Manipulate the breath to, as the Buddha says, "Breathe in and out sensitive to rapture"

"Remember that rapture’s a quality you experience both in body and in mind by how you fashion the body through the way you breathe. This is why Ajaan Lee recommends, at the beginning of the meditation, that you take three or seven good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and only then think of calming the breath down. And even then, you may not want to calm it down quite yet.

I know some people complain about this part of his method. I remember when I first read about the Buddha’s teaching on the breath meditation, I was told that in yoga you manipulate the breath, but in the Buddhist practice you don’t change the breath at all. And to this day there are people who make this a partisan issue, saying that Ajaan Lee’s method is non-Buddhist — it’s a yoga method, or a brahmanical method — because he manipulates the breath. But nowhere does the Buddha say not to manipulate the breath. In fact, he says, as part of his breath meditation instructions, “Breathe in and out sensitive to rapture; experiencing rapture.” He doesn’t mean simply sitting there, waiting until the rapture somehow comes on its own. You’ve got to induce it.

And you can do that by the way you breathe. How else could you do it? The breath is the only physical function that you can manipulate so easily. So you try long in and short out; get more oxygen into your system."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Energizing Your Meditation"

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Any part of the body that seems tired or tense, in need of a little refreshment, a little bit of soothing: Let the breath do that.

 "When you focus on the breath, try to breathe in a way that feels really refreshing. Think of the breath energizing your entire torso all the way down, and then even beyond the torso down through the legs, down the back. Any part of the body that seems tired or tense, in need of a little refreshment, a little bit of soothing: Let the breath do that." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill, Gratitude, No Guilt"
Read more

You can float and be buoyant, but stay in place. There’s a sense of lightness and buoyancy, so keep that sense of lightness, but stay where you are.

"Breathe in such a way that there’s no holding on, so that things are allowed to flow smoothly. The breath flows smoothly, the blood flows smoothly, and there’s a sense of ease all the way through the breathing process. Some people at this point begin to get a sense of floating, but try not to drift out. You can float and be buoyant, but stay in place. There’s a sense of lightness and buoyancy, so keep that sense of lightness, but stay where you are. You’ve learned to breathe in such a way that the whole body feels at ease throughout the in-breath and out-breath. Try to maintain that sense of awareness of the whole body, and let the pleasure radiate out through the body. Just learn how to maintain that, to stick with it. If you find yourself losing focus when you open up your range of awareness to the whole body, go back to surveying the body spot by spot, section by section, and then try settling down with the whole body again. You may find yourself going back and forth like this
Read more

Keep the sense of relaxation in your feet and hands as steady as possible by comparing one side to the other

"No matter how the breath is cycling through the rest of the body, keep the sense of relaxation in your feet and your hands as steady as possible. It doesn’t have to be an enormous relaxation, just enough for you to know that it’s more relaxed than before. One way of checking it is to compare one hand to the other, one foot to the other. See which one is more tense and then allow it to relax as much as the other one." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Grass at the Gate" (Meditations3)
Read more