Esalen's First Yoga Teacher — Teaching yoga since 1968

(Observing your pet breathing counts as time meditating.)

NanoZen™

Only this one breath

Nano means one billionth. Although your lifespan is unpredictable and your breathing rate is unique, you may reasonably be expected to take about a billion breaths in your lifetime. Thus one breath is approximately one billionth of all the breaths you ever take.

Zen meditation, also called mindfulness meditation, focus your attention on your breath. To do this kind of meditation, you focus your awareness on your breathing.

Zen is very easy to do for one breath, very hard to do for many breaths in a row. Zen is about being in the moment. If you can concentrate on your breathing for one moment, you are doing Zen.

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All you need is a lifetime of practice to learn how to do Zen for many moments without losing your focus.

In the meantime, you can do Zen one breath at a time. Just notice one breath coming into you and going out.

That is NanoZen™.