Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Remember that the breath is energy, it’s not just air coming in and out of the lungs. The air can be held, as when you hold your breath, but the energy of the breath can’t be held. It can be blocked, but you don’t really hold it. So even as you’re holding the air in your lungs, there will be a flow of breath energy in different parts of the body. This means that when we focus on the breath as energy, we’re focusing on something that’s very light, very quick, and very pervasive. It also helps to think about the breath as something that comes in and out of the body very easily. Even when you’ve got a stuffy nose or congestion from a cold, there’s still a subtle energy coming into different parts of the body. It’s like working around a traffic jam: If you know that the traffic is congested on a main street, you drive through the side streets. You can think about the breath just waiting to come in at any time, so you don’t have to pull it in. At the same time, you don’t ...

"You have to start here, creating this little corner and giving all your attention to this one spot where you’re focusing on the breath or whatever your meditation object is. The purpose is to create a little space, at least, where you can put aside the madness of the world — where you feel solid, secure, where there’s a sense of well-being. So you find a spot that’s relatively comfortable and you work to make it more comfortable." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Pleasure & Pain"

"So what do you do with the fact that feelings are fabricated? You learn how to fabricate them well. Instead of trying to dig down and see what your real feelings are, notice if you can create comfortable feelings in the body, good feelings, happy feelings through the way you hold your face, the way you hold your body, the way you breathe. This can cause feelings of pleasure, refreshment, and rapture to pervade the body. Admittedly, they’re fabricated, but so are other feelings. The important point is that these feelings have their uses. If you can maintain these kinds of feeling, the mind is in a much better position to look at things from a calm, steady point of view." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Reality of Emotions" (Meditations5)

"You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture. The word rapture here can also mean refreshment. Ask yourself, what kind of breathing would feel refreshing right now? Remember that feelings don’t simply come and go on their own. The mind helps to fabricate them — in other words, there’s an intentional element in every feeling. The way you focus on the breath can give rise to feelings of refreshment, if you do it right. So, ask yourself, “How can I breathe in a way that would feel refreshing, feel full throughout the body, full as I breathe in, full even as I breathe out?” Once you’ve mastered that, the next step is to breathe in a way that feels easeful and pleasant. The difference between refreshment and pleasure is that refreshment is like coming across a glass of water after you’ve been out in the desert. It’s a very intense, energetic pleasure — sometimes so intense or overwhelming that it’s actually unpleasant. Pleasure, however, is cooler, gent...

"So learn to have some trust for this sense of being inside the body. The awareness that fills the body, the breath energy that fills the body, can protect you in a lot of ways. It can provide the nourishment and the refreshment you need at all times. At the same time, it develops a momentum in the practice. If you keep on creating all the water you need, when you have more than enough, you can share it with the people around you. Your sense of what it means to interact with people will change — will be a lot less fearful — and your sense of what it means to be refreshed will grow deeper and stronger." ~Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Social Anxiety" (Meditations3)

"One of [Ajaan Fuang's] students was commenting one time on how he was on a bus ride. He’d had trouble getting to stay with the breath up to that point, but for some reason that day everything seemed to click. As he later told Ajaan Fuang, the breath became delicious. So from that point on every time Ajaan Fuang taught him meditation, he would say, “Okay, get so your breath is delicious again.” What would your delicious breath be like? What would taste really good, what would sound really good, what would smell really good, in terms of the breathing? Try to expand your repertoire of new ways of thinking about the breath. Some of the experiments may not work, but you never know until you try. So as you’re meditating, if you find yourself getting stuck in old ruts — dealing with the breath in the same old ways and getting the same old results — remind yourself that you can change. You can improve your relationship with the breath by allowing yourself to imagine it." ~ Tha...

"If you find that the goodwill [mettā] meditation is getting dry, you stop and you work on your breath, trying to develop a way of breathing that feels good inside, nourishing inside. Ajaan Lee once said that if you don’t have any sense of well-being or pleasure inside, then it’s hard to wish for other beings’ happiness. He gave the image of a large water tank. If there’s water in the tank, then when you open the faucet, cool water comes out. If there’s no water in the tank and you open the faucet, nothing but air comes out. And it’s the same with your goodwill. There has to be a sense of well-being inside for it to really have force and to really be cooling. So breath meditation and goodwill meditation help each other along. There are times when you need to develop goodwill in order to just be able to settle down with the breath, and other times where you need to work with the breath so the goodwill has a felt sense of well-being inside. So you practice these things together. If...

"If you’re grim about the meditation, you’re missing an important part, which is that, for the mind to settle down, you want to settle down with a sense of ease, a sense of well-being. Think of your sense of the body as a whole crowd of little feeling points, sensation points. In the normal way we breathe, we run through the body in the course of the day in a way that tends to squeeze these points. But here you give them a chance to open up, to blossom, to grow all over the body. What you’re actually doing is relaxing the muscles in your blood vessels, the little tiny, tiny muscles all along. Allow them to relax everywhere. Relax your nerve endings. What happens here, as everything is allowed to relax in this way, is that you gain a sense of fullness. These are the seeds for what the texts call piti: rapture, refreshment, a sense of fullness where you don’t feel anything physically is lacking right now. Then you can bathe in a sense of ease. When a sense of comfort arises, you ha...

