Selected Content from Microsoft Copilot: Your AI companion

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Mindfulness of Breath — 15‑Minute Dhamma Talk (Your Voice, With Sections + Timing)

0:00–0:20 — Welcome & Generosity

Aloha, everyone. It’s really good to see you. And it’s very generous of you to give me a few minutes tonight.

0:20–1:20 — Trauma‑Informed Framing

Before we talk about mindfulness of the breath, I want to acknowledge something important. For some of us, the breath isn’t always a safe or neutral place to rest attention. Maybe you’ve got a cold, or asthma, or anxiety. Maybe you’ve lived through trauma and the breath feels tight or charged. If that’s true for you, nothing is wrong. This is completely normal.

There are many other anchors we can use—sound, touch, the felt sense of the body. You’re welcome here exactly as you are. Take in what’s useful and leave the rest.

1:20–2:20 — MRI Story (Normalizing Breath Aversion)

I’ve had moments like that too. I remember being in an MRI—one of those narrow tubes where your nose is about half an inch from the top. I thought, “I’ll meditate.” And the breath made everything feel smaller and tighter. So I switched to mettā practice, and that was fine. There’s always a practice available to us.

Even here in sangha, if breath isn’t the right doorway tonight, you’ll find your own home base.

2:20–2:50 — One Shared Breath (Arriving Together)

If you’re comfortable, let’s take one breath together—just to arrive. Nothing to fix. Nothing to improve. Just one shared inhale and exhale.

2:50–4:00 — The Scale & Ordinariness of Breath

Now, back to the breath. We breathe something like six hundred to eight hundred million breaths in a lifetime. Most of them go completely unnoticed. And yet each one is a gift—life arriving.

Not special because it’s mystical. Special because it’s so utterly ordinary.

The body handles this rhythm without our help. Except when we’re sick, or underwater, or in an MRI tube, we never have to think about it. Breath is part of the First Foundation of Mindfulness because it’s something the body does—reliably, quietly, continuously.

4:00–5:00 — The Buddha’s Instructions (MN 118)

In the Ānāpānasati Sutta, the Buddha gives beautifully simple instructions:

Breathing in long, know you’re breathing in long. Breathing out long, know you’re breathing out long.

That’s it. No need to deepen the breath or smooth it out. Just feel it. Let the body breathe itself. It’s been doing this since the moment you were born.

5:00–6:20 — Monkey Mind & The Moment of Waking Up

Of course, the moment we try to pay attention to the breath, we meet the monkey mind. Suddenly we’re swinging from branch to branch—thought to thought, sensation to sensation. And that’s never a problem.

The most important moment in mindfulness of breath is not staying with the breath. It’s the moment you realize you’ve left. That moment of recognition—that’s the moment of waking up.

6:20–7:30 — The Puppy Metaphor (Returning with Kindness)

So we return. Have any of you trained a puppy? It’s exactly like that. You say “sit” and “stay,” and the puppy looks up at you with those beautiful eyes… and then trots off. And we just bring it back again and again, with kindness, with patience, with love.

That’s the whole practice.

And if the breath isn’t working, we shift to something else. There’s always another anchor.

7:30–9:00 — The Art of Attention

Why do we practice this? Because it trains the art of attention.

We begin to notice the beginning, middle, and end of each inhale and exhale. We notice the space between breaths. We’re not controlling anything—we’re letting the breath breathe us.

And in that allowing, something softens. Something opens.

9:00–10:00 — Introducing the Poem (Breath as Wind)

There’s a poem by Christina Rossetti that, to me, captures the nature of breath. We don’t see the breath itself. We see its effects. Aside from being in a London fog, we’re never going to see the air around us. But we feel what it moves.

Here’s the poem.

10:00–11:00 — Poem: “Who Has Seen the Wind?”

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you. But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I. But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by.

11:00–12:30 — Breath as Anchor Amid All Experience

Mindfulness of breath is one of the basics of insight practice. We start by feeling the breath, and then we let it be an anchor while we acknowledge everything else that arises—thoughts, images, sensations, emotions. There’s a whole world happening in our consciousness. And we can always return to the breath.

12:30–13:40 — Breath as Shared Inheritance

And again, it’s not because the breath is special. We share this gift with every animal on the planet—whether they breathe with lungs, or gills, or through their skin. We all respire. We all breathe. We share this atmosphere with each other.

You may be breathing in a molecule that passed through a mother’s lungs halfway around the world while she held her baby. The body takes care of us like that—quietly, reliably—just as a mother protects her only child.

13:40–14:40 — Gratitude & The Ordinary Miracle

This ability to breathe without thinking is a gift. But when we practice mindfulness of breath, we’re changing our relationship to it. We’re learning to remember. To return. To pay attention on purpose.

And that naturally gives rise to gratitude. Of the hundreds of millions of breaths we’ve taken so far, how many have we actually noticed? Not many. I know I haven’t.

So this practice lets me feel gratitude for my body. What a gift—to breathe, to share this atmosphere with every other living being, and to have this ordinary, reliable rhythm carrying us through our lives.

Breath is woven into whatever it is we think of as “ourselves.”

14:40–15:20 — Poem Again & Closing Reflection

Let me read the poem one more time. It’s short, and it’s lovely.

Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you… (etc.)

We don’t see the wind. We don’t see the breath. But we feel the body responding. We feel the inhale, the exhale, the moment in between. And we know the breath is passing through.

We don’t have to see it. We don’t have to force it. We can simply feel it—the body’s quiet gift, moment by moment.

Thank you.