Continue this exercise for two to five minutes, keeping your eyes closed and focusing your mind on easy, natural breathing. So return naturally to whatever rate of breathing your body feels comfortable with. If you start to feel a bit short of breath, don't worry; however, this might mean that you're forcing your breathing to become lighter than it wants to be. Again, there's no need to force this, but when you feel that your breath is growing a bit shallower and lighter, simply let it happen. Now, as your breathing relaxes, let it become a little lighter. Just feel your breath moving gently and easily, with your attention following it naturally. When you exhale, let your attention follow the air up out of your lungs and softly out through your nostrils.
This is a very profound change and an enormous benefit, and it could certainly never be brought about by medication. But you'll also experience a kind of energy and vitality during the day that has its source at a deep level of the nervous system. As you gain experience with meditation, you'll of course begin to sleep better at night. You won't have to look for this silence; you'll just begin to lose track of your thoughts, and then the silence will simply appear. Before long you'll get a few glimpses of a profound and complete silence. When you've practiced this technique a few times, you'll begin to notice how, just by paying attention to your breathing, your body sinks deeper and deeper into relaxation, and your mind naturally becomes quieter, too.
