One of the main tasks I’ve undertaken here on this Substack is to unpack these powerful, compact instructions.

“Allow… freely and easily” are operative words. They point to a potent natural process of letting go and letting be. A process beyond contrivance, beyond manipulation. The kind of power that wears ragged stones smooth after millions of years of oceanic tumult, the kind of intelligence embodied in a small cut that heals itself through unimaginably complex organic chemistry without a single thought from you or I.

But in the way of this naturalness we find a set of patterns of tension, defense, and habit. Ways of holding our breath so as not to contact the fullness of our emotional and energetic experience. Of course these patterns have deep value, and personal, historical import and must be respected, but it can also be helpful to have tools to gently press beyond them. To remind ourselves of the easeful fulness of breath that is our birthright.

I recently discovered a potent tool that uses effort in service of unlocking greater freedom. It’s a great arrow to have in the quiver, a complement to gentler methods I explore so extensively in this Substack. I call it Force to Free.

Last March I went to Dominica, an island in the Eastern Caribbean, with my best friend from childhood. We signed up for a weeklong “underwater meditation” course with Jeff Coulais, a former freediving world-record holder. What we thought was going to be a relaxing week turned into a marathon of starving ourselves of oxygen and shivering in cold water. I would rank it as one of the least relaxing vacations of my life.

One gem of a practice that Jeff shared with us is what he called “isolations” and what I’m calling here Force to Free. He had us deliberately expand and contract our breathing apparatus as much as possible. After doing this, when I returned to “natural breathing,” I found that there was much more ease and flow than before. I could feel my ribs easily opening to receive each breath, more of my body alive and available to the gentle flux. Smooth, soft, open. It was like the feeling of riding a bike when you’ve just cleaned and greased the chain.

Alternating periods of deliberate effort with periods of total allowance can help us discover deeper layers of ease, regulation, and flow. It reminds the nervous system just how freely the breath can move while respecting the body’s habitual holding patterns.

I now love using this myself and sharing it with clients and friends. In the guided meditation I’ll walk you through bringing breath into your lower, middle, and upper torso first individually and then, one after another. Afterwards you’ll be invited into a stance of pure observation. It’s all in the guided meditation at the end of the article.

I encourage you to use this as a complement to “natural breathing” and see what it unlocks. Nothing can match the elegance or power of natural breathing, but sometimes it really helps to give your nervous system a little nudge, a reminder of what’s possible, so that we can discover new layers of what it means to “attend to your breath with an attitude of kindness and allow it to move freely and easily.”

Force to Free — Guided Meditation

If you benefited from this, please share it. This community only grows through word of mouth.

Get your response to this moment of awareness wrong and it will haunt you endlessly. Get it right and the path unfurls beautifully.

It’s easy to make the mistake of beating yourself up in this moment. Oddly enough, almost everyone does.

Beating ourselves up when we notice our mind has wandered is a big reason why people hate meditation, or at least don’t like it, and struggle to do it regularly.

How could you not hate meditating, given the dynamic at play?

Imagine you recently got a puppy. He’s waggly, and scraggly, and squiggly and squirmy, and oh so cute. Everything you dreamed of and more! Your heart fills with joy and fondness. Only problem is… he’s chewing the crap out of your home. Your couch, your rug, even your dining room chairs.

But he’s young, and trainable.

So every time he stops chewing precious items in your home you… yell “BAD DOG,” and for good measure you glare and ice him out.

Later he starts chewing again, munch, growl, grrrr. There goes that new West Elm couch, the performance velvet torn to shreds. As the rampage continues you turn to Netflix and sink into your easy chair. And then, exactly in the moment when he stops chomping, and looks up at you, still and calm, and wondering what to do next, so you turn and… yell “BAD DOG.”

Obviously that is a terrible way to train your dog if your goal is less destruction of your home. You’ve taken EXACTLY the moment when you should be rewarding him and turned it into a moment to punish him. You’ve got B.F. Skinner groaning in his grave.

Many of us do the same thing to ourselves when we practice meditation. We attack and punish ourselves at exactly the moment we should be rewarding ourselves.

