"I can't meditate"

"I can't meditate." 

"If I watch my breath, I get anxious!" are two of the most common reactions people have when they start out with meditation or mindfulness practices. This Next Breath is especially for those people.

I was talking to my friend who is a super successful, wealthy lawyer and he was in misery. He said his mind just races and he can't stop it. His job involves "arguing all day long." At night, he can't get his mind to turn off. The voices keep going about who is right and wrong. He confided in me, while panting and breathing through his mouth, he thought he was going to go insane. The stress is killing him. He tried Mindfulness training and hated it. Mindfulness, observing his breath in a detached way, telling his mind to be still, made his situation worse. He gets more stressed when he meditates.

I told him I could help him. Work actively with the breath first! The quickest way to change the mind is to change the breath. That is what the yogis did! Breath is so much easier, than working with something as subtle and elusive as the layers of mind and emotion, and something as mercurial as thoughts.

An indicator of poor health is rapid breathing while sitting. Rapid breathing will also induce inhaling through the mouth which then compounds the disease patterns and makes everything worse.

An indicator of deep meditation is slowing the breath down. But how to slow down the breath? 

Your ego, your willfulness is not in charge of your breath. The body tightly controls metabolic rates in the body. Forcing your breath into artificial breath ratios, is doomed to failure and it doesn't work for very long. Okay, you can do it for a couple of minutes, but the body rebels. Breath ratios pretty much suck, and no one like to do them, even BKS Iyengar.

Most Praanaayaaama fails because people are trying to control the breath. There is a better way, an alternate school of breath practices, first outlined by Swaamee Kripalu. Free up the breath. Don't enslave it.

This Next Breath can help you with this. From my own experience of slowing down the breath to one breath per minute and then down to 9 breaths over a 10 minute period, I can show you, step by step how to calm the body and breath down... later the mind will calm down too. Work with your Breath First. Your meditation practice will thank you.

There is a catch. Anyone can do this. You don't have to be smart. You don't have to be flexible. You need daily dogged persistence, support and inspiration.