Varying styles of meditation

As a meditation practice Anapana practice is unusually complete. As we work our way through the different steps, our style of meditation will vary, as the next few paragraphs will describe. In this way our meditation takes us deeper into the mind, eventually healing the deep places of our psyches.

Using the breath

Anapana has often been misunderstood as only an exercise in mindfulness of breathing.

Its name comes from the two Pāli words āna “breathing in” and ap-āna “breathing out”. When joined together those two words become ānāpāna. But it turns out that there is much more to Anapana practice than mindfulness of breathing.

The name reflects the fact that awareness of our breathing accompanies every part of the practice, all sixteen steps of it. The practice begins as a simple mindfulness practice. We don't deliberately change the way we breathe, but we learn to experience our own breathing, just the way it is. Exercise 2 will describe this practice.

Mindfulness of the body

Mindfulness of breathing turns out to be simply an introduction to the idea of mindfulness of the body. Step 3 emphasises the development here from the breath to the whole body. See Steps 1 to 4.

An enhanced body sensitivity

Mindfulness of the body leads to an enhanced body-sensitivity. This involves another style of meditation, one which has been much misunderstood, known as Jhana practice. See Step 5.

Calming our reactivity

Some energy and skill is involved in developing the enhanced body-sensitivity of Step 5, but after that we may be able to just sit quietly. The body-sensitivity becomes self-sustaining, and leads to a sense of ease or well-being. The well-being is important for it is able to absorb and consume whatever mental or emotional pain or reactivity we may be experiencing at that time. In this way Anapana practice leads to the stilling of any reactivity which may be troubling heart or mind.

Just Sitting, healing heart and mind

The stillness or non-reactivity we have developed then enables us to enter an almost Zen-like practice of “Just Sitting” and experiencing the heart. This is one of the deepest forms of meditation, inaccessible without the earlier stages to prepare us for it. Slowly it enables a complete healing of heart and mind, leading to a contentment of heart, a composure of mind, and a liberation of both from whatever “bonds” or “fetters” may once have shackled them (Steps 9 to 12).

A new beginning

Yet liberation is not an end-point in Anapana practice, only a new beginning. A liberated life—“nirvana”—is what lies beyond. What does this mean? “Nirvana” means something has simply “gone out” like a flame which has run out of fuel. Our reactivity, which once shackled our responses to life, is no longer there, and now we can live engaging with all life holds, neither refusing any of it, nor addicted to any of it. Free at last, for the benefit of all who come our way. The last four of the Anapana steps (Steps 13 to 16) relate to the liberated life that lies beyond Step 12.