Counting Breaths, Cultivating Calm: How Concentration Strengthens Everyday Mindfulness

What if narrowing your attention could make your daily life feel wider, calmer, and more vivid? We dive into the practical craft of concentration and show how a single, steady focus becomes the quiet engine behind reliable mindfulness. Rather than forcing the mind, we build a friendly runway—gladdening the mind with gratitude and warmth—so attention settles without strain and the nervous system knows it is safe to rest.

We walk through concrete anchors that meet different temperaments: counting exhales in simple cycles, sensing breath at the belly or nostrils, receiving whatever sound arrives, or repeating short phrases of loving kindness. You’ll hear why long stretches of silence matter during counting, how to restart at one without self-judgment, and what “relaxed steadiness” feels like when you’re doing it right. Along the way, we unpack clear metaphors: the adjustable flashlight that moves from wide-open awareness to a narrow beam, the body scan as a midpoint on the spectrum, and breath mindfulness as a flexible practice that can widen for strong emotions before returning to the anchor.

By the end, you’ll understand when to choose pure concentration, when to lean into broader mindfulness, and how both interlock to create durable presence. Expect grounded tips on posture, effort, and self-talk, plus a compassionate take on distraction that turns each lapse into a cue to return. If you’ve struggled to keep attention from slipping, this conversation offers a simple blueprint you can use today to stabilize focus and carry that clarity into work, relationships, and rest.

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Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_02 (01:40):
Welcome everyone.
Hope you're all doing well.
So today for today's practice, Ithought I would try a
concentration practice.
I emailed in a newsletterrecently about concentration
practice as being a support forour mindfulness.
To be mindful, we do need somedegree of focus to be able to

(02:05):
sustain our awareness from onemoment to the next, to the next,
to the next.
So concentration, our ability tofocus, helps fuel our
mindfulness and our ability tosustain our mindfulness in daily
life.
And so there are a number ofdifferent kinds of concentration

(02:28):
practices that we can choosefrom.
Some are say body-based orsomatic in nature, in which we
can focus on or narrow ourattention to felt sensations
such as the rise and fall of thebelly or the sensations of air

(02:49):
or breath in and out of thenostrils.
We can receive sounds cominginto the ears and focus on
whatever sound is actuallyentering the ear at that moment.
We can repeat a mantra or aphrase or a sound.

(03:09):
Classically speaking, in a lotof mindfulness circles, phrases
or words of care or lovingkindness are very popular.
So phrases like may we be safe,may we be healthy, may we be
happy, may we live with ease, orsimply safe, healthy, happy, or

(03:35):
simply like care or love.
Repeating these phrases as atool for staying with one type
of experience, or just kind offocusing our mind on one thing.
Another method that's I thinkbeing used more and more these
days is the method of countingour exhales, either going from

(03:58):
one upward until we lose track,or going from one to ten, and
then back down to one and thenback up to ten and repeating
that cycle.
And if we lose track, we canstart it back over at one.
I think that's actually the veryfirst meditation.
Actually, no, the secondmeditation I've ever learned was

(04:19):
just counting breaths, verysimple practice.
So these practices aren'texactly mindfulness practices
where we're kind of noticingchange, noticing whatever's
arising and various aspects ofour experience.
Concentration practice is reallyjust a narrowing of awareness
onto one thing and staying withthat as much as we can without

(04:43):
grasping or striving too much,but just staying with and only
staying with that for asustained period of time.
We can also visualize somethingand stay with the visual.
There's more types and stylesthan I'm mentioning here, but
these are just a few of the onesthat are most common.

(05:03):
Before we practice concentrationpractice, it's very helpful to
invite a sense of say gladnessor safety, warmth, or connection
to help the mind settle and feelsafe enough to focus on

(05:30):
something rather than lookingout for threats or trying to
analyze something or you know,be vigilant per se of our
surroundings or things we needto think about is very helpful
before we focus the mind toinvite the heart to the table to

(06:00):
reflect on things we're gratefulfor, people we love, moments
that help our hearts to softenperhaps wholesome moments in our
life that feel rather karmicallypositive, or happy, joyous,

(06:35):
maybe moments of our ownmeditation practice in which we
really felt a deep sense ofpeace, or revelatory insight, or
a paradigm shift in which theclouds parted.

(06:55):
So for each of us, thesedifferent reflections will be
different.

SPEAKER_00 (07:05):
We can all think of something personal that helps us
to gladden the mind, as RickHansen would often say

(07:26):
reflections that help soften thebody to help us land moments of
goodness gratitude.

(08:10):
Noticing what happens with ourbreathing and with our body as
we reflect on these moments ofgoodness.

(13:52):
For each breath.
And if you wish to count theexhales, feel free to do so from
one to a hundred or from one toten to one to ten, and starting

(14:19):
back over to one if we getdistracted.

