Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"If you have trouble sleeping, then by all means meditate when you’re lying in bed, for meditation is a useful substitute for sleep. Often it can be more refreshing than sleep, for it can dissolve bodily and mental tensions better than sleeping can. It can also calm you down enough so that worries don’t sap your energy or keep you awake. But make sure that you also set aside another time of the day to meditate too, so that you don’t always associate meditation with sleep. You want to develop it as an exercise in staying alert." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"You’ll notice that there are subtle sensations in the body as you breathe in, as you breathe out, that correspond to the grosser sensations of the movement of the rib cage, the movement of the diaphragm. Allow those subtle sensations to blend together in a way that feels harmonious. Think of every part of the body being connected, all the energy channels in the body being connected, so that the breath energy spreads through them instantly and automatically, independently of the in-and-out breath, without your having to do anything to breathe it in or out. Here you’re using one of the aggregates, the aggregate of perception, to help calm the breath down. And you notice that it does also induce a sense of piti, which is usually translated as “rapture,” although in some cases it’s not quite as strong as what we would ordinarily call “rapture.” It’s more a sense of refreshment. The body feels full, satisfied." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "On the Path of the Breath...

"Ajaan Lee talks about the bases of the breath, which correspond pretty closely to what the Indians call chakras. These are the sensitive energy centers in the body. You can find one that feels congenial to you, one where you’ll notice if you’re putting undue pressure on the breath, either with the in-breath, or with the out-. Try to maintain a sense of ease and just-rightness there at that spot, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. To do this, you’ve got to relax tension in different parts of your body. This is why this is called a center of breath energy, because it’s connected with a lot of other energy channels, where energy flows in the different parts of the body. If you can keep this spot open and relaxed, you’ll find that its influence automatically radiates out through different parts of the body. Then you think of the breath spreading from there to other parts as well. If you find that there are some areas where the energy doesn’...

"When we talk about “breath,” it’s not just the air coming in and out of the lungs, it’s the energy throughout the body that permeates through all the nerves. You want to get more and more sensitive to those sensations of subtle energies and learn how to stick with them. Make this your default mode: that you’re going to stay centered right here. This gives you a good foundation as you go through the day. It’s not just one more thing to add on top of what you’re already doing. It’s actually a solid center from which you can deal with all your other duties and responsibilities as you go out into the world. We all need this center here because otherwise we get blown around by the slightest breeze. So stick with it, stick with it, stick with it. Learn how to pace yourself so that you can put in just the right amount of effort that you can maintain continually." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Four Bases of Success"

"We work with the breath. It’s not something boring just to come back to. It’s our standing point and you make it your personal standing point by learning how to make it comfortable so that you get a sense of ease that suffuses the body. Don’t think of the body as a clunky, solid object sitting here that you’ve got to expand and contract, expand and contract. Think of it as a large, amorphous energy field where the patterns of tension are unnecessary, where the boundaries or blockages are unnecessary. Just imagine everything penetrating everything else so that there’s an easy flow of energy. There’s an easy flow of whatever’s moving in the body. You don’t have to impose limits. You don’t impose boundaries on things. In this way, you develop a place where you can take a stance. You can stay here with a sense of ease and well-being, a sense of belonging here." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Dealing with Confusion"

"We’re focused on the breath. We give the mind an intention: “Stay with the breath. Don’t move. Don’t go wandering off to other things.” And we give it a further intention: “Try to breathe as comfortably as possible.” That right there is an immediate exercise in the relationship between your actions and feelings of pleasure and pain. You want to develop that particular sensitivity as much as you can. What’s important is the particular combination of the stillness of your focus and the point where you’re focused, right at this issue of intention and its relationship to pleasure and pain. This is why breath meditation opens things up in the mind, for it’s focused on the real issues." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Treasure Hunt" (Meditations2)

"Remind yourself that the breath is not hindered by anything. A pain may seem to put up a wall in the body, but the breath doesn’t have to be hindered by the wall. It can go right through. It’s your preconceived notion about the wall that’s preventing the flow, but the flow doesn’t have to be prevented. The flow of the breath has no boundaries — no boundaries in space, no boundaries in time. A common habit while we’re focusing on the in-breath and out-breath is trying to make a very clear line between the in-breath and the out-breath. We usually do that by tensing up the muscles a little bit. But remind yourself that that’s artificial, an unnecessary stress and an unnecessary strain on the breathing. So learn to conceive of the breath as something where the boundaries are fuzzy, and the breath is totally free to move. It has no obstructions at all. That way, your sense of grounding becomes grounding in ease, in pleasure, in refreshment. That’s the only kind of grounding that can, ...

