Vico said in the how to meditate videos you mentioned that in the beginning you can place your hand on the stomach if you can't feel the rising and falling but is that advisable only for new meditators or can it be done later also or is it possibly considered a crutch and therefore not advisable?
Sometimes crutches are advisable when you need them so
use it as a crutch when you don't feel your breath but not out of a deep state of concentration.
It might happen that your body became so still and your mind become so still that you don't notice your breath anymore.
It's going in and out so subtle that you don't
you can't find it anymore.
So in that case it would be really unadvisable to take the crutch and put your hand because by that you would go out of the deep concentrated mind state.
But if for some reason you are too, whatever, too nervous or too agitated or
your breath is going too fast for you to even be mindful, to concentrate somehow, then you can put your hand back on the stomach and feel where it is, feel that you calm down a little bit because
often an agitated mind makes the body nervous and the breath fast and way around the fast breath can make the mind agitated because it's working together.
And just to qualify what the videos were, why I mentioned in the videos is really for new meditators because
Whether or not you do use it later on, the point for a new meditator is that new meditators specifically have never spent much time looking at their breath, at their abdomen.
So it's not a familiar object of attention.
It's something that the mind is not used to focusing on.
It's something that the mind is not able to even conceive.
of how it should be or where it should be or what it should be.
And so in order to give your mind an example or an idea of what the rising and falling is like, you put your hand on your stomach and you feel it rise.
What often happens to new meditators is that they force so much
the stomach, that they actually make the stomach rise when the breath comes, rise when the breath goes out and fall when the breath comes in.
When the breath comes into the body, they let it out again.
So it's a question that we'll ask meditators often in the beginning.
Is the rising on the in-breath or on the out-breath?
And surprisingly enough, many people will say the rising is on the out-breath.
Because that's when they let go, right?
They're tensing up and then they let go.
Which means that they really have no clue about what the breath is.
I used to do this to my Thai students, some of them who would be living quite stressful lives.
I come in for reporting and say, so this is the rising and the falling.
Is the rising on the in-breath or the out-breath?
The rising is on the out-breath.
It rises when you're in the out-breath.
And they do this.
And I say, okay, lie down on your back.
Confused, but you have them lie down on their back and then put their hand on their stomach.
And then you just watch it.
The stomach goes like this.
And so if you have trouble answering that question in the beginning, it's a sign that you're not familiar enough, or your mind is not familiar enough with the breath.
And also that you have an incredible amount of stress, which most of us have if we haven't ever undertaken meditation practice.
And so you need to
jumpstart your mind and really give your mind a head start in understanding or in perceiving the rising and falling you can even not just put your hands on your stomach you can also lie on your back
And then for sure you'll find that there's no way that the rising is on the out-breath, the rising is on the in-breath.
When the breath goes in, the stomach will naturally rise.
If you watch a baby, that's how it happens.
And if you lie down on your back, that's how it happens.
So the point of the beginner meditator using the hand is to become familiar with it, which doesn't apply later on, but there could be other reasons why you might do that, other reasons why you might even lie down in order to get more comfortable.
If you have a lot of stress, lying down can be a good way to help your mind become more relaxed and more balanced.