Do you know why we focus on the breath while meditating?

Hey guys, it's Vivek from Mindhome once again. If you've ever meditated before or have a regular meditation practice, you might be wondering, why do we focus on our breath? Yeah, like, why don't we focus on something more exciting or calming, like maybe a calm beach, maybe focus on our dreams or anything that's perhaps more interesting than our breath? Many meditation apps and classes and other programs focus on the breath while meditating. This is actually a very old and one of the most traditional forms of meditation, primarily popularized by the Buddha. While there's various forms of meditation, meditation is best described as purposely directing our mental attention towards a particular object for a sustained period of time. And that can mean even applying that same mental attention on a single bite of food, playing an instrument, or even as we walk. Buddha even advised us putting that same attention when going to the bathroom. If you're wondering if this applies when you're sitting at home watching Netflix and chilling, no, that's not the same. That's not purposely putting your mental attention towards something. That's actually just sitting back and being entertained. So if all these different things are forms of meditation, then why focus on our breath? So while your breath may seem like a boring object to put your attention towards, it's actually very powerful for 5 main reasons. So the first reason is it's an anchor to the present. If you think about when you're most happy, it's when you're in the present, whether it's, you know, having a conversation with friends you love listening to music that you love, or doing something you're very passionate about. It's about being in the moment, not thinking about the past or worrying about the future. It's about being in the present. And when every time you take a breath, that's a breath that's in the moment, that's in the present. So by focusing on your breath, you're actually focusing on being extremely present. Number 2 reason is that our breath is universal to all of us. No matter your sexual orientation, race, rich, poor, whatever it is, we all breathe. It's available to all of us at any time, any place. So as long as you're alive, your breath is there and you can focus on that. So no matter what your beliefs are or what your background is, your breath is the same. So it's pretty universal to everybody. Hey guys, sorry about this, but we lost this part of the video, so we wanted to re-record it and complete our thoughts for point number 3. So what I meant to say is, from childhood, our minds have learned to focus on different things, whether it's solving a problem, a conversation, playing an instrument. Our entire life, we've been focusing our minds on certain objects or things. But we've never really learned to be in the present. So by focusing on our breath, we're utilizing what our mind knows how to do best, which is to focus on things. And by focusing on our breath, we learn to be focused on the present, which, as I mentioned earlier, is the one— the main purposes of focusing on our breath. 4, our breath is our link to our unconscious part of our minds. So if we want to lift up our arm or wink or anything like that, we use our conscious mind to do that. But when it comes to our breath, whether we think about it or not, we breathe. Now, if we want to speed up our breathing or slow it down, we can consciously work on doing that. But when it comes to our breath, we normally just breathe without thinking about it. And if you ever notice, when you get excited or upset about something, your breath starts picking up, you start shortening your breath totally unconsciously without thinking about it. So by focusing on our breath, we actually start developing a connection with the unconscious part of our mind. And this is super important. This is— it's called our subconscious or unconscious part of our minds because traditionally thought of that we can't consciously connect with it. But through meditation, It's been shown that we can, and this in turn will help remove deep-rooted mental suffering, which is what the purpose of mindful meditation is to do. And this gets into my fifth and last point. It's essential to get into deeper meditation. By focusing on our breath, we learn to sharpen our minds, and in doing that process, it allows us to do deeper meditations like focusing on the sensations on our body. And in that process, we learn to work on removing deep-rooted causes for pain and suffering that we go through mentally. So as you can see, focusing our breath, while definitely perhaps a little bit boring, is super important to have a very deep and valuable meditation practice. And while most of us focus on how many breaths we take, I actually believe it's more important to focus on how we take those breaths. So thank you guys for checking out this video. If you enjoyed it and it was insightful, please consider giving us a thumbs up and sharing the video with friends or family. So if you're interested in meditation, living mindfully, and generally being happy, please subscribe to our channel. Thank you so much for checking it out, and don't forget to breathe mindfully.