Breath

The breath is by far the most common thing that meditators pay attention to. There are lots of good reasons for this - it's always there, feels relatively consistent moment-to-moment, and bringing awareness to the breath naturally encourages a settling of the nervous system.

There is much more to meditation than just "watching the breath", however. The breath can be used in a wide range of ways, and experienced in a wide range of ways.

As our meditation practice matures, we can tune into a sense of the breath as a movement in which the whole body participates, rather than a physiological movement of air. This more subtle sense of the breath is hugely useful, as it can become a very pleasant and stable place to reside. "Coming back to the breath" can cease to be such a repetitive chore, and can become a process of resting back into a sensitive awareness of the movement of the breath in the whole body.