(22:38):
Just noticing what's true for usright now.
How are we holding ourselves?

(23:01):
What are the predominantsensations around the head and
the heart and the belly?

(23:37):
Our well being.

SPEAKER_02 (26:23):
I purposely kept it silent for the most part because
some of you were probablycounting.
And in my experience, if I'mcounting and someone inserts a
reminder or invitation, then Imay lose track.
So just one point of note as aguide of certain concentration

(26:45):
practices.
But I'm open to hearing whatsome of you experienced or
thought, any questions orcomments about that practice,
and also just opening it up toanything in general for anyone
who has anything to share or askabout anything.
So the floor is open.

SPEAKER_01 (27:03):
We have a question.
Can you explain again how why aconcentration practice is sort
of different from a mindfulnesspractice?

SPEAKER_02 (27:12):
Yeah, it's a great question.
So there are a couple ways ofthinking about it, or there are
many ways of thinking about it,but some people will liken this
to being like one of thoseflashlights where you can expand
the scope of light or kind ofnarrow it down to like a laser.
They're called mag lightflashlights, and where you like

(27:34):
twist the end and it can expandor narrow.
And say on one extreme where thelight is wide, that can be
likened to mindfulness in thesense that it's this open
awareness of kind of any part ofour experience.

(27:56):
Okay.
Whereas concentration is kind oflike a laser where it's just on
one thing and one thing only,and locked in on that one thing.
There's a lot of sort of grayarea in between.
Most of which is stillconsidered mindfulness.
Concentration is really sort ofnear the end of the spectrum

(28:17):
that's narrow.
Another say metaphor is that youhave a stick or a log.
One end is mindfulness, theother end is concentration.
They're like two sides of thesame stick, or two sides of the
same coin in a way, but youcan't have one without the
other.

(28:38):
They're interconnected.
It's kind of like the Taoistsymbol where the small white
part is within the big blackpart, and the small black part
is within the big white part.
They're integrated so that youneed concentration in order to
stay mindful, and you needmindfulness in order to know

(28:58):
that you're concentrated andlike to be aware of what you're
focused on.
Say with mindfulness, say thebig part of the flashlight, or
the you know, the wide part ofthe light, like that it would be

(29:19):
considered like open awarenesspractice, in which we're mindful
of bodily sensations and/orsounds, andor sights, and or
emotions, any part of ourexperience as it arises.
We can shift awareness todifferent parts of our
experience, notice them changingin real time, and we're fluid

(29:40):
with experience as it arises,you know, mindfulness of
walking, talking, eating,stress, joy, like whatever's
arising.
We can stay mindful with it allor parts of our experience.
Say a more narrow lens of thatwould be say like a body scan,
in which we're sensing the toesand then the foot and then the

(30:02):
ankle and then the calf.
Like that's considered amindfulness practice because
we're we're shifting gears,we're inviting awareness to
different parts of the body,noticing changing sensations,
open to sensations that arepleasant or unpleasant, or
neutral, sensing the bone, skin,flesh, etc.

(30:25):
But it's it is more narrowbecause it's just bodily
sensations usually.
Mindfulness of breathing is uhkind of closer to a
concentration practice.
So we're kind of getting kind ofinto gray territory here where
with mindfulness of breathing,we could be aware of breath at
any part of the body or just thebelly, but we're kind of

(30:48):
noticing the changing rhythm ofbreathing, the different
sensations around the belly aswe breathe, how that's affecting
mood.
We're still kind of open to thechanging landscape of our
experience, but we're mostlyjust kind of sensing into
breathing.
We're open to being like withmindfulness of breathing, like

(31:09):
if a strong emotion arises or astrong sound distracts us, like
we can shift our awarenesstowards the predominant emotion,
tend to it with gentleness, andthen come back to breathing,
where the breath is a preferredobject of awareness, but we're
not necessarily limiting ourfocus on just the breath per se.

(31:33):
We're we're still open towhatever's predominant, but
we're gonna come back to thebreath once whatever's pre more
predominant.
Subsides.
So depending on the mindfulnesspractice, it may be more of a
wide flashlight or a more narrowlight.
But as soon as we really startgetting into territory where

(31:53):
we're really locked into justone small part of our experience
only.
And we're not really open toanything else, where we're
really just coming back, comingback, coming back, coming back
as kind of quickly as we canback to the concentration
object.

(32:14):
We're not noticing all theseother things.
We're just glued into a more andmore and more and more narrow
part of our experience.
That's more and more and morepart of a concentration
practice.
So sometimes the line gets alittle blurry, and usually it'll
be referred to as a mindfulnesspractice.
But sensing into just the breathat the tip of the nostrils, and

(32:37):
especially with the counting,that would be considered more of
a concentration practice.