The following talk was given at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California.

Please visit our website at audioderma.org. So welcome again to this introduction to mindfulness meditation, this fourth talk, and this

first five talks centering on breathing, mindfulness of breathing.

And breathing is a kind of an unusual, maybe exceptional piece of our psychophysical existence.

In a way, breathing sits at the nexus, at the crossroads of so many different parts of our life.

So much of our cognitive, emotional, physical world come to

play as we breathe.

So much of what happens in the world around us and our intentions

what we want to do, or our emotions in regards to what's happening around us

will affect our breathing.

Breathing speeds up, it goes deeper, it goes shallower.

We breathe differently if we're trying to be physically exertive than we are if we're just

very calm and relaxed and not doing much. We breathe differently if we're afraid than if we feel deeply reassured and safe.

We feel we breathe differently if we have fantasies that are frightening orilled with desire and then if we do if we imagine ourselves in situations where it's very comforting and

Easeful for us so our thought world, our physical world, what happens around us affects

our breathing. And so as we learn to pay attention to breathing, as we become more sensitive to it, take time to get to know it,

we are kind of sitting there at the crossroads of so much of what's happening in our life

And we don't necessarily have to understand everything that's happening, but we can begin

Appreciating how the breathing shifts and changes and how certain ways of

breathing maybe are more tense or more part of reactivity or and that there's other ways of breathing which are more calm and

settled and soothing and settling and so and simply to know that, experience the breathing, make time to feel it,

introduces into the breath a new element.

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