Whatever is newly born needs a name and when we are more and more welcomed by the silence, naming becomes our job . We have to notice, to bless with attention the beasts before us, both the rough and the smooth. To name is to bring an attitude of wonder to the work of sorting, and even to the work of dealing with difficult states of mind. When we can name what is happening to us, we are no longer fully identified with it and have begun to separate from the grasping dark. If what we feel is known and named to be a tiger, then the whole world is not tiger. We can divide the compulsion and the image, the action and the emotion. There is a landscape through which we move, trees casting their own stripes on the forest floor, places where tiger is not.
John Tarrant, The Light inside the Dark
We can become restless and adverse to the breath because we always have the desire to get something. We want to find something that easily interests us, something we can focus on without much effort. If we find something interesting, such as exciting rhythmic music, we absorb right into it. But the rhythm of normal breath isn’t interesting or compelling. It’s calming, and most beings aren’t used to tranquility; they are caught in a need to be excited or interested. In other words most of us need something outside of ourselves to stimulate us and to engage our attention.
Mindfulbalance 