Rhythmic Meditation

Sit calmly and watch your breathing single-mindedly. Just watch it. Do not manipulate it. Do not regulate it consciously. When you start watching your breathing, you will invariably find that it had been irregular a moment before depending on the state of your mind at that moment. When you keep watching the breathing, it automatically starts regulating itself, the rhythm getting deeper and deeper depending on the single-mindedness of your watching.

With the advent of single-minded watching, the breathing gets so deep and thin that you come to a point where you hardly even feel it. Your body starts feeling lighter and filled with peace and energy.

When you reach the point near enlightenment, the breathing almost stops.

On enlightenment, the breathing absolutely stops. The little amount of oxygen required by the body, in that state, is taken in by the skin. That is what happens with the breathing when a person free-falls from an airplane at a height of around 15,000 feet above the ground. But since his effort is not conscious, he does not get enlightened!

This is the way one should meditate while sitting for about an hour or so. But you cannot keep sitting like this the whole day. What you should do the rest of the day is to keep watching your breathing while doing any job like thinking, talking, arguing, moving, running, doing business, watching TV, and so.

This will ensure that you do not fritter away the benefit of your meditation done during one hour of sitting. And your next sitting will not start from zero again; rather, it will take off from a point not very far from where you left it at the last sitting.

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