“Rather than trying to focus on your breathing, simply try & experience the breathing doing itself, just BE the breathing. This often results in better focus, without having to try so hard.”
Dear Integral Meditators,
How much will power do you need to exert in meditation, and in life? This week’s article explores what happens when you take your ‘I’ out of your efforts to meditate, and instead let it ‘do itself’.
If you enjoy the article, we will be exploring these subjects in both the weekday (Tues&Weds) and Saturday sessions this week.
In the spirit of the singing door,
Toby
The swinging door – when the breathing does itself
“What we call ‘I’ is just a swinging door that moves when we inhale and when we exhale” – Shunryu Suzuki, from Zen Mind, Beginners Mind
Making your meditation focus more ergonomic
When we try and focus in meditation, or in a daily task, often we try in a particular way, where the feeling is ‘I’ am trying to focus on ‘it’. So as the ‘I’ in meditation we exert effort to focus on the breathing and cut out distractions as an act of will.
You can try an interesting experiment; rather than trying to focus on your breathing, simply try and experience the breathing doing itself, just BE the breathing. You can be the breathing doing itself, or, alternatively ‘do’ the breathing doing itself. The proposition here is that our ‘I’ or the idea of our I is actually surplus to requirements, unnecessary. A side effect of this is that you may find that your attention to the breathing starts to become free-er, more relaxed, effortless. You find your focus becomes better quality, but you don’t have to try so hard.
The breathing as a swinging door
In Zen meditation the image of a swinging door is used; you focus on your breathing in the throat as if it were a swinging door; swinging in as you inhale, out as you exhale. With the technique of the breathing doing itself, you simply watch that swing in and swing out, attuning to the rhythm and as far as feels possible leaving your I out of the equation. Put another way you could relate to your ‘I’ as being nothing more than the swing-door of the breath.
Bringing your inner and outer worlds together
Continuing with the Zen image, you can then imagine the breath flowing from your outer world to your inner world as you breathe in, and from your inner world to your outer world as you breathe out. You can then develop this in the way described by Shunryu Suzuki in the same passage as the first quote at the top of the article:
“The inner world is limitless, and the outer world is also limitless. We say “inner world” and outer world,” but in reality there is just one whole world, our throat is like a swinging door. The air comes in and goes out like someone passing through a swinging door. If you think “I breathe,” the I is extra.”
Using the breathing in this way we can go from the breath moving from our “inner” to out “outer” world and back again, to simply the movement of the breath to and from a single world, a unified world. It is just the movement of the breath in a unified world, in a state of one-ness with the world, with no “I” necessary.
A heart union
I also like to do this practice down at the heart level. At the heart level we connect with our feeling nature, so the meditation takes on a more emotive dimension when I go down there. As I breathe in, I feel a soft light and energy expanding out into the world, as I breathe in I feel the light and life from the outer world flowing back into my heart. This then simply becomes the one-world, the one being expanding and contacting as I breathe. You can try it and see if you like it, or work with the traditional Zen techniques outlined above.
© Toby Ouvry 2026, you are welcome to use or share this article, but please cite Toby as the source and include reference to his website www.tobyouvry.com
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