[ferelrossi]

Sometimes, you "feel like" the breathing has stopped when your awareness of the breath goes off even slightly. As most of you already know, as you meditate, the breath becomes shorter and smoother and it becomes increasingly challenging to focus on this ever so slight breath. At that stage, if your mind moves from the breath even slightly, you lose your meditation object. Losing the meditation object is a common problem, at least for me. Sometimes meditators, specially if you are a beginner, perceive this incorrectly as if the breathing has stopped and you have entered higher absorption when in fact you haven't. It happens because your mindfulness has slipped.