Breath, again

I heard someone on the radio talking about a 30-day plan he has, where he decides each month on a goal and then puts an "x" on his calendar each day to try to build up a 30-day run of doing the goal. He's done many things that way, expanding his knowledge and understanding. I was talking to my daughter about it and she says she puts a sticker on the calendar each day she accomplishes her goal. She likes seeing all of them and the feeling it gives her. I am going to buy some stickers today and try it with the goal I made for right now -- 5 minutes of meditation each day. I saw a video on Facebook, which I cannot find anymore, where it gave a real basic overview of meditation -- just sit comfortably, close your eyes, and focus on a center of breathing like your nose or mouth or belly. It said your mind will go crazy thinking of all sorts of other things but that is okay, just try, fail, try, fail, try, fail, that's what meditation is. And just do it for 5 or 10 minutes a day. He said no matter how busy you are, you have 5 or 10 minutes you can do this. So I made a goal of 5 minutes a day. Two days so far.

Both times I've tried this, I have ended up thinking a lot about breath. It reminded me that I wrote about the breath of God in this blog, years ago. While meditating, I thought about breathing in, then breathing out. I first tried breathing in through my nose, out through my mouth, then all through my nose, and so on. Boring, right? A "revelation" I had is that the breath I'm taking in and the breath I'm breathing out are not the same. Maybe this is no revelation to you, but I was imagining a kind of pipe-like thing -- I pull in air and that air travels through a pipe or tunnel or something and comes out when I breathe out. No it doesn't! The breath I'm breathing out comes from somewhere inside me already. Not sure there's any big thing to learn from this, but there it is.

I suppose even thinking all this through might be considered my mind going off and failing to meditate?

Is this too much navel gazing? Who really cares what I think of as I'm breathing in and out?

Anyway, I'll be off now to buy some stickers. Two gold stars so far.