Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"So if you give the mind something good to feed on — like the comfortable sensation of the breath coming in and going out — the mind has a good source of nourishment. As it gets a taste of comfort, you begin to notice when it’s not comfortable. Often that discomfort is associated with unskillful states of mind arising: anger, greed, jealousy, fear. These things will cause a change in the breath. If you’re there with the breath and you’re used to having it comfortable, you notice these changes immediately. They’ll alert you to the fact that something’s gone wrong in the mind. Again, for most of us, we’re off someplace else when these things begin to take a foothold in the mind. By the time we realize it, they’ve taken over. They kill off whatever goodness we may have. That’s why heedlessness is the path to death. You get careless about what’s happening in the mind, and then all sorts of things can start coming in. But when you’re right there, sensitive to the slightest little unple

"One of the most powerful elements of fear is your unwillingness to think of what you can do. You don’t even want to think of the situation. But if you actually sit down and think about it patiently, step by step, you realize you can handle it. You might have to muddle through, and things might get difficult, but you can handle it. And as you’re thinking this, it’s helpful to have the breath coming in, going out really comfortably. So learn how to use the breath, reclaim your breath. Get in touch with your inner adult and fortify the inner adult with what you now know about the breathing. That’ll change the balance of power in the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Nurturing Your Inner Adult"

"So, you have an hour to get acquainted with the breath, to try to see what kind of breathing feels good right now, and then right now, right now. The needs of the body will change over time, so you have to be on top of them. Notice how they change. Make it a game. Don’t be too grim about the meditation. After all, we’re here trying to find pleasure in the breath. So treat it as a sport, something you want to learn how to enjoy. As with any sport, it takes time, it takes training, it takes discipline. But there’s also the element of enjoyment that comes when you’re doing it well. It feels good. It feels right." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Befriending the Breath" (Meditations4)

"As you work through all the different parts of the body where it feels tense or blocked or sort of squeezed out, you let the breath sensations fill all those little nooks and crannies, and there comes a greater and greater sense of fullness, refreshment. That’s what piti means. It’s the drinking-in of the good sensation. We normally translate piti as rapture, but it’s also related to the word for drinking, pivati . You drink-in this nice sensation. It feels full, it feels refreshing all the way through the body because you’ve opened up all the little cells in the body and allowed the breath to enter. When you get that sense of fullness, it’s easier to relax." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Tuning-in to the Breath" (Meditations1)

"Breath energy in the body has lots to offer. On the physical side, it can relieve a lot of stress, a lot of diseases associated with stress. On the mental side, it can create a sense of ease and belonging here in the present moment so that you enjoy being right here just breathing in and breathing out. When you get on more friendly terms with the breath, and the breath becomes your friend, then you're more inclined to want to stay, to see what you can learn from the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Basics" (Meditations2)

"You’ve got to convince yourself this is a worthwhile activity, sitting here focusing on your breath. Then you have to think about letting the breath be comfortable, trying not to force the breath too much, just noticing what kind of rhythm of breathing feels good right now. This requires some thought, but it’s constructive thought. It’s okay to think and pose questions around this issue, because that kind of thinking and questioning gets you more absorbed in the breath. It’s not a matter of forcing the mind to stay with the breath no matter what. If you put too much force on the mind like that, it’s going to rebel. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball under water. As soon as your grip loosens up a bit, the ball goes shooting up out of the water. What you’ve got to learn is how to get the mind interested in the breath. Realize that this energy in the body that goes along with the breathing is an important factor in keeping the body healthy: not just alive but health

"Try to be as alert as possible to how the breathing feels. Try to make it feel refreshing. This way the work becomes something you can easily keep on doing, because you feel refreshed in doing your work. Sitting here, it feels good breathing in, feels good breathing out. Ordinarily large areas of the body are starved for breathing energy, so give them a chance to drink it in, to bathe in it. Think of the energy going to the different parts of the body — “Who wants this breath? Who wants the next one?” — until you’ve got the whole body nourished. If it feels good, do it again. Next time around try to be even more perceptive as to what’s going on, what’s needed where." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Generating Power" (Meditations2)

