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The 4-7-8 breath was introduced originally by Dr. Andrew Weil who was really considered the grandfather of integrative medicine and as a pulmonologist who’s also a current University of Arizona Integrative Medicine Fellowship fellow, I’m so honored to be able to guide you in this practice. The 4-7-8 breath can be used for situations where you’re feeling particularly anxious, stressed, and even if you have some difficulty falling asleep.

The 4-7-8 breath stands for the following. You inhale for a count of four, then you hold your breath for a count of seven, and then you exhale through your mouth through pursed lips for a count of eight. The durations of these breaths aren’t as important as the ratio of the inhalation breath, breath-hold, and particularly the exhalation breath. The exhalation breath, you’ll notice, is twice as long as the inhalation breath. This allows for the lungs to completely empty of stagnant air, and oftentimes people who have chronic lung disease, particularly those with obstructive lung disease, have a tendency to air trap. This 4-7-8 breath offers the opportunity to completely exhale.

It’s also a much more intentional practice. If, for instance, awareness of breath might be anxiety-provoking, particularly for lung disease patients, which has been the case for some of my patients, then perhaps a four-seven-eight breath would be more helpful. Pursing your lips when you exhale has been shown to basically stent open the airways. This type of breathing also activates your vagus nerve, which is your “rest and digest” nerve.

1.      Sit or stand in a position of comfort

You can close your eyes if that feels safe for you to do so or lower your gaze a few inches in front of you. Perhaps sit more upright, envisioning this string that’s pulling the crown of the head upwards toward the sky, running down through the spine. Checking in and making sure that the head is atop shoulders that are atop the hips. This allows your lungs to be in better anatomic alignment to maximize their ability to exchange air.

2.      Exhale out through the mouth

Exhale the air through your mouth and then to start, you’ll inhale through your nose for a count of four. One, two, three, four. Hold the breath, two, three, four, five, six, and seven. And then out through your mouth, through pursed lips, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.

(We’ll do that three more times.)

3.      Exhale once again, and then inhale through the nose

Hold your breath. Then exhale through your mouth. Inhale into the nose. Hold your breath. And exhale through your mouth. One more time, inhale through the nose. Hold your breath. And exhale through the mouth.

4.      Return to a normal rhythm of breathing

Perhaps checking in and noticing how you feel now compared to just a few breath cycles ago. Notice the body sensations now. Notice any emotions. Notice your sense of being right now in this moment after the 4-7-8 breath. 

The recommended number of times to do this type of breath is going through four breath cycles up to twice a day initially. Sometimes, if you do more than that, it can cause some lightheadedness and dizziness. If that should happen, you can definitely decrease the number of breath cycles you do with the 4-7-8 breath and slowly build up. But perhaps this is a breathing technique that you might want to try before you do your daily mindfulness practice. Incorporating an intentional, mindful type of breathing before your formal practice. The invitation is there, the choice is yours.

Amid a world so concerned with “getting back to normal,” I propose that we actually need to go back a number of decades—maybe 60–70 years, even—to recover an all-around sustainable, more humane approach to “normal.” Specifically, we need to go back to a time when more people were more connected to the earth through the cultivation of crops and the husbandry of animals for sustenance, in symbiosis with the Earth and her cycles.

I recently watched the film Kiss the Ground (2021), which has forever changed my perspective on what earth actually is. The film is about saving our soils globally, restoring them to a state of nutrient-richness alive with microorganisms, as the basis for all human, animal, insect, and vegetable life, and especially for a sustainable climate. I had no idea how intimately intertwined the changing climate and the retention of the world’s vital topsoil are—they are essential for our very survival. As creatures made up largely of other microorganisms, we are wholly dependent on a multitude of living, thriving, unseen beings.

Soil loss is taking place on an epic scale: one third of the world’s topsoil has already been lost to commercial farming practices, erosion, and desertification. These activities also cause global warming and increasingly intense climatic changes. Healthy soils absorb water and carbon dioxide, but the opposite is now occurring: once-vital soils are releasing water and carbon dioxide, resulting in desertification. Examples abound. However, there are also places, such as China, South America, the US, and elsewhere, where farmers are committed to soil restoration. Whether rooted by seedlings, grasses, or trees, the soil needs plant life to sequester carbon and to retain water, to stabilize the climate, and to prevent water erosion and wind-borne soil loss. Desertification is a vicious cycle that continually leads to hotter microclimates, scaled to larger and larger areas. Then macro-climatic changes become the norm and we have dramatic climate change, or as one friend calls it: “global weirding”—hotter hots and colder colds, as well as hurricanes, floods, droughts, and all manner of extreme weather conditions. These events lead to the displacement and endangerment of already marginalized communities, the loss of animal life, and the depletion of entire species.

