Meditation - how to breathe naturally? Just starting with meditation, I can't get the breathing right.

As soon as I concentrate on breathing (as there is not much else to concentrate on), I unvolunteraly assume concious control over when to breath in and out.
That leads to either to little or to much breathing and makes me feel dizzy.

How ever, when I stop conciously breathing in and out, I don't breath at all - my breathing reflex wont kick in as long as I think about breathing. The result is an awkward cycle of holding breath, turning blue, conciously breathing like just surfaced from a freedive, holding breath again.

Not thinking about breathing works only so long before I realise that I avoid to think about breathing...

Is this common at all? How do you handle this?
I bicycle regularly so maybe I'm good at breathing (get a good amount of oxygen from each breath).

If I sit at rest I seem to need about 4 breaths per minutes. Apparently that's abnormal (maybe even pathological), the internet says that 12/minute is normal for adults, 8/minute for athletes. Also I've been diagnosed with sleep apnea so I have a CPAP machine for sleeping. I say this to warn you that "your mileage may vary".

Anyway, sitting at rest it takes me about:


5 seconds to inhale
5 seconds to exhale
Pause for about 5 seconds, until my body feels it wants to begin to take another breath to avoid a shortage


So 15 seconds per cycle, 4 per minute, including a 5 second pause in each cycle.

I breathe continuously on a bicycle (i.e. during aerobic exercise), and don't try to breathe continuously when I'm at rest, i.e. at rest I do expect to pause between each breath -- and not take the next breath until I feel I begin to need it.

It doesn't have to be exact: if you start a breath a couple of seconds too late or too early, it doesn't matter.

By breathing deeply and continuously I can slow that to 3 breaths/minute:


10 seconds to inhale
10 seconds to exhale
No pause between breaths


That feels abnormal though, an effort to breathe extra deeply and extra slowly.

Anyway, maybe what you're missing is the pause between breaths. IMO if I didn't pause (when I'm at rest) I'd hyperventilate. You can vary the duration of the pause. The trick is not to begin to inhale, until you begin to feel that you begin to need the next breath. If you wait until you just begin to need to breath, don't worry: because you're at rest you'll easily be able to satisfy your need with just one breath, maybe two at most.

Sometimes there's a sudden urge to take an extra quick inhale. If that happens then just let that happen.

Also you wrote, "an awkward cycle of holding breath", as if you're pausing with your lungs full. I pause after each exhale:


Inhale engages some muscular effort
Exhale releases that muscular effort
Pause/idle while the muscles are at rest (not breathing and the body held upright just by being balanced on an upright skeleton, minimum use of muscles to hold yourself in place).


See also How to breathe into your stomach and not get light headed during meditation?

I kind of recommend the book, Anapanasati -- Unveiling the Secrets of Life by Bikkhu Buddhadasa ... plenty of detail, adapt as necessary.