"So make sure you get the basics down. Stay with the breath. Keep the breath comfortable. If you fall off, get back with the breath. Do it all with a sense of good humor, because it’s a skill that requires you stick with it for the long haul. And don’t be discouraged by how much effort it takes, because the results, when they come, are more than worth the effort." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Breathing Game"

"You want to learn how to breathe in a way that’s skillful, comfortable, that feels good inside, feels nourishing inside. Get so that you can tune into that, tap into that, access that, any time of the day. It’s good to stop at random times in the day and ask yourself, “Where’s the comfortable breath right now?” At the very beginning, you can clearly see how you can easily wander away from comfortable breathing, even though it’s so nearby and can do so much good for you. So it’s good to be able to make a resolve: Stop for a second and say, “I’m not going to do anything until I get that comfortable breath back.” Then see how long you can carry it. Because that’s an important tool in counteracting the unskillful members of the [mind's] committee." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Right Resolve & Right Concentration"

"The Pali term piti, which we usually translate as rapture, it also can be translated as refreshment. In the factors of awakening, it follows on persistence. So you have to ask yourself, “What kind of persistence would give rise to a feeling of refreshment?” Having that in mind gives you an idea of where your efforts should go as you’re focused on the breath. What kind of breath would be refreshing right now? What way of conceiving the breath would be refreshing? The Buddha says that you develop this factor for awakening by looking for the potentials for refreshment inside and learning how to attend to them." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Refreshment"

"For example, dealing with other people, you suddenly run into their energies. Or you go to certain places where the place itself has strange or unfriendly energies. You don’t want them to invade your space, so you try to protect yourself, because the breath, as it flows through the body, is like an electric current. It creates a magnetic field around the body that can act as a protection against negative energies coming in from outside. That way, even though you’re dealing with difficult people, you don’t have to inhale their difficulty, you don’t have to absorb their difficulty, you don’t have to let it come and occupy parts of your body. You were there first. You’ve got this protective shield. It’s when you sense this that you realize the value of maintaining. This gives the mind a good, safe place to stay. You become more and more sensitive to what’s been invading your space all along and now you don’t have to suffer from it. You’ve got something to help you battl

"Start from your immediate experience and branch out from there. That’s the way Ajaan Fuang used to teach meditation. He’d have people get in touch with their breath. He’d use a few analogies and similes, and then he’d listen to the words they used to describe their own experience of meditation, when the breath felt “sticky,” when it felt “solid” or “dense,” when it felt “full.” And then he’d use their vocabulary to teach them further. For instance, one of his students would talk about the “delicious breath,” so Ajaan Fuang would start his instructions to that student by saying, “Get in touch with the delicious breath.” In this way, the meditation is not something imposed from outside. It’s something that develops from your own inner sensitivity." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Private Matter" (Meditations4)

"One of Ajaan Fuang’s students talked about the time when he was meditating in a bus — he wasn’t normally that good a meditator, but for some reason when he sat on a bus he found it very easy for the mind to settle down — and the breath felt delicious. Well, how do you make the breath delicious? How does that happen? In other words, try things out. Use your ingenuity. Use your imagination." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Beginner's Mind"

"Find someplace, such as the breath, where you can stay with a sense of well-being. And when the question is: “What to do next? What to do next?” the answer is always, at least for the time being: “Just stay right here. Stay right here. Stay right here.” In the beginning, this requires some adjustment. That’s why in the first jhana, there’s directed thought and evaluation. You’re talking to yourself about how well you’re staying with the object: adjusting the mind, adjusting the object so that they fit together well. You hover around both the mind and the object. When you feel that the object is good enough, you can just be with the object. Just be with the breath. It gives you something to rest with." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Poison Your Fantasies"

"And that sense of balance and stillness: That’s your gift. So learn how to protect it. At first it’s going to be a little awkward, but over time you find that it is possible to keep this balanced state of mind, this balanced sense of the breath being nourishing, open, refreshing inside and doing other things at the same time. This is one of the reasons why we do walking meditation: to learn how to maintain that sense of balance and stillness even though the body is moving. And then from there you can add other activities on top of that. But always think of this as your foundation. It’s not just one more ball to keep in the air as you’re juggling all kinds of things. It’s the spot where you’re standing as you juggle. In other words, it’s an essential foundation for everything else you want to do. When you’ve started getting used to having this sense of the center, you wonder how you functioned before you had it. And although simply concentrating the mind is not going