"As you walk down the street, be sensitive to the breath. Learn how to watch your perceptions. Notice what there is along the street that pulls you out. This is easier to see if you’re walking down the street with that sense of fullness. Can you maintain it while you’re walking? This is one of the reasons we do walking meditation: to keep that sense of fullness, refreshment, pleasure going no matter what we do. Try to develop a sense of a steady center." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Fabrication at the Breath"

"If you’re suffering from a sense of free-floating anxiety — ill-at-ease without knowing why you’re feeling ill-at-ease — you may be suffering from a vicious circle, with anxious feelings causing anxious breathing, and anxious breathing feeding anxious feelings. Try breaking the circle by very consciously and consistently breathing in a deep, soothing rhythm that engages all the muscles in your abdomen, all the way down. With the in-breath, breathe as deeply into the abdomen as you can, even to the point where the breath feels a little too full. Then let the breath out in a smooth way. Relax all the muscles in your head and shoulders, so that the abdomen is doing all the work. This rhythm may not feel comfortable at first, but it does cut the circle. After a few minutes, let the breath return to a rhythm that feels more easeful. Keep this up as long as you can, and the feelings of anxiety should grow weaker. This deep abdominal breathing can also help relieve stress-induced headac...

"So, work with a sense of comfortable breath. Allow the breath to get comfortable, allow it to be easeful, and then allow it to spread through the body. When it begins to spread through the body and it starts working through patterns of tension, you come to a more intense sense of absorption. Stay with that. Learn the skills required to stay right at that point of balance where you’re not pushing it too hard and not being too lazy or lax — just the right amount of interest, the right amount of attention and intention to keep things going — so that the breath can have a chance to heal the wounds in the body, soothe the mind, and bring both the body and the mind to the stages of practice where the concentration gets stronger and the insights sharper, more subtle. This all depends on the groundwork. As for the question of how soon you can move on to the next step: Don’t ask. Just keep on doing the work. Things will develop." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Small, Steady Flame"...

"When the defilements are clamoring for instant gratification, you see you’ve got this alternative form of pleasure, the pleasure of concentration, right here, to feed them. You’ve got this comfortable way of breathing. It’s free. It’s immediate. It’s visceral. Just that fact can help peel away a lot of the appeal of things you were attached to before." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Fourth Noble Truth"

"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"

"So it’s important that you learn how to develop this sense of absorption in the breath, pleasurable, refreshing, feels really good just being here. That changes your sense of the range of possibilities. There is a pleasure that doesn’t depend on those things outside, it’s perfectly fine right here. It’s nourishing. And even though simple concentration is not going to totally solve the problem of the way the mind causes itself suffering, it really changes the balance of power. You’ve got more allies in this revolution you are trying to create in the mind. Where the mind can live at peace with itself without causing any harm for you, any harm for anybody else. That’s your desire. As for the peace in the world, as the Buddha said, the world never has enough. It’s insatiable. It’s a slave to craving. But you don’t have to be a slave to craving. You can free yourself by finding new allies in the fight. This is your path to freedom. It seems simple just watching the breath. It is not e...

"The pleasure and refreshment that can come from working and playing with the breath provide your ardency with a source of inner food. This inner food helps you deal with the obstreperous members of the committee of the mind who won’t back down unless they get immediate gratification. You learn that simply breathing in a particular way gives rise to an immediate sense of pleasure. You can relax patterns of tension in different parts of the body — the back of the hands, the feet, in your stomach or chest — that would otherwise trigger and feed unskillful urges. This alleviates the sense of inner hunger that can drive you to do things that you know aren’t skillful. So in addition to helping with your ardency, this way of working with the breath can help with your practice of virtue." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"If the breath feels really good, you gain a sense that you really don’t want to go anywhere else. You like being right here; it’s like coming home. You have a sense that this is where you belong. So try to maintain that. The problem is that after feeling refreshed like this for a while, you say, “Okay, enough. I’m ready to go someplace else.” Remind yourself: There are deeper levels of pleasure that you won’t experience unless you really stay here for a long period of time. Things begin to open up, open up, open up over time. So try to be patient. If you find yourself wondering, “What shall I do next?” ask yourself, “Is there a way of breathing that could be even more comfortable?” Parts of the body that are not getting any breath energy: Look for those. In other words, you have to work on this sense of well-being. Otherwise, the mind begins to get drowsy and slips off. So there’s always more to observe right here. Just go deeper and deeper, and you get more and mo...

