I’ve stumbled on a new protocol for counting my breaths that has helped me relaunch a regular pattern of meditation in recent days.  Instead of counting always upwards, I alternate counting upwards to ten with counting down to zero.  The change feels valuable.

Counting breaths has always been a mixed experience and aid to meditation for me.  Yes, it helps the brain avoid some of the otherwise powerfully distracting thoughts that try to shatter one’s concentration and ease.  And it gives you a rough sense of how long you’ve been meditating, in case you tend to end your sittings after a certain length of time.  At its best, counting breaths helps deepen and slow those very breaths.

Just as often, counting creates its own tensions, its own falsification and distraction from the spirit of meditation.  It can feel rational, artificial, arbitrary. 

But lately a small change has been rejuvenating.  Instead of counting upward by tens, and typically ending after about 60 breaths over 20 minutes, I have begun counting breaths to ten and then counting down to zero.  Three such cycles make up the typical period of sitting, for me.

The effects are interesting.  Instead of feeling that I’m on a long, linear journey in search of peace, I feel that I am on a cyclical trajectory that implicitly acknowledges pressing forward as well as falling back.  It’s as if one cycle of twenty breaths becomes a single meta-breath, a long inhale and a long exhale.

It also seems to matter that zero now figures in my counting.  3 – 2 – 1 – 0 – 1 – 2 – 3…  It’s no more than a symbol, but that approach to the emptiness of zero helps me understand what my meditation is for, and what it might be achieving, without becoming a goal in itself.

This is not a prescription for breath-counting that I’ve seen in any of my readings, though for all I know it is a common enough method.  For me, in any case, it’s been a pleasing renewal of my practice, and I’ll continue.

27 August, 2026.