"So look around in the body. Where is a comfortable place? At what spot can you watch the breath clearly and comfortably? Try to stay in touch with that place — and stay in touch with that sense of comfort as well. After watching it for a while, you’ll find that certain ways of breathing give rise to a feeling tone that feels good, feels healing. Try to maintain that feeling tone. This may require adjusting the breath now and then, because the needs of the body, as the mind begins to settle down, begin to change. The breath can grow more and more still, more and more refined. The less your mind jumps around thinking about this, that, and the other thing, the less oxygen you need. So, allow the rhythm of the breath to change as is necessary. The important thing is learning to ride that feeling tone, the way you’d ride a wave with a surfboard: getting a sense of when to lean a little to the left, a little to the right, steer here, steer there, to maintain your sense of

"Look at the way you perceive your relationship to other people. If you feel that you’re victimized by other people, that’s a perception that’s not going to help. You have to have the sense that you’re well-grounded and safe, solid in your own well-being. And the breath helps here. If the bodily sensations feel uncomfortable, you’ll have a hard time maintaining any real sense of well-being here, and that will make it harder to wish for the well-being of others, because the well-being has to start in here. As Ajaan Lee says, “If you say the thoughts of goodwill, but you don’t really feel any sense of happiness or well being inside, it’s like opening up the faucet to an empty tank of water. Nothing but air comes out.” The coolness of air and the coolness of water are two very different things. What you want is water. So you want to develop the cool water of a sense of well-being inside you. And the breath is a good place to start." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "High Lev

"So you want to work on developing a sense of pleasure in the form of the body as sensed from within, rather than in visualizing the attractive details of the human body’s appearance. In other words, you take your sense of the body as you inhabit it right here, right now. How do you relate to it? How can you find pleasure simply in sitting here and being aware of the fact that you’re inhabiting this body?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Lust" (Meditations5)

"One of the good things about the pleasure of inhabiting the body — what the Buddha calls the pleasure of form, i.e., how you feel the body from within, what we now call proprioception, your sense of the body as you feel it from inside — is that it’s a pleasure that doesn’t have many stories at all. How many stories can you make about the breath? Maybe a few stories about particular times when you used the breath energy and saw immediate benefits, as when you had an injury or an illness, but the stories are a very different kind of story. They’re a lot less sticky than the stories that go with sensual pleasures. They’re a lot less intoxicating. At the same time, the pleasure of the breath is not so much the pleasure in the stories, it’s in the actual immediate experience of the breath right here." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Pleasure Without Stories"

"As you get more and more sensitive to the breath, you find that you develop the sensitivity you need to dig deeper into the heart. At the same time, it gives you a sense of exactly how much suffering you’re unnecessarily causing yourself even just by the way you breathe, something we do every day: breathe in, breathe out. Again, it’s just one of those things that’s part of life, but if you turn your attention to the breath and really focus on it, you begin to realize that there are comfortable breaths and uncomfortable breaths. And why on earth would you want to breathe an uncomfortable breath? Nobody’s forcing you. It’s just something you take for granted. But once someone points out, “Hey, you can breathe in a lot more comfortable ways,” you can start exploring that. And as you explore it, you become more sensitive to whole areas of your being in the present moment that you tended to cover up before, tended to ignore. So this simple technique we have of just being with the bre

"So play around with the breath. Think of fabrication as playing, and you have permission to play. Don't think that playing around in this way is going to get in the way of insight. It actually helps create the conditions for insight to arise. For one, it gives stamina to the practice. If you're simply sitting with whatever comes up, meditation becomes an exercise in brute endurance. If no pleasure's coming up in the meditation, no sense of rapture or gratification, it becomes dull and unattractive. You find it harder and harder to actually sit down and keep up with the practice day after day. But if you allow the meditation to be a process of exploring, of finding what's really comfortable right now, you can stick with it. It becomes something interesting, something you want to do." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Permission to Play" (Meditations5)