"Try to relax around the breath. Don’t make the meditation too much of a chore. Think of it as an opportunity to breathe easy. Each breath is another opportunity to breathe easy. When the mind can rest a bit, then it can look at itself more clearly. So whatever lessons you’ve learned on how to let the mind rest with the breath and let that sensation of resting spread out: Remember them." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Getting the Most Out of the Present"

"Then when the breath gets comfortable, what do you do with that? You’ve got to be careful, because there is a tendency when the breath gets comfortable to start focusing on the ease and well-being, and to forget about the breath, or to hope that the concentration will go on automatic pilot. That’s like falling asleep at the wheel, hoping that the car will take you where you want to go. You’ve got to keep your attention with the breath, no matter how comfortable it gets. Remind yourself that the sense of ease and well-being will do their work in easing the body, soothing the mind, without your having to wallow in them. So you let the breath be comfortable, and let that comfort stay, but you stay focused on the breath. Then as that comfort develops, you think about how you might spread it through different parts of the body. Because what you’re aiming at here is a sense of full-body awareness, fully aware of the breath energies: not only the obvious ones where you feel the in-and-...

"Ajaan Lee talks about the bases of the breath, which correspond pretty closely to what the Indians call chakras. These are the sensitive energy centers in the body. You can find one that feels congenial to you, one where you’ll notice if you’re putting undue pressure on the breath, either with the in-breath, or with the out-. Try to maintain a sense of ease and just-rightness there at that spot, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. To do this, you’ve got to relax tension in different parts of your body. This is why this is called a center of breath energy, because it’s connected with a lot of other energy channels, where energy flows in the different parts of the body. If you can keep this spot open and relaxed, you’ll find that its influence automatically radiates out through different parts of the body. Then you think of the breath spreading from there to other parts as well. If you find that there are some areas where the energy doesn’t spread, you ...

"As we ordinarily go through life, when we come across sensory pleasures, we learn that they don’t last, and so we try to milk as much as we can out of them before they go. But when you come to meditation, you have to adopt another attitude entirely. You’re focused on your breath, not because you want the breath, but because you’d like the pleasure. You have to be frank with yourself about that, but at the same time, if you focus on the pleasure once it comes, you lose your foundation. Then you’ve lost them both — the breath and the pleasure. So, you have to remind yourself the pleasure will be there, and as you keep doing the work of staying with the breath consistently, the pleasure will stay and do its work. As the mind begins to settle down even more with the breath, you can start thinking of the breath spreading through the body, and that’ll take the pleasure along with it. Think of the breath going down the spine, down the legs out to the toes; starting again at the back of ...

"Start with what you know. The breath is coming in. You know that? Yes, you know that. It’s going out. You know that? Yes, you do. Okay, know just that much. Don’t forget that. Is it comfortable or not? Well, you may not be sure. Could it be more comfortable? Experiment and see. Try to sensitize yourself to how the breathing feels. Without this level of sensitivity, the meditation becomes mechanical. When it’s mechanical, it becomes a chore. And when it’s a chore, the mind will rebel. So ask yourself: What really feels good when you’re breathing right now? If you can’t figure out what really feels good, hold your breath for a while until the mind comes to the point where it’s screaming at you: “Breathe! You’ve got to breathe!” Then, when you breathe, notice what feels really good as you breathe in. Take that as a guide." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Start Out Small" (Meditations2)

"Breathe in a way that’s refreshing, that gives rise to a sense of fullness in the body. Think of the breath as the energy flowing around the body, and ask yourself: Where does it feel good? Where does it not feel good? Focus on the areas that you can make good by the way you breathe, and hold in mind the right perceptions that allow that to happen. For example, be careful not to squeeze the end of the in-breath or the end of the out-breath to mark the difference between the two. Think of your experience of the body as being primarily energy. It’s not the case that you’re trying to pump the breath energy into a solid body. It’s more like allowing the breath to flow freely into the energy already there without any clear dividing line between the two. When you hold that perception in mind, it gives rise to a floating feeling in the body. See if you can maintain the position of your focus on that perception, on that feeling of lightness, buoyancy. This is what gives fl...

"There are times when you’ll find that your conception of the breath gets confused, as in the tendency to confuse the breath energy with the liquid energy in the body. When liquid runs up against obstacles, it can’t go through. It gets squeezed in. It builds up pressure. But the breath doesn’t have to be squeezed in. Yet when we start breathing as if it were, that creates problems. So, remember: It’s totally free to go anywhere at all, all the time. The neat boundaries we place around it are artificial. Learn to erase them and see what happens. As for the pleasure or rapture you want, that will happen on its own. You can squeeze it, you can force it, but squeezed and forced pleasure is not going to last very long. It’s like squeezing a piece of fruit to make it ripe. You know that ripe fruits are supposed to be soft, so you squeeze your piece of fruit, squeeze it and squeeze it until it’s soft, but that doesn’t ripen it. You just get mush. The right way is to leave the fruit on th...

