Where's the Breath? A Qualitative Investigation Comparing the Experience of Focusing on the Nose versus the Belly During Breath Awareness Meditation
Speaker: Catherine Kerr; Juan Santoy; Harold Roth
Format: Audio & Slides

Breath awareness (BA) has been proposed as a scientific mechanism underlying meditation. BA is thought to enhance interoceptive access to and perception of emotion-driven somatic sensations. Previous investigations of BA and interoception have, however, been limited by failure to specify breath location, since interoceptive access is thought to vary with the bodily location of the breath focus. Qualitative data collection focused on the phenomenology of meditation experience is an important first step for forming scientific hypotheses. This project collected qualitative data related to subjects' self-reported immediate, open-ended experiential descriptions of BA meditation. These qualitative reports were acquired from journal entries written immediately after students' meditative practice in the Brown University Contemplative Studies MEDLAB experiential session (run as part of the semester-long course introduction to contemplative studies) with students being randomly assigned to focus awareness on either the tip of the nose or the belly during BA meditation throughout the semester. The study used a hermeneutic, grounded theory approach to answer the study question: what is the difference in student reports in students who were randomly assigned to focus on the belly during breathing versus students assigned to focus on the nose? To carry out the investigation, the primary coder and secondary coder examined students' immediate, unprompted self-reports. Results: We found that when students focused on the breath in the belly, their descriptions of experience focused on attention to specific somatic areas and body sensations. By contrast, when students described practice experiences related to a focus on the nose during meditation, they tended to describe a quality of mind, specifically how their attention "felt" when they sensed it. Discussion: scientific neural hypotheses about interoception and breath location related to this qualitative finding are considered.