Rising and Falling

I can still remember the first meditation retreat I ever attended over fifty years ago. It was taught by a gentle Thai monk, Koon Kum Heng, who presented a classical Theravada practice that he called rising and falling. For seven long days I did nothing but observe how my breath caused my front belly wall to rise and fall on the inhalation and exhalation. With each inhalation, the belly could be observed, and eventually felt, expanding outward. On the exhalation, it would settle back in. The movement never stopped. Over and over and over again, while sitting in an upright meditation posture, standing, lying down, or walking slowly from meditation hall to bedroom, from dining hall to bathroom, I did my best to focus my entire attention on my belly as it rose and fell, expanded and contracted, on the breath.

Rising and Falling of the Belly
sit or stand
in a posture of meditation
just feel yourself there
tall and relaxed

turn your attention
to your belly
even in the stillest of bodies
your belly can be felt
to rise and fall
expand and contract
on the inhalation and exhalation of breath

rising and falling
rising and falling
over and over again

observe the motions
feel the motions
become the motions

Simple instructions, maybe, but far easier spoken than followed, as inevitably I’d find that my mind would wander off on a parade of random thoughts that, with uncanny success, would make me oblivious to the rising and falling motion in my belly. The practice became only somewhat stabilized toward the end of the retreat, when I realized I was no longer observing the rising and falling action from the safe distance of my mind but was actually feeling the expansion and retraction in my belly and becoming centered there. Conventional mind felt immeasurably clearer and less prone to distraction.

At one point during the retreat I recall chuckling to myself as I remembered a phrase that would frequently come up in conversations with friends of my parents. To them, succeeding in life meant going into medicine, law, or business. When I told them, as a teenager, that I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with my life, they’d remark with a hint of a scowl, “Well, you’re not going to just sit around and contemplate your navel, are you?”

During the retreat I realized how far that phrase—uttered so pejoratively—had traveled and morphed. It meant not committing to anything and wasting away your life. Yet here I was, hour after hour, day after day, doing nothing but exploring an ancient practice of “contemplating my navel,” and it was wonderful. Endlessly rising and falling, rising and falling, and I loved going along for each ride like a surfer having a very good day on the water.

Only many years later would I understand that this practice of observing the rising and falling of the belly draws on the opening instructions on breathing in the Satipatthana Sutta: to remain aware of the breath in the front of your body. Over the years I’ve also come to realize that this initial instruction is the foundation of the classical practice of mindfulness, but that the culminating instruction to breathe through the whole body catapults us into a world of radiant awakening. And so the question naturally arose: How might this classical Theravada practice of rising and falling be explored from the perspective not of the initial instruction on breath—remain watchful of breath at the front of the body—but from the culminating instruction—breathe through the whole body?

Rising and Falling Through the Whole Body
come to standing and relax into
the upright nobility of your body
standing tall
while remaining relaxed

feel the body
look and see
listen and hear
relax

now take a deliciously full inhalation
through your nose
as though you’re breathing in
the most exotic fragrance imaginable
and filling every cell of your body with its aroma

feel the inhalation
filling you from toe to head
as though your body
were a long and narrow balloon
pressing you down into the earth
while lifting you up into the sky
spinal curves flatten

then exhale through your mouth
blow all the air out
exhale at least as long as your initial inhalation
everything shortens
spinal curves reform
your energies can be felt to return
back into the diaphragmatic center of your body
from head back down into diaphragm
from feet back up into diaphragm

for mindfulness to become radiant
breath needs to be felt
filling and emptying
expanding and contracting
the whole of the moving body
not just touching the front of the static body

the key to initiating
this breath
on which your entire body can be felt to rise and fall
lengthen and shorten
is to just let go
through the entire body
to gravity’s gentle pull
at the very onset of inhalation

no you don’t fall over
as this gesture of letting go
draws a much larger volume of
buoyant air
into your lungs
grounding you deeply into the earth
while catching you
and lifting you up

as yeast raises flour
let your inhalation
create lightening
through the long shaft of your body
while simultaneously becoming more rooted to the earth

the inhalation that causes the body to lighten
is full
and yet deeply relaxed
never forced

when you’re out in the world
remember to find this breath
anywhere from every once in a while
to as much of the time as you like

The Old Testament God is portrayed as a strict and authoritarian parent, loving his children, the Israelites, when they behaved according to his rules and surrendered to his presence, admonishing them when they resisted joining his chorus and started singing their own tunes. When he’d get cross with his children, he’d scornfully call them out by what must at the time have been a very bad expletive indeed: you stiff-necked people.

Lost in thought, your neck doesn’t move. It becomes frozen as though it were composed of a single long bone rather than a stacking of seven individual bones whose intervening joints exist solely for the purpose of movement. Another helpful support to initiate the rising and falling through the entire body that stimulates radiance is to make sure the neck is moving on every inhalation and exhalation. If the neck can free itself from its frozen stillness, that motion immediately gets transmitted through the entire spine, and you become far more radiantly present.

Freeing Your Neck
as you breathe in
feel the back of your neck expanding and lengthening
as your cervical vertebrae move

as you breathe out
the vertebrae move back
and the neck once again settles

while playing with the neck’s motions
let your shoulders float
cycling up and down
through the passage of the breath

keeping your neck and shoulders in constant motion
rising and falling on the breath
it’s not possible
to become lost in thought

Bringing body alive and allowing breath to move you, body naturally keeps rising and falling throughout its length, over and over again. The lower back lengthens and shortens. The upper back lengthens and shortens. The neck lengthens and shortens. The head bobs up and down like a fishing bobber on a lake over which a gentle breeze is blowing. A body that doesn’t brace itself against its breath starts feeling palpably lighter. Breath after breath, it sheds its resistant burden.

as body rises and falls on the breath
body lightens
being enlightens

enter the lightening
of a breath that rises and falls
through the entire body

If all this parsing out of the minutiae of how breath and body move in radiant mindfulness is starting to sound a bit like the centipede going to great lengths to describe how it walks, it’s helpful to remember that the centipede really has no problem when it comes time to stepping out. Descriptions aside, the practice of radiant mindfulness couldn’t be simpler because its constant undulating motions are so very natural and relaxed. It’s a bit like looking at those images of apparently random masses of colored dots and shapes that somehow reveal a three-dimensional form if only you can figure out how to adjust your vision. After multiple frustrated attempts, you just relax your eyes, and suddenly—bingo!—the image appears, and you understand how what just happened, happened. The same thing will occur for you when, in a sudden moment, your body simply figures this out and finds its way into feeling how its entirety can be felt to rise and fall, lengthen and shorten, expand and contract, on the cyclic inhalation and exhalation of breath.

♦

From Radiant Mindfulness: How to Reach the Awakened State Beyond the Mind by Will Johnson, published by Inner Traditions © 2026. All rights reserved, reprinted with permission of publisher