"Okay, good enough. Plunge into the breath and leave the thinking behind. Just focus right in, focus, focus, focus. It’s not that you’re going to block out other things or that you’ll be unable to hear things happening outside. It’s just that you’re not paying attention to them. This is the point where the Buddha says the mind attains internal assurance. You know it’s okay just to focus in. You don’t have to hold anything back. Tell yourself: You’ve listened to yourself talk for who knows how long. It’s time to stop for a bit and get a taste of the pleasure and rapture, the sense of fullness and refreshment that can come when you’re willing to stop the chatter." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Stop the Chatter"

"If the breath feels comfortable, learn to maintain it. It’s okay to be attached to the breath when it’s comfortable. Desire can also be a good thing, when you learn how to be skillful in what you desire. We tend to think that the Buddha said desire serves no other purpose than to cause suffering, but that isn’t true. Skillful desire, the desire to be skillful, to let go of unskillful mental states, to develop skillful ones, is actually a part of the path. It comes under the factor of right effort." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Don't Listen to This Talk"

"If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll be able to find some way for realizing that the sensual desire you’re feeling has drawbacks that far outweigh the gratification, and that you’d be much better off focusing on the breath to let the mind gain a sense of inner peace and calm instead." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mindfulness of Dhammas I: Noble Truths, Hindrances, & Factors for Awakening"

"When the Buddha describes concentration states, he doesn’t use images of single-pointedness. He uses images of whole-body awareness. When a sense of rapture and pleasure comes from the breath, he tells you to knead that sense of rapture and pleasure through the whole body, the way you would knead water into flour to make dough. Another image is of the rapture welling up from within the body and filling the body just like a spring of cool water coming up from within a lake, filling the entire lake with its coolness. Another image is of lotuses standing in a lake: Some of the lotuses don’t go above the water but stay totally immersed in the water, saturated from their roots to their tips with the stillness and coolness of the water in the lake. Still another image is of a person wrapped in white cloth, totally surrounded by the white cloth from head to foot, so that all of his body is covered by the white cloth. These are all images of whole-body awareness, of a sense ...

"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...

Fully in the Present by Thanissaro Bhikkhu , short morning talk April 30, 2013 When you focus on the breath, you’re fully inhabiting your body. All too often we leave large sections of our body uninhabited. We’re not paying attention to them. They’re there in the background, of course. When you’re not fully inhabiting the present moment, where are you going? Are you going off someplace else? One way of ensuring that you’re going to stay here is to be fully here with the body. It’s also your protection. You may have noticed when you walk into a crowd of people in a room, you can pick up their energies very quickly. If parts of your body are uninhabited, those energies can get lodged in your own body. You may not notice it at the time, but after a while you begin to realize that you’ve picked up nervous energy or angry energy or whatever the energy is. So this is part of your protection: learning how to fully inhabit your body so that wherever you go, you’re going with your...

"If you don’t find the breath refreshing, ask yourself, “What is getting in the way? What needs to be refreshed in the body right now? What’s not getting the refreshment it wants? Can you think of the breath helping with that spot? If you’re feeling dissatisfied with the sensations in your body right now, what can you do to change them?” But first you’ve got to analyze: Where’s the problem? What’s the dissatisfaction coming from? What’s feeling starved of breath energy? Make a survey, go around the body, go to the spots that you don’t normally focus on and allow them to open up. It’s good to perceive the breath and breath meditation not so much as a chore, but as an opportunity." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Full Attention"

"You and your breath become friends working together. The breath becomes more comfortable, the body gets healthier, the nerves get soothed, the mind has a good soothing place to stay, a restful place to stay. The breath and the body have somebody looking after them. You walk the path together with a sense of goodwill [mettā]. Be friends with the breath. You’re going to be living with it for a long time. The more you take a friendly interest in the breath, the more it’s going to have to offer to you, the more it’ll show to you, the more you can learn from it. But as with any friendship, it takes a certain amount of exploration. The breath is going to try you, test you as a friend. You have to be willing to be tested, to sit through some uncomfortable periods so that you can get to know exactly what works and what doesn’t work in the relationship. But if the friendship gets over those difficult periods, it’ll become more solid — as long as the goodwill is still there." ~ Thanis...