Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Breathe through your discomfort and dissolve it away. Let the breath create physical feelings of ease and fullness, and allow those feelings to saturate your whole body. This physical ease helps put the mind at ease as well. When you’re operating from a sense of ease, it’s easier to fabricate skillful perceptions as you evaluate your response to the issue with which you’re faced." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras"

"The bliss of concentration is an acquired taste. It’s a specific kind of happiness, which the Thais call santi-sukha, which literally means the happiness of peace. This is a basic level of well-being that we tend to overlook because it carries no excitement, no thrills. It’s just a basic sense of ease that’s steady, like the flame of an oil lamp. For most of us, we notice pleasure and pain because of the back-and-forth, the ups and the downs. When things are steady and on an even keel, we tend to lose interest and not notice them. But that’s precisely the kind of well-being we’re working on here: the kind of happiness that’s steady, that doesn’t go up and down. We have to learn how to appreciate that. As we stick with it more and more, we begin to realize that we wouldn’t want to be without this kind of happiness, without this kind of well-being. But then the next question is, is it really steady? As you examine it, you find that it, too, involves a certain level of...

"The way you manipulate the energy in your body is going to determine how you identify yourself, along with sense of the world you inhabit. If the energy in your body’s really uncomfortable, whatever world you’ve got out there is going to feel confining. But if you can breathe through it, you can learn to walk through those uncomfortable worlds, dissolve them away." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Close to What You Know"

"Even working on breath meditation is a form of goodwill [mettā] for yourself, as you look after the energies in your body. You begin to realize that you’ve been placing a lot of burdens on your mind, unnecessary burdens, by allowing these energies to get all out of whack. But if you work on them and gain a sense of being balanced here in the concentration, a lot of the burdens in the mind get lifted. And then you have more time for other people." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Spread Goodness Around" (Meditations9)

"You’re perfectly free to breathe in any way you like, perfectly free to try deep breathing, say, for a while, to see if it feels really good. There’s nobody out there to say, “Well, you failed that test, or you are not right, this is not as comfortable as it could be.” You’re the one who is gauging the results, and it’s up to you to decide what feels good over the long term. Sometimes you’ll find the rhythm of the breathing will change, as your physical condition changes, as the mind begins to settle down. Other times you’ll find there is a fairly steady rate that feels good, and all you have to do is stay with that steady rate. But it is entirely up to you. After all, this is a time for the mind to look after itself, and so it has the freedom to decide what to do with the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Our Primary Responsibility"

"The Buddha’s not saying that when you practice renunciation you should simply do without. He provides you with an alternative pleasure: the pleasure of right concentration, the pleasure of jhana. The absorption you get in when you’re fully inhabiting the body, the sense of ease that comes with the breath, the sense of fullness that comes with the breath as you allow it to spread throughout the whole body: When you have this alternative pleasure, you learn how to cultivate it, enjoy it, and then you can use it for getting the mind into even deeper concentration." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sense Pleasures & Sensuality" (Meditations12)