The moment we notice we’ve become distracted is a victory. It’s monumental. It’s when we’ve regained our agency, we can now decide to redirect our mind. Woot woot! We can turn our attention away from the relentless activity of thinking and towards the peaceful rhythm of our own breath or the compassionate recollection goodwill for all beings, or whatever it is we’ve decided to attend to. We can invite release and letting go and kindness.

This is a triumph of consciousness, and the gateway to possibility and choice. We’ve just won. Big. The dog is ready to do your bidding, ready to learn how to live harmoniously with you. This is not the time to kick him or yell (hopefully you actually don’t ever do those things 😬), it’s the time to get out a damn treat and scratch his ears and say in your friendliest voice, “good boyyyyy, you’re a really good boyyyyy. Look at how you stopped. You’re a great little stopper! You’re so calmmmm. You’re such a calm little doggy.”

We need to learn to treat ourselves like this. To reward ourselves for the victory of noticing that the mind has wandered. “Good boyyyyy!”

Learn to celebrate, and for god’s sake, learn to stop beating yourself up in these moments.

I know beating ourselves up is a strong habit for many of us. It’s just how we roll. But it’s screwing up your practice and it’s screwing up your life. So maybe it’s time to roll up your sleeves and learn to care for these moments.

Learning to reward yourself for little wins is a learnable skill. Maybe right now the point of your practice is to learn it. More on the how to do that another day. For now just imagine that you’re paying attention to someone else and trying to figure out out if they like how you’re treating them. Only you’re paying attention to yourself and noticing if you like how you’re treating you.

Ultimately you should feel good when you notice the mind has wandered. If you feel good when you notice that that you’re distracted, that means you’ve mastered the skill of rewarding yourself for the noticing. That’s an important threshold to cross.

And it’s transferable. It’s transferable to when we realize we’re on our phone against our own best interest, or we just got triggered by our partner, or have been procrastinating an important task. The more the noticing is rewarded, the easier it is to just get on with doing the next good thing. Instead of slipping into a painful cycle of self-punishment.

Self-compassion, the art of being kind to ourselves, is a major thread on this Substack, we’ll return to it over and over. I believe it’s one of life’s most important skills. And one that meditation can train brilliantly.

One pointer I’ll leave you with is that TONE matters. Much more than content. We’ve already got puppies on the mind, so let’s just keep going with them.

Imagine you are talking to a puppy and you want that puppy to feel great. It doesn’t matter what you say. It matters how you say it. You could say “you’re a stupid little dog, I hate you,” but if you say it sweetly and gently the puppy will feel loved. Tone matters more than content. It’s true when we talk to puppies. It’s true when we talk to friends. And it’s true when we talk to ourselves.

Last thing I’ll offer is PLEASE, don’t put yourself on a tight time line when it comes to learning this skill. It took me years of being stuck in the terrible loop of beating myself up instead of rewarding myself for wins. You may be up against deep patterning. It might take time. Respect your timeline. Hopefully it’s quicker than mine.

You’re going to lose the breath a hundred thousand times. Maybe a million. That’s not a flaw in you— that’s the practice. Each one of those moments is another chance to decide what kind of friend (or dog parent) you’re going to be to yourself. I hope you’ll start being a really, really good one.

Till next time, happy breathing, happy practice. : )
(guided meditation below)

- Miles

Guided meditation for learning to care for the moment you realize you’re distracted.

I started meditating because I wanted my mind to calm down. Instead, things got worse. Louder, tighter, more chaotic. Thinking, thinking, thinking, on a terrible endless loop.

Breathing can and does calm your nervous system. It’s one of the best possible ways to regulate ourselves. When pressed to advanced enough stages of development, the peace and composure gained from practice become quite extraordinary. The so-called jhanas, beautiful states of clear, blissful, focused attention, were described and celebrated by the Buddha and continue to be celebrated by adepts thousands of years hence. It was in hot pursuit of these jhanas that I dove headlong into practice in my early twenties.

Instead of bliss and focus, I met an experience that confused and frustrated me to no end. My mind laughed at and mocked all attempts to tame it. There is a special kind of helpless rage that comes from realizing how limited our control is over this most intimate of experiences (our own mind).

