The question of how do I need to breathe comes up from time to time whenever I’m teaching meditation.

Meditation is essentially a practice in awareness not breathing and so we can just be with our breath just as it is and however it is in that moment whether it’s deep and long or shallow and rapid. In other words, when we are practicing breathing meditation, the object of our awareness is on the coming and the going of the breath in the body. The object of our awareness could alternatively be the ambient sounds in the environment or the physical sensations in the body or even a mantra.

In meditation it is also important to understand we are not so much thinking about breathing as being in touch with the felt sense of the coming and the going of the breath in the body.

This approach is different to those found in the yoga traditions where the instruction might be to breathe in through the left nostril and breathe out through the right or to breathe focusing on a particular part of the lungs such as in deep diaphragmatic breathing.

There are also times in my clinical work as a psychologist that teaching breath control techniques to clients, like lengthening the out breath to evoke the relaxation response can be very useful to down regulate the nervous system.  But in meditation we are learning to gently place our attention on the breath – usually wherever it feels most prominent in the body; the abdomen, chest or nostrils and just let our attention rest in the breathing.