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In my early days as a Zen student, the jiki jitsu (person leading sitting) often yelled, “Sit hard.” This usually occurred when someone (or everyone) was struggling with pain or fatigue.

In our last post, I mentioned that part of the evolution in how I teach hara development is that I now emphasize the role of inhalation, especially for beginners. This emphasis goes with my stressing relaxation over tension, an evolution I have discussed previously. I'll begin by putting this in context.

Three years. That’s how long it’s been since my last post. At that time, I thought I had provided enough theoretical background and exercises to give people a foundation for their hara development regimens. During the hiatus, I continued to learn more about hara development, and my approach has evolved.

A reader asked me recently to say more about the three dantian. I touched on this topic in my second blog post, but this request gave me an incentive to elaborate on it.I'll begin by defining terms. The Chinese characters for dantian are 丹田.

It has been quite a while since I posted to this blog. Over that time, I have received numerous inquiries from readers which have led to very productive email exchanges. This has given me an idea: I would like to invite you all to submit questions and/or suggest topics for future posts.

My Zen teacher was a musician and he frequently used examples from music to illustrate Zen principles. He often said that Zen training was like learning to play a musical instrument. He would describe what it was like to give a young child an instrument, say a violin. At the beginning, they would make horrible, screeching noises. But, with practice, their tone would start to become mellower and the sounds they made would start to resemble music.

Students frequently ask me whether they should be doing hara breathing all the time. Briefly, the answer is “yes”; however, there are some nuances that are worth discussing here.

I have once again been involved in other projects that have kept me from posting to the Hara Development. I plan to resume posting shortly.I want to call your attention to several media events relating to hara development. First, I have an article entitled “Finding Hara” that will be published in the next issue of Tricycle Magazine. The hard copy will be available on the newsstands on November 12; the digital edition will go online on November 1 (https://tricycle.org).

I recently came across a fascinating book chapter that I think has relevance to hara development. Its subject is Noh, a classical Japanese dance theater tradition. Noh is characterized by slow, deliberate, highly stylized movement. The actors wear masks, which cover their facial expressions. While there are spoken words in Noh, emotions are also conveyed by the masks and by movements and bodily gestures.

Anyone who has studied Japanese martial arts—or who has at least watched any of the Karate Kid movies—is familiar with the black belt. Known in Japanese as a kuro obi (kuro=black, obi=belt); it is a sought after sign of proficiency in an art.

A reader of this blog, who is an experienced Zen priest, recently wrote me the following e-mail:
“ I read Omori Sogen Roshi's two books with great interest. Both books resonated strongly. Simple and elegant. He discusses having no "tension" in the stomach muscles, which I understand. However, for the HaraMeter to be effective, to some extent one needs to "set the hara" so as to maintain the valve pressure so to speak. Correct?”

I would like to share with you some new exercises that I recently developed. They have become the foundation of my hara development instruction. All of these exercises are variations on principles borrowed from progressive muscle relaxation (PMR). PMR was developed in the 1920’s by Edmond Jacobson, an American physician, and is still widely used clinically as a relaxation exercise.

In the early stages of my Zen training, I thought that the way to engage the hara was to purposely put tension in my lower abdomen. This did not work; my breathing didn’t change. After my initial “discovery” of my hara, I continued to emphasize tension.

In my last entry, I focused on zazen (seated Zen meditation) as one of the traditional ways of developing hara. In this post, I will focus on another traditional way to train hara: martial arts. Since “martial arts” is a very broad term, I will describe one particular technique that has tremendous importance in the Chozen-ji tradition: “Ah Um” breathing.

As I explained in earlier posts, the traditional ways to develop hara are training in zazen and training in the martial arts. In this post, I will concentrate on aspects of zazen that can be helpful in developing hara whether or not someone wants to formally study zazen.

In the first installment of this blog, I described my experiences trying to learn to hara breathe. As should be clear to the reader, it was a long and frustrating experience. Years later, after I started teaching Zen, I saw many of my students struggle in similar ways. In fact, I have been struck by how few people can quickly learn to breathe from the hara.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I view hara as the unification of the physical, psychological and spiritual dimensions of the human experience. I have already covered the first two in previous installments and will now focus on hara from a spiritual perspective.

Now that we looked at it from a purely physical perspective, I would like to focus on hara from a psychological standpoint. In so doing, I want to shift from whathara is to why it is worthwhile to develop it in the first place. To begin this discussion, it is helpful to look at the importance of the term in Japanese language and culture.