According to the United Nations, we have a mere 60 years left before the world’s remaining topsoil has blown away as dust, when nothing will be cultivable. This is a terrifying thought, which should give us each great pause.

I may not have children of my own but that does not mean that I don’t feel responsible for helping to ensure that current and future generations will have access to food, shelter, and a habitable climate for all life. Therefore, our imperative as Buddhists, as activists, as humans of any persuasion, ought to be preserving vegetation, soil, clean water, and air, and reversing the ominous trajectory of soil loss and degradation.

How is farming an issue for Buddhist or spiritual practitioners? It is the ultimate form of enacting wisdom-compassion, a skillful means to provide what beings need, within the context of knowing there is no time to waste. There is also no soil, water, air, or ozone layer to waste! Although these actions may be relative, if held within the ultimate view that meeting the needs of beings beyond our own narrow circle is the swift path of generosity, they become forms of enlightened living to benefit all. Rather than only stepping in after a natural disaster, we could be helping to prevent future crises—especially those of a catastrophic or irreversible nature, such as loss of soils, clean water, or air, species extinction, or the loss of human life.

Sustainable farming is within reach no matter which country we live in, for even the most modest of budgets, because one way to accomplish this goal in the short term is to join energies with neighbors, sangha, and even at work, to begin with a humble plot or planters on the roof, to begin to reclaim lost soil, water, organisms, and vegetation that all beings need to thrive on our shared Earth.

Give thanks and a bow to your fellow organisms, no matter how big or small. We are all interdependent.

Buddhistdoor.net

Our busy mind is an overwhelming place to live

Let’s start with the obvious: many of us lead very busy lives. Usually more than we can realistically handle in the allotted time. Most of us, especially those of us in senior leadership roles, can feel like we’re in a constant rut of overwhelm. There is always more to do, remember, and achieve than hours in the day. And when we do one thing, our mind tends to remind us of the dozens of other things that require our attention, or that we believe can’t get done in time. 

Our minds react to this with stress and often anxiety. The problem however is that our mind perceives this busyness as real. As if it was happening right now. To the mind, the future and past always happen right now. When we engage in memories from the past we relive the memory in the now, we can even re-feel the joy or pain of that moment. The same is true for our ideas of the future. When our mind creates thoughts about the future, of potentially negative consequences (catastrophizing) our mind experiences them as if they were happening right now. 

And that is where mindfulness meditation comes in. Time is an illusion created by our minds. You can only live in the now. When we are thinking about the past or the future we really are just experiencing memories, ideas, and thoughts in the now. Mindfulness is a practice that allows us to step out of the conceptual into the experiential, or put another way, it allows us to “wake up” to what is real right now.

Thoughts are just thoughts (even at work)

I recently had this experience while being in one of the many Zoom meetings I attend these days: I felt distracted and worried about all the things that still would need to get done that day. A glance at my calendar revealed that I was booked up for most of the day. I had unanswered emails sitting in my inbox and I wondered when I would get to the many to-dos I had jotted down on my to-do list. As my mind was taking off in every direction, I took a moment to simply make space for all the emotions that had come up. Anxiety, a feeling of overwhelm, tension in my body, stress, a sudden loss of energy and joy, a feeling of strain.

As I noticed this, I took a moment to straighten my back, place my feet firmly on the ground and check in with my belly breath. As I was doing this I started to “re-awaken” to the meeting I was in. Re-grounding myself in my body and my breath, and moving my conscious awareness back from an anticipated future into the present reality, I felt an immediate sense of calm, energy, joy, and serenity return. What was here right now, was me breathing and attending a Zoom meeting. I realized I had allowed my mind to go off into a fantasy of what would happen in an imagined future. And then my body and mind felt anxious about that. By returning to the present moment, I was able to deal with what was actually here right now. Now, you can argue that none of the “re-awakening” to the present moment made the emails go away or the to-do list any shorter. And that is true. But I could approach each of those with presence, and energy, because my mind was present to them, as I tackled them. And I didn’t allow the fantasies of my mind to put unnecessary extra weight and strain on me. 

Take it one thing at a time

There is a scene in Michael Ende’s beautiful book Momo that expresses this so well: The street sweeper Beppo is asked how he deals with sweeping a seemingly endless street in front of him without getting overwhelmed by the enormous task. He responds by saying: “Sometimes, when you’ve a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you’ll never get it swept […] That’s not the way to do it. You must never think of the whole street at once. You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next. Nothing else.” That’s it. There always is just that one stroke, that one breath, that one word we say. Nothing else. When we live our life like that, not only will stress dissipate, we also are more efficient (after all, some studies indicate that we are distracted half the time), better listeners, more present partners, colleagues, and bosses. 

