[KirinDave]

> If you are "breathing" you are only "breathing".

And sitting, and your heart is beating, and you're swallowing, and your eyes are moving reflexively, and you're probably digesting. And what about people with tinnitis? They're often "hearing" something.

Sorry, I just don't understand why focusing on a specific topic to the exclusion of everything else is somehow inferior to focusing on breathing. Because your higher functioning mind can take over your breathing, but your reflexive breathing is plenty good at it nearly all the time. Woudln't the same distraction-free mindset be attainable by contemplating the central limit theorem, or Euler's formula, or focusing on doing more situps than your body is comfortable with?

[jules]

I think the point is to train your ability to focus on things that you don't naturally focus on. If you like thinking about math and you can easily focus on it without effort, presumably it doesn't have the same training effect. I think the idea of mindfulness is to learn to build up "reflexes" in your mind that cause you to notice certain thoughts at the conscious level. Focusing on your breathing is something so boring that random thoughts will continually enter your mind. Sometimes it will take a significant period of time to consciously notice that you're no longer focusing on breathing. Over time you train yourself to recognize those thoughts as soon as the enter your mind. In other words you train yourself to lift unconscious thoughts to conscious meta thoughts, i.e. feeling angry v.s. thinking "hey, I'm feeling angry".

For example if somebody does something annoying, you might reflexively think or say something bad to that person. The idea of mindfulness is to train your mind to process thoughts on a conscious level before acting on them. You will have the conscious thought "oh, I feel annoyed by this" and then be able to make a conscious decision about your reaction, instead of a reflexive one. Or instead of randomly browsing the web, you consciously notice "hey, I'm browsing the web, lets get back to work" ;) I'm certainly not an expert on the subject, but this is my understanding of it. If you've never tried it and want to get a clearer understanding, try it now. Try focusing on your breath for 2 minutes (or heartbeat, or the number 5, or whatever, as long as it's the same simple boring thing over those 2 minutes).

[wpietri]

This is something that I don't think you will be able to understand until you have tried it enough to see what others see in it. There are many activities like that.

The point of focusing on breathing is not to do the breathing in place of your automatic breathing. It is to pay attention to that automatic breathing.

Contemplating the central limit theorem is a complex activity. Where does contemplation of that truly end? It is easy to follow the mind's natural tendency to become distracted. You think about related math. You think about your math professor that first talked about it. You think about unrelated math. You think about practical applications.

The breath is simple. You observe the breath going in and out. When your mind it on something else, you return it to the breath. Over and over. You don't have to consider anything: if you attend to something other than the sensation of the breath, you've wandered off.

[lobo_tuerto]

Maybe because breathing is something you are actually doing, while you _can't_ do "cats".

Basically you are fusing something you are doing with your complete attention. And that is on a different level than "cats".

[acous]

You can be mindful of all of those things, but it's not necessarily the thing they start you off with with. Breath is easy to explain and locate... not everyone can isolate their heartbeat or eye movements easily.