Determined, I kept attacking the problem from different angles until slowly, I began to realize that mindfulness of breathing, when practiced correctly, often actually catalyzes uncomfortable experiences. It’s not just that we happen to feel like crap when we pay attention to our breath, it’s that feeling like crap is a critical part of the process and an excellent gateway into a deeper intimacy with ourselves. Especially as I dove into the worlds of clinical psychology and psychedelic assisted-psychotherapy, I began to connect the dots between trauma and mindfulness of breathing, the intersection where becoming present and letting go meets the pain we hold.

To pay attention to our breath is to pay attention to our body. Our body is where we find the breath. To pay attention to our breath is to pay attention to the subtle energies in the body. These subtle energies are where we find our emotions. Thus, to pay attention to our breath is to pay attention to our bodies and our emotions.

It’s easy to think we want greater embodiment and deeper emotional awareness. It seems obvious, “of course I want those things.” But when push comes to shove, the truth is that more embodiment and more emotional awareness are the last thing many of us want.

When I first began landing in my feelings, I had to contend with the fact that the primary thing I felt was fear. I would sit around in circling events, intense group-therapy style work, and it felt like a joke - people would ask me what I felt and the only thing that came up was “fear.” You know what it feels like to feel fear all the time? Hint, it’s scary!

Where the hell did all this fear come from? It wasn’t from the present. I was well-fed, safe, warm, and dry. All good at the level of actual threat. It started to become clear that much of the fear was a percolation from the past. So-called trauma.

As we traverse life, things happen to us that are overwhelming and painful, that are too much for us to process given the resources we have at the time. We suppress or avoid these unbearable emotions in one way or another, learning to do this long before we can talk. We unconsciously work hard to not feel those feelings through a process of tension, dissociation, and intellectualization.

The old fear, anger, sadness, dread, whatever it is remains locked up in our bodies, like water behind a dam. If we are lucky, at some point we feel safe enough to let some of that water through the sluice. As it drains, our whole lives reset. A huge burden sloughs off our nervous system. We get better at responding to things as they are, rather than through the distorted lens of the trauma. We get better at accurate threat assessment. We stop reading ninety-three on the danger scale when in actuality what we’re facing is a five or a fourteen.

Where was all of my fear coming from? Was it from my miserable high school experience? Was it left over from earlier in childhood? Was it intergenerational sludge from my grandfather’s all-expenses-paid trip to Auschwitz? The truth is I didn’t really know and it didn’t really matter, what mattered was that I was scared as hell and I had to learn to deal with it.

I wish I’d known that practicing something as seemingly anodyne as “attend to your breath with an attitude of kindness, and allow it to move freely and easily” actively invites our habitual dissociation, tension, and intellectualization to dissolve. I wish I’d known that this dissolution and the fear and pain it unearths is actually one of the most profound opportunities the practice offers. An opportunity for deep intimacy and healing. That is what I wish I’d known.

So how do we actually apply this? That’s a question I’ve been obsessed with since I started meditating in earnest years ago. Over time I began to rely on a few practical principles that made mindfulness of breathing much less confusing and much more workable. I promise I’ll unpack some of the scientific literature on attachment, trauma, emotions, and the body in an upcoming article, for now let’s just stay close to the practice.

1) Prepare for the kickback: It’s not a big hobby of mine, but I’ve had the chance to fire a few guns over the years. When you shoot one, the propulsive force of the bullet forward creates an equal and opposite force backwards. The bullet flies forward and the gun jerks backwards. For both accuracy and safety it’s important to know that the kickback is coming. It’s important to prepare for it.

Same too with breathing. What if every time you sat down with any hope of calming down and chilling out and stabilizing you also brought with you the awareness that you’re heading into a realm filled with some pretty grizzly feelings. Some of which you just might meet.

Being prepared in this way prevents us from being so surprised and upset and lets us set up our stance to absorb and alchemize the forces that we encounter.

2) Welcome the kickback:

The move is not to wince and brace for the kickback, it’s to actively roll out the welcome mat. When I sit down to breathe these days, I go in knowing that I’m likely to find at least a bit of edgy stuff. Some bit of residue from my day, my week, my year, my whole damn life - is likely to poke its head out into the open space that the practice creates.

