What should a practitioner or a teacher of meditation know about basic human anatomy and physiology?

In this paper I outline the physiological knowledge and particular insights I have found useful for enhancing a person’s understanding of how we breathe, how we regulate our heart rate, and how we control our metabolic rate in ‘control’ or non-meditative states and the kinds of changes we might expect in a meditating subject.

Mendicants, a mendicant practicing mindfulness of breathing who has five things will soon penetrate the unshakable.

Sixteen patients underwent functional MRI while reacting to negative self-beliefs and while regulating negative emotions using 2 types of attention deployment emotion regulation: breath-focused attention (MBSR) and distraction-focused attention (counting backwards).

Compared with baseline, MBSR completers showed improvement in anxiety and depression symptoms and self-esteem. During the breath-focused attention task (but not the distraction-focused attention task), they also showed (a) decreased negative emotion experience, (b) reduced amygdala activity, and (c) increased activity in brain regions implicated in attentional deployment. MBSR training in patients with SAD may reduce emotional reactivity while enhancing emotion regulation.

This model proposes four intervals in a cognitive cycle: mind wandering, awareness of mind wandering, shifting of attention, and sustained attention. People who train in this style of meditation cultivate their abilities to monitor cognitive processes related to attention and distraction

Analyses revealed activity in brain regions associated with the default mode during mind wandering, and in salience network regions during awareness of mind wandering. Elements of the executive network were active during shifting and sustained attention. Furthermore, activations during these cognitive phases were modulated by lifetime meditation experience.

… most yogis succeed with that method

You can’t get much simpler than the breath.

Concentration through mindfulness of in-&-out breathing, when developed & pursued, brings the four establishings of mindfulness to completion. The four establishings of mindfulness, when developed & pursued, bring the seven factors for awakening to completion. The seven factors for awakening, when developed & pursued, bring clear knowing & release to completion.

For the longer (and more famous) sutta on mindfulness of breathing, see MN 118.

Just one

These are the over two hundred kinds of knowledge that arise in one who develops concentration by mindfulness of breathing with sixteen grounds

… the earliest extant, detailed commentary on Buddhist meditation available in an Indic language

The Path of Discrimination was a key influence on later meditation manuals (such as the medieval Visuddhimagga) and is the oldest such commentary in existence, giving us a rare insight into the early Indian commentarial and meditation traditions.

For a translation of the entire Paṭisambhidāmagga, see SuttaCentral

Your ability to stick with these qualities is what’s going to help them grow. When you notice yourself wandering off, ardency means that you bring the mind right back. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. You don’t give up.

Book number four in Ajahn Geoff’s famous Meditations series, on breath meditation and how to approach the practice.

So, keep on practicing. There’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll have to reap results, there’s no doubt about it.

An intimate letter of encouragement, helpful for meditators who haven’t yet entered the insight path.

This article explores to what degree meditation on the breath in early Buddhist thought involved focused attention. Closer inspection of instructions on this mode of meditation in the form of sixteen steps shows focused attention to be only a secondary aspect of the practice, which for the most part rather involves cultivating breadth of mind.