Three ways to return to the present:

1. Daily re-awakening practice

Our minds are so busy hanging out in ideas, fantasies, and assumed future possibilities that it takes regular daily practice to “re-awaken” to the present moment. I do mine first thing in the morning and right before I go to bed. I sit down, set my timer and refocus my mind on my breath. Often when I start sitting down my mind feels like a highway of thoughts. Gradually, gradually I return to the present moment. 

2. Stepping out of the narrative in the moment

Like many busy people I spend the bulk of my day in meetings (virtual these days). During most meetings my mind is often caught in some narrative: What point I need to convey, how I want to be perceived, what I want to get out of the meeting. When I notice that my mind has gotten lost in thoughts, I return to my breath right at this moment. By breathing and stepping out of the mental narrative it often feels like a veil is being lifted and I can actually be with the other person in the conversation (rather than with the thoughts in my head). 

3. Having a reminder

A friend of mine, a busy CEO, has a Tibetan singing bowl on his desk that rings at random intervals. He says that whenever it rings it reminds him to let go of whatever he is working on for a moment and re-center. He says it allows him to let go of the “intensity” that he can fall into otherwise. It can be powerful to have a reminder that allows you to realize you got caught in your mind’s “intensity”.

Mindful.org

Let’s try this together first.

1.       Take a moment to turn your attention inwards, lowering or closing your eyes, if that’s helpful. Just becoming aware of your breath moving naturally in and out of your body.
2.       With each in-breath, feeling the spaciousness in your chest. And with each exhale, dropping your shoulders down just a little bit more.
3.       For this next breath, letting go of your judgments and expectations of how this moment needs to be, and seeing if you can receive the gift of this breath, in this moment.
4.       When you complete that cycle, opening your eyes.

Were you able to let go of your judgments and distractions and reach your field within? If you didn’t, that’s okay. In fact, that’s the challenge: We are not able to reach that field within when we want to. I’m here to tell you that mindfulness is your capacity to step off the treadmill and return to that field within. Mindfulness is a practice. It disrupts our autopilot thinking and supports us returning to our awareness, the field within. Mindfulness is also the field of non-judging awareness that allows us to see things clearly.

I remember my first political debate when I was running for town council. I was waiting in line with five other candidates. There were 100 people packed in a library waiting for us. My heart was beating fast, my mind was jumping from topic to topic, and I was feeling really anxious. So, I took a deep breath in and that helped some. Then came doubt.

I don’t belong here. I didn’t have any experience in politics and some of the candidates had many years of experience. I pushed my negative thoughts away with some positive thinking and breathing. At the end of the debate my campaign manager comes to me and says, “You were not yourself.” And he was right. I was disconnected from myself and the audience.

In that one critical situation, I encountered all three hindrances:

1.       My mind was running in circles;
2.       I was pushing away what was uncomfortable;
3.       And I was grasping for audience validation.

Meditate, contemplate, and act

The invitation here is to be willing to meet ourselves with the good and the messy. When we do that, we are able to examine our emotions and thoughts with kindness. We are able to look closely at what’s true and what’s our default. When I did that in the subsequent debates, my campaign manager told me I was 1000 times better.

How much better can our lives be? 1000 times better, if only we can learn not to avoid the discomfort and to return to ourselves. However, we didn’t grow up learning how to do that. Here is where mindfulness comes in. Mindfulness can be practiced with three steps: Meditate, contemplate, and act.

1.       Meditate: Returning to our non-judging awareness. Meditation allows us to retrain our brain to focus on the object we’ve chosen. This could be your breath, your body, movement, or any usual activity like swimming, running, or Zumba. I encourage people who have difficulty doing seated meditation to try any of these activities.
2.       Contemplate: Once our mind is stabilized, now we can contemplate. What is my experience right now? What are my intentions for this situation? We can ask ourselves, “What’s here now?” and “What would I like to see happen? What’s important right now?”
3.       Act: It’s not enough to just have good intentions. The more we can practice acting skillfully, in non-critical situations, the easier it will be to act skillfully in critical situations.

As a society, we have many big decisions we need to make as we come out of the pandemic. We can step back on the treadmill and forge our way forward, or we can return to the field together. I understand there’s an urgency to get back to normal. But the pandemic has forced us to see that normal is broken. We have insurmountable challenges: racism, poverty, climate change, to name just a few. Staying on the treadmill mostly provides us quick fixes, efficiencies, and strategies that favor some but others. 

We need a new way of thinking. We need a new way of working together, of finding solutions that emerge when we’re willing to struggle together. I believe that mindfulness builds a collective capacity to move through our resistance and return to the field together. In this space there is creative potential to solve any problem. Maybe not right away, but it supports us in making this journey together possible and even worthwhile. 

Moving forward, when you encounter difficulty at home, at work, or in the community, remember, don’t walk away. Return back to yourself and remind yourself and each other, “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field. Let’s meet there.”

Mindful.org