To learn to welcome these feelings is to take seriously the first instruction, “attend” with an “attitude of kindness.” The attitude is of primary importance. Yes we want to calm down, of course. But the bigger goal is just to get to know ourselves, and to be with what we find with kindness. Intimacy and kindness become our superordinate goals.

3) Notice the relationship between relaxation and “negative” feelings:

You prepared for the kickback, you welcomed it, prioritizing intimacy and kindness over anything, you’re off to a great start. Now it’s time to get fascinated by what really happens as you relax.

There you are, allowing your breath to move “freely and easily.” It’s natural to think “this should feel nice, free and easy sounds good to me!” But in truth when we actually start to let go, to relax, that’s exactly when some of what’s been hiding behind the tension begins to stir.

As you sit there or lie there meditating, maybe even as you’re reading now, noticing how your body is, noticing how your breath moves, you’ll naturally find areas of tension, constriction, freeze, and numbness. Areas that don’t quite want to move or that don’t quite want to enter awareness.

As you invite relaxation, even just a bit, pay very close attention to what, if anything, surges in your heart. When I do this I often find that chunks of some iceberg of sadness or anger or fear melt and drip in their own special way through me. Getting to know this dynamic relationship between tension and subtle (or sometimes not so subtle) bad feelings has done more than anything to make my mindfulness of breathing practice endlessly fascinating rather than endlessly frustrating.

4) Be invitational, not demanding:

I like to have parties from time to time. Maybe you do too. I’ll invite my friends. I’m very happy when they come, naturally. And when they decline… that’s fine too! But if they decline and I were to throw a fit and get sulky and pissy then it wasn’t really an invitation, it was actually a sneaky demand.

We invite our attention to enter our body, we invite our breath to move freely and easily, we don’t demand. To demand ease and embodiment will poison our practice just as surely as making all sorts of demands of your friends will poison your relationships.

As a therapist I’m constantly asking my clients to slow down and notice what’s going on inside. Sometimes they can, sometimes they can’t. It’s my job to ask them. And it’s also my job to recognize and respect the ways and times that they can’t and won’t. Patiently doing this over and over again is what creates the conditions for them to over time be able to turn more and more directly into their own embodied experience. Please extend yourself the same patience.

5) You don’t determine your pace:

Forces deeper than our wants and desires determine the timeline of our release. To try and pry ourselves open only creates additional tension. The slow way is the fast way. And the rate is largely out of our control. This is a lesson that I learned so brutally in my early years of meditating.

What we do control is the relationship we have to the process., Our job is to practice in a kind, invitational, curious, precise, way; our body’s job is to decide when it feels safe enough to let go.

There’s a mystery and grace to the process. Surrender to that, trust that, allow the titration to work its own magic. This kind of respectful attitude can help us avoid all sorts of sticky situations.

6) You can always do something else:

Staying with the breath even when it’s hard has over and over again proved to be extremely personally meaningful. I’m incredibly grateful for the teachers and friends who have and continue to inspire me to do this. I’m also a huge fan of bravery and grit in others, and admire when people demonstrate a willingness to face themselves.

AND, sometimes the best thing to do is to NOT meditate. Sometimes the best thing we can do for ourselves is take a break, go for a walk, phone a friend, find some way to distract or entertain ourselves.

Maybe this point is obvious, but after years of living and training with hardcore meditators (monks, dharma bums, yogis), I think this is a point that can get lost amidst the machismo and the fundamentalism.

There’s an art to learning when to hold and when to fold. It’s different for everyone. Developing the discernment to know your own limits, and honor them, is a deep learning.

At risk of beating a dead horse, here’s the pith… when mindfulness of breathing gets gnarly, difficult, confusing, frustrating, or emotionally intense, it’s often a sign that something important is beginning to unfold, not that something has gone wrong.

I like to keep this in mind whenever and wherever I attend to my breath and body, on the cushion, on the subway, at work, with my friends.

I hope this helps your own practice to grow and ripen as you navigate your own personal edges.

Below you’ll find a guided meditation that you can use to help embody the practice.