You have to be alert, you have to be mindful to do what needs to be done, and let the pleasure take care of itself.

"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 the neck and going down the shoulders and the arms to the tips of the fingers; going through the torso; going through your head, eyes, ears, nose. As you gain a sense that the breath energy can flow in these places, the pleasure will go along with it. That’ll be soothing to the body, but again, you stay with the breath. Let pleasure do its work on its own.

This teaches you several important lessons. One is that you’ve got to focus on the causes, and the results will come — as when you’re focusing solely on the breath, you’re thinking about the breath and you’re evaluating it. It’s called directed thought and evaluation. As you try to stay there, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-, those three activities — singleness of preoccupation, directed thought, and evaluation — are the causes. As for the sense of pleasure and even rapture that can come, those are the results. You don’t have to do those. You do the thinking, you do the evaluating, and then you make sure that you stay with this one object, which is the breath. That’s all you have to do. The pleasure comes and it’ll follow the breath.

Part of the evaluation is this activity of thinking of the breath going to the different parts of the body and of adjusting the breath as you need to, because as the mind settles down, the way you breathe is going to change or the breathing that feels best for the body will change, so you want to be on top of that. You have to be alert, you have to be mindful to do what needs to be done, and let the pleasure take care of itself."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Locate Your Craving" (Meditations10)

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