapanasati is not, in fact, a meditation on breath, but on in/out prana. That is what this meditation is for – awareness of energy flow. And if you were to examine the word anapana quite closely, taking it back to it’s Sanskrit roots, you really end up with “yes/no energy”. Actually, it could be “no/no energy,” because literally the word could be understood as follows: a + na and a + pana, which makes two negations.

 

This meditation is enumerated as the way to develop awareness of the energy feeds. You start with the breath because it is the most crude, the most obvious energy flow. The meditation naturally unfolds from there. Maybe the awareness of breathing might cease, but the awareness of energy flows, of the ana-pana-sati, should not."

 

It has nothing to do with breathing patterns, IME and according to well regarding cultivators whose opinions I trust. Are there people teaching it as such, of course, but so what.

 

Anapana is the process of becoming more directly aware of something else. And some teach that directly and without teaching breath practice at all! And this process idea or concept is found in Daoism as much as it is Buddhism. In Daoism the main polarity is pre-heavn and post-heaven breathing and everything else comes from that.

Edited May 21, 2013 by snowmonki

[Seeker of Wisdom]

I'd also add that as the breath refines in anapana, you should focus more to maintain a clear awareness of it. That's how you train greater levels of vividness, attending to increasingly subtle phenomena.

 

Eventually it will seem like the breath stops - it doesn't, as jb said - and Ajahn Brahm says that, at this point the breath is now a mental, not physical, experience. Focusing on that mental experience leads to a nimitta appearing, and by focusing on that nimitta you can enter jhana.

[joeblast]

excellent posts

 

related, http://thetaobums.com/topic/28378-master-nan-teaches-you-anapana/page-2#entry433449

[ChiDragon]

i was also asking about doing them separately

 

but both are contradictory

 

even if you do them separately, will you get any benefit ? what if it does harm instead of benefit ?

 

one practice tries to eliminate any gap in breathing while other tends to expand them

 

if you practice them both (separately), how will you progress ?

 

Just to point out, the purpose here is to slow your breath as much as possible, to the point of not breathing. Hence, your thoughts would stop. You can then reach to samadhi. What matters how you breathe anyway since the breath must stop at one point.

 

 

It makes no difference as long as you breathe and stay alive. The main purpose is to breathe as slow as possible. The gap allows the oxygen to stay in the lungs. Thus it gives more time for the collection of oxygen by the red blood cells. As a result, there will be more oxygen in the blood to be distributed throughout the body for the cells. Another words, breathing with a gap or slow has accomplished the purpose of reducing the breathing frequency. I don't see any contradictions between the two methods as described.

Edited May 21, 2013 by ChiDragon