Three Anchors That Aren’t The Breath is a nine-and-a-half-minute practice for anyone who was told to follow the breath and found that it didn’t help. An anchor is a place for your attention to rest and come back to. You try three of them for half a minute each: the sounds in the room, one thing that isn’t moving, and the feeling of your hands. Then you pick the one that was easiest to come back to, and you stay with it for two quiet minutes.
In the recording, I name three ways the breath goes wrong for people: it changes when you watch it, it’s a bit dull, and it’s too close on a hard day. Each of those has something behind it.
The breath changes when you watch it.
Breathing is unusual among the things your body does. It runs by itself, and you can also take the controls whenever you like. The trouble is that noticing it tends to hand you the controls. People who measure breathing for a living have had to plan around this, and a 1997 study on that very problem shows how breathing changes once people know it’s being recorded. So if you start managing every inhale the moment someone says “just observe,” you’ve run into a known difficulty.
Minds wander about half the time.
In 2010, two Harvard psychologists pinged 2,250 adults on their phones at random moments and asked what they were thinking about. In 46.9 percent of the samples, it wasn’t what they were doing. No activity came in under 30 percent, except for one. (It wasn’t meditation. I’ll let you look it up.)
Researchers at Emory built wandering into their meditation model. They had 14 meditators press a button each time they caught their mind drifting, and the result was a loop: wander, notice, come back, stay a while. Coming back is one of the four parts. That’s why the recording asks which anchor was easiest to return to, not which one you held the longest.
Closer isn’t always gentler.
The three anchors go in order of distance from the body: sound first, then sight, then the hands, with a way out offered at the hands. I wrote about the reason in the last post. The short version is that attention to the inside of the body seems to follow an upside-down U, and too much of it is linked with anxiety and panic.
People differ, and they change their minds.
In a 2018 study, 82 students who had never meditated tried three anchors for ten minutes each: the breath, a spoken phrase, and a green circle. About half preferred the breath. Thirty percent preferred the phrase, and 21 percent the circle. More than three-quarters changed their favorite somewhere along the way. It was one session with undergraduates, so I wouldn’t lean on the exact numbers. The pattern matches what I’ve seen teaching: no anchor suits everyone, and Tuesday’s may not be Thursday’s.
The old manuals never said it had to be the breath.
In the fifth century, a monk named Buddhaghosa wrote a meditation manual called the Path of Purification. It lists forty things to rest the mind on. The breath is one of them. Ten are things to look at, among them earth, water, fire, and the color blue. So if your anchor turns out to be a doorknob or a mug, you have about fifteen hundred years of company.
What I can’t tell you.
Which anchor is yours. Nobody can, and the Toronto numbers suggest the answer moves around. The breath is a fine anchor, too. Half of those students preferred it, and it’s the fourth option at the end of the recording. Some people come back to it later, and some never do.
Pick one thing near you that isn’t moving and has no words on it. Rest your eyes there until your mind leaves, then come back once. That’s the practice in miniature.