"The important point is that you don’t avoid the pleasure. You actively cultivate it. You learn how to be a connoisseur of the pleasure, learning to appreciate how really nice it can be to breathe, with a sense of fullness in the body, how refreshing that can be, because you’re going to need that appreciation to deal with your thoughts of sensuality. So appreciate the breath. Savor the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mastering Pleasure & Pain"

"The Buddha’s observation is that the fact that of being alert to the breath is one of the causes for pleasure. If you keep that alertness continuous, the pleasure smoothes out, and as it gets smoother, it gets more intense. It develops a kind of momentum. It builds up. And whatever good it’s going to do for the body, whatever good it’s going to do for the mind, you don’t have to go making exclamations about it to yourself." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Pleasure on the Path"

"We’re trying to sensitize ourselves to an area of our awareness [the feeling of breathing] that all too often we ignore. We spend most of our time paying attention outside, and this area inside here gets squeezed out, left behind. Its potentials for giving us a sense of well-being don’t get developed. So here’s our chance to give it some time, give it some space. If you really pay attention here, if you’re consistent in your awareness of the breath, smooth in your awareness of the breath, then the breath becomes smooth as well. It becomes more and more comfortable. And what starts out as just an ordinary feeling of being okay becomes more intensely pleasant. You can let that feeling spread throughout the body...." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Pleasure of the Middle Way"

"When we’re working with the breath, sometimes we feel we want to make it really comfortable and full of rapture and all these wonderful things, and for some reason it’s just okay. We drive ourselves crazy trying to make it really good. But you have to remember: Okay is okay. You’re looking for a spot where you can settle down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Pain is a Noble Truth"

"Ajaan Fuang once said you have to be crazy about the meditation in order to be really good at it. In the course of the day, whatever spare minute you can find to keep your mind on the breath, you want your mind to head there, again and again. It’s almost as if you were addicted to it. They say that when alcoholics go into a house, one of the first things they pick up on is where the alcohol is kept. They’re very conscious of that. Their minds incline in that direction, so that without even thinking they can detect the signs. Well, you want to be a breath-a-holic. Wherever there’s breath, you want your mind to head there. Of course, you find that it’s everywhere if you’re really interested, if you really want to pursue it. Again, it doesn’t matter that you’re attached to it. There are ways of ultimately prying you loose from that attachment. In the meantime it’s a good place to be attached: states of concentration, states of well-being in the mind that don’t have to ...

"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...

"Find a way of breathing that feels good right now and allow that sense of comfort to spread through the body. Relax around the breath. We have these potentials for happiness in life and if we don’t make the most of them, then we get discouraged and we resent other people’s happiness, too. So here’s an opportunity to develop some very basic resources that you have with you all the time, so that wherever you are, you can relax into the breath no matter what the situation is, and at the very least you’ll have that amount of pleasure to nourish the mind. This ability to find pleasure where it’s skillful is an important skill to have in life, because otherwise we go looking for unskillful pleasures." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Using Your Wealth"

"So when you try to acquaint yourself with these [breath] energies, there are three points to keep in mind: 1) You’re not concerned with your breath as it might be observed by a doctor or a machine outside you. You’re concerned with your breath as only you can know it: as part of your direct experience of having a body. If you have trouble thinking of these energies as “breath,” see if thinking of them as “breathing sensations” or “body sensations” helps — whatever enables you to get in touch with what’s actually there. 2) This is NOT a matter of trying to create sensations that don’t already exist. You’re simply making yourself more sensitive to sensations that are already there. When you’re told to let the breath energies flow into one another, ask yourself if the sensations you feel seem unconnected to one another. If they do, simply hold in mind the possibility that they can connect on their own. This is what it means to allow them to flow. 3) These energies are not air. T...

"This is why you’re practicing concentration. You try to develop a state of good solid concentration in the mind with a sense of ease and well-being that can come simply from being with the breath, being absorbed in the breath, filling the breath energy throughout the body with a sense of healthy energy. This puts you in a good position to compare things. You can look at the other pleasures you followed in life and ask, “Are they anything like this breath? Are they as steady, reliable, and harmless as this kind of pleasure?” You’re training yourself to be a connoisseur of pleasure, so that you can really understand where the pleasure lies, where the pain lies, and how things stack up. Which pleasure is greater? How about the pain of going back to your old ways of looking for pleasure? You see these things a lot more easily when you’re coming from a vantage point of stable well-being. Even though concentration isn’t the ultimate, it does give you a higher standard for ...

"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 sensiti...

"Usually a thought, once it’s finished, will lead to another thought and then another one. Learn to drop the thought right in the middle and come back to the breath. When you come back, reward yourself with a really nice breath, one that feels really refreshing. That way, the next time you wander off, you’ll be more inclined to come back because you know when you come back it feels good. While you’re with the breath, try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. The more sensitive you are, the more subtleties you’ll find. And the more subtleties you find, the more interested you’ll get: What’s actually going on here? Areas of the body where you’ve been carrying tension around for who-knows-how-long: You can begin to loosen them up. You notice all kinds of things about how you relate to the body, and how the mind relates to itself in the present moment. If you find yourself talking to yourself about the breath, that’s fine. That’s an integral part of th...

