Most meditation practice focuses on the breath. If we are doing single-pointed meditation, we focus only on the breath. If we are doing awareness meditation, we come back to the breath when nothing else is engaging our attention.

When we begin to meditate, when we have been meditating for some time, even when we practice meditation routinely, this matter of focusing on the breath turns out to be much more difficult than we might anticipate. There is a tendency, for example, to try and make the attention on the breath a matter of habit -- to think that all we need to do is to place the attention on the breath once and leave it there. Sure enough, the moment we do this, our attention starts to wander elsewhere. It's because a habit -- by definition -- is something we don't think about. And the minute we stop thinking about the breath, our attention ceases as well.

The problem resides to some extent in the ambiguity of the phrase "focusing on the breath." At first, we may take this as meaning that we focus on our breathing. But that's not quite true. What we're invited to attend to is each breath -- this breath; each in-breath and out-breath -- this in-breath and this out-breath. There can be no let-up in this attention, no relaxation of our focus on this in-breath at this moment, on this out-breath at this moment.

Of course, our attention will inevitably wander -- to the next breath, to breathing as a whole, or away into the fantasy-land we find it so easy to escape to. But that's all right. Sooner or later we realize that we have wandered away, and return our focus to this breath. It's impossible to do perfectly, but it's perfectly possible to improve with practice.