We're also developing good qualities in the mind: mindfulness, alertness and ardency

"So you focus on your breath. When the breath comes in, know it’s coming in; when it goes out, know it’s going out. As you do that, you have to bring some mental factors to the breath.

The first is mindfulness, just keeping the breath in mind. Remind yourself: This is where you want to stay. And make this your frame of reference. You can forget about the world outside for the time being. Focus on this world here, the world of your breathing, the world of your immediate experience in the body. Make that your frame of reference.

Thoughts that deal with other things: Put them aside for the time being. It’s not that you’re being irresponsible here, it’s simply that the mind needs some time for itself, some time when it can put down all the cares and responsibilities of the outside world so that it can get itself into shape.

So, mindfulness here means remembering to stay with the breath in and of itself, right here.

The next quality is alertness: You actually know what you’re doing right now. You know when the breath is coming in; you know when the breath is going out. You know when it’s comfortable or not. This is important. If the breath isn’t comfortable, it’s going to be hard to stay with it. A lot of the meditation revolves around this one issue right here: learning how to be comfortable with the breath.

You can focus on the sensation of breathing at any spot in the body where it’s easy to know that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. Choose a spot where it feels comfortable to be centered. It can be the tip of the nose, the middle of the head, the base of the throat, the chest, the abdomen.

When you find a spot that you like, then allow the breath at that spot to feel comfortable: comfortable coming in, comfortable going out, with no tension building up with the in-breath and no holding on to tension or pushing out with the out-breath. Just allow the breath to come in, go out, in a way that feels really good.

A third quality you bring is ardency: You’re really focused on this. You pay attention. When you’re with the breath, you try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. The more sensitive you are to detect the slightest little bit of tension or tightness and work through it, then the more comfortable the breath becomes, the more absorbing it becomes. It feels really good just sitting here breathing.

You can start exploring this aspect of what it means to have a body and what it means to sense a body from the inside. You can play with the way you breathe — in terms of its rhythm, in terms of its texture, whether it’s deep or shallow, fast or slow, heavy or light. There’s lots of room for experimentation.

When you get really sensitive to the breath, you begin to realize that it’s a whole-body process. Your whole nervous system is involved in each in-breath and each out-breath. Think of the breath coming in and out through the whole body, down through the nerves, out to every pore.

If you find yourself slipping away from the breath, then ardency means coming right back as soon as you notice that you’ve slipped away. And try not to get discouraged. It’s common in the meditation that you suddenly find yourself someplace else, thinking about things in the past, things in the future. Don’t worry about how you got there. Just drop it and come back to the breath.

No matter how fascinating or how important that other thought may seem to be right now, you can think about it later. Right now is time to get in touch with your breathing. You’ll find that with practice you catch yourself more and more quickly, until you get to the point where you can actually sense the mind getting ready to leave the breath before it goes. Then just breathe in good and deep in a way that feels really gratifying to the body, and that will re-establish your mindfulness.

So these are the qualities you bring to the breath: mindfulness, keeping the breath in mind; alertness, being alert and sensitive to the breathing; and ardency, trying to make that sensitivity even more refined, more continuous. So, as we focus on the breath, it’s not that we’re just getting the breath. We’re also developing good qualities in the mind. These are qualities we need in all our activities: the ability to be mindful, to be alert, and to really be ardent about what we’re doing."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Making a Difference"

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