Many meditation guides will direct the rhythm of your breathing while you sit: for instance, a count of seven while you breathe in, a pause of three or four seconds before exhalation, a time for exhalation that is longer than the inhalation, perhaps a count of ten; and before the next breath, in the time between breaths, some four seconds or so.  I’m sure that actual numbers don’t matter.  That there should be a slow, steady inhalation, and that the following exhalation will naturally be longer if it is also slow and steady; that there should be a comfortable, unforced pause between the two—all this is natural to the body and easy enough to the mind.  To me, increasingly, the essence of meditation, the seat of its possible good for me, is in the time between breaths—the quiet, timeless moments between a long, satisfying exhalation and the beginning of the next breath.

I remember too well my brother taking his last breath, and exhaling it.  In the silence that followed, he was not between breaths, he was released from breathing.  In the time between breaths there is something a little like death.  It’s the absence of any need to take the next breath.  If I am meditating “well” that time is deeply silent and peaceful and empty.  There is a complete lack of effort, and of fear.  The next inhalation is free to come when it will; perhaps it will wait another second or two.  There is no attachment, no conception, no next.  Yet the emptiness of that moment is not blandness or blindness.  There is a certain alertness to it. 

Then something in me welcomes—needs, of course, but truly welcomes—the next inhalation, and one kind of peace has passed.  Perhaps it will come again in the next cycle.  If there is indeed some virtue in meditation that I can carry over into my daily life, where others and desires and troubles exist and make their urgent calls upon me, it lies here, in the time between breaths.  And when it is my time for the next breath not to come, I hope I may reside for a few extra seconds in this kind of peace and freedom, before oblivion floods in.

24 January, 2025.