"You give yourself a nice, comfortable place to stay. If you’re going to be sitting here for an hour, nobody’s going to know if you’re playing with the breath, right? I mean, I don’t know how many people have asked me, “Can I really do that? Am I allowed to do that?” Of course you’re allowed to do that. And even if you weren’t, how could anyone enforce that prohibition? As you’re sensitizing yourself to the body in this way, you find that you can create a place where it’s really good to stay. And you can stay there for long periods of time. That’s precisely what you’re trying to do in concentration practice: bringing the mind to a stable state. It’s not going to want to stay there if you’re beating it. It’s like a child in a house: If you treat the child well, you can open the windows and doors, and the child’s not going to run away. If you close the windows and doors, and beat it, it’s going to find a crack, an opening, and it’s going to go and not come back. So ...

"Learn how to develop a sense of ease, a sense of fullness and refreshment right here in the body. Make that your food. Try to preserve and protect that level of the mind. That’s the skill in how you look at things and listen to things: maintaining this sense of the center in the body, a sense of ease, refreshment, and fullness no matter what happens outside. That puts the mind on a higher plane — and in a much better position." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Skill of Restraint"

"The breath is called the fabricator of the body, or bodily fabrication — kaya-sankhara — both because the way you breathe has a huge impact on the way you experience your body, and because there's an intentional element in the breath. It's one of the few bodily processes that can be either voluntary or involuntary. So make the most of the fact that you can exert some voluntary control over it. You can choose when to breathe in; you can choose when to breathe out. Then it's a matter of learning the best reasons for choosing to breathe in or breathe out in any particular way. Can you sense how the body tells you that now's a good time for an in-breath, now's a good time for an out-breath? It has its signals, you know. There are certain feelings in the body that you can learn to recognize over time, and you can explore how best to respond to them. Take their cue in such a way that it leads to a sense of fullness. For example, you can breathe in till...

"Try to content yourself with the breath right now. After all, it is a path, a path that leads somewhere good, and it doesn’t save all of its goodness for the end of the path. If you’re willing to watch the breath, get to know it, play with it a bit, try to see what kind of breathing feels good, it gives you an anchor in the present moment so that the mind isn’t running out after all kinds of things. It’s got a basic sense of well-being right here. In the beginning, the well-being may not be all that impressive, but it’s like a plant. You don’t get upset at a seed because it doesn’t give you fruit right away. You realize the seed is going to take time, so you water it, you care for it, and the seed will grow. So talk to your mind to make it contented with what it’s doing right now. This principle of contentment is very important." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Customs of the Noble Ones"

"We find that simply by focusing on the breath in a way that’s comfortable, allows the mind to settle down and feel at home in the present moment. That right there is a huge, huge thing. There are so many people who can’t do even that, either out of regret for what they’ve done in the past, or just a simple unwillingness to look carefully at what’s going on in the present moment. They’re always running around, running around, running around, and having nothing to show for it really. So it’s an important investment to take the time to get to know your breath, get to know the body in the present moment, in a way that allows you to settle down. When the mind settles down, it has a greater sense of spaciousness. That sense of spaciousness is something you can’t buy." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Intelligent Heart"

"Every time there’s a communication from one person to another, you have to translate it into your own heart, into your own issues. When Ajaan Lee is talking about the breath, what does it correspond to in your experience? When Ajaan Fuang noticed that I was having trouble getting my head around the concept of breath energy in the body the first time I was there — the concept appealed to me, but I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it — he said that it refers to the sense of feeling already there throughout the body, it’s just a matter of learning to recognize that feeling as breath energy. Then you just start working with what you already feel, seeing it as a type of breath. So take that concept and see how it helps you to get the mind to settle down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Language of the Heart (1)"

"We try to develop this sense of well-being in the body as our refuge. As the Buddha points out, if we didn’t have any other alternative to pain, we’d just go for nothing but sensuality, because that would be the only other option out there offering some pleasure. So, it’s important that you find a strong sense of pleasure simply sitting here in the body as it’s felt from inside." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "See Your Thoughts as Strange" (Meditations10)

"So instead of throwing out language or throwing out our social conditioning, we learn how to use them more skillfully. And working with the breath is an ideal place to start. You give space to the mind by breathing in a way that feels good. You can use your linguistic habits to talk to yourself about the breath: How does this breath feel? How does that breath feel? Where would it feel good to breathe right now? Which part of the body needs a larger dose of good breath energy? In this way you get more and more in touch with the immediate feeling of your body so that your linguistic habits can show immediate benefits. It feels good to breathe this way. It feels good to breathe that way. Your mind and your body are getting more intimate so that all the levels of fabrication — physical, verbal, and mental — start working together around a common sense of well-being. In this way they get to communicate with one another. The process of focusing on the breath in a skillful...