I am exploring how the hypnogogic states depend on the necessity of breath, how consciousness takes place spontaneously and the ability to feel opened through the place of occurrence of consciousness becomes the ability to feel the long and short of breath.
I’m talking about proprioception and the sense of location in space, and how that opens feeling that begins to reveal the necessity in the length of breath. I am cut off from feeling my own necessity until I can relax and let go; Cheng Man-Ching the Tai-Chi master taught total relaxation followed by relaxing the chest as the way to start. The state like waking up and falling asleep doesn’t depend on what I do, it depends on letting go of mind and body. I do see that a mind in the chest opens feeling in the lower abdomen and lower back, a mind in the lower abdomen and lower back opens feeling in the legs and feet, a mind in the legs and feet opens feeling in the sacrum and spine, a mind in the sacrum and spine opens feeling in the arms and head, and a mind in the arms and head opens feeling at the surface of the skin. Something like that, successive assimilation of proprioception through feeling connected with the sense of location, as a matter of necessity in the particular movement of breath.
As Gautama the Buddha put it in a description of the first meditative state:
… as a skilled bath-attendant or (bath-attendant) apprentice, having sprinkled bath-powder into a bronze vessel, might knead it while repeatedly sprinkling it with water until the ball of lather had taken up moisture, was drenched with moisture, suffused with moisture inside and out but without any oozing. Even so does (a person) saturate, permeate, suffuse this very body with the rapture and joy that are born of aloofness; there is no part of (the) whole body that is not suffused with the rapture and joy born of aloofness.
(MN III 92-93, Pali Text Society pg 132-134)