"[Walking meditation] gets you used to maintaining your center in other activities as well, so that even when you’re engaged in complex activities, even when you’re thinking about things, you can still have a sense of inhabiting the body, being centered within the breath. You may have so many other things going on that you can’t keep track of when the breath is coming in or going out, but you should be able to maintain a sensitivity to the energy tone in the body — where it’s relaxed, where it’s tight, what you can do to keep it relaxed and comfortable in all situations. You’re inhabiting the body. You’re not going off entirely into some other thought world. This keeps you grounded. It gives you a place to return to as soon as you’ve done whatever work needs to be done in that thought world." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Walking Meditation: Stillness in Motion" (Meditations4)

"The best way to deal with the breath is simply to think: allow . Think of the breath going down the back. You don’t push it down the back. You allow it to go. When you think of the breath going to the different parts of the body, don’t try to push it. You allow it. If you push it, you’re pushing the blood. You’re pushing the liquids in the body. What you can do is just think: open up, open up. Keep your wrists relaxed, keep your ankles relaxed. All your joints: Keep them relaxed. Think of opening up the passages by which the breath can flow. You can’t make the breath flow. It’s something it’s going to do on its own once you’ve opened the channels. So you maintain the thought of just “breath.” You might want to picture the body and, say, think of breath going down the back, out the legs, down the shoulders, out the arms, spreading out in all directions. You can keep that picture, that perception in mind, but try not to force anything in the body. As soon as you start

"If there’s pressure in any part of the body, remind yourself that it’s blood pressure. Breath doesn’t have to exert pressure on anything. It goes right through atoms. So if there seems to be a wall of pressure that you can’t push the breath through, remind yourself that you’ve made the mistake of pushing something else beside the breath. You’re trying to push the blood there. Just hold the thought in mind, “Breath can flow there, it doesn’t push anything.” The simple thought of allowing can relieve a lot of the pressure. So do your best to get acquainted with the breath energy issues in the body, what it means for the breath to flow well, and be ingenious at finding new ways of solving new problems as they come up. That way, this area of the body, this area of the mind that tends to get closed off, you can start to reclaim and you can use that dimension of your awareness to your own advantage — your own skillful advantage. This is one of those meditative skills that’

"Give yourself a good comfortable place to stay and be aware of the breath coming in, aware of the breath going out. Notice how the breathing feels in different parts of the body, because the breathing is a whole-body process. If it’s not a whole-body process, that’s a sign that there’s a blockage someplace you’ve got to work with. But first get a good breath rhythm going in any one spot where it’s easy to watch. It might be at the nose, the chest, the abdomen, the neck, the middle of the head — any place where all the different pressures of the breath coming in and going out and the pressures of your blood circulation feel right together. Focus right there and allow the breath to find whatever rhythm feels good, feels gratifying. If the mind wanders off, bring it right back. If it wanders off again, bring it back again. You’re trying to put it in position — which means finding a good, comfortable posture for the mind — and then trying to get it to stay in position.&

"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." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"For meditation to go well, you have to like what you’re doing — because, after all, it’s a big job: working through all the many habits by which you create suffering for yourself. So it’s not something to do in a weekend retreat and then think you’ve got it all done. It’s a long-term process. And if you like what you’re doing, it goes a lot more easily. This is why when you’re meditating you want to become friends with the breath. Don’t regard your meditation object as your opponent. Remember all that the breath has done for you. It’s kept you alive all these years. It’s what keeps the body and the mind together. And even right here in the present moment, the breath can give a sense of pleasure if you allow it to. So explore that possibility. Get so that the idea of the breath as your friend is not simply an abstract idea. It’s an immediate, visceral experience. You gain a sense of familiarity, a sense of liking the breath, of knowing how to use the breath to nouris

"We talk about listening or looking at the breath, but, of course, it’s not a matter of looking or listening with the eyes or ears. It’s a matter of being really sensitive to what the body needs. Now, you do want to be very careful, and this is where the analogy of listening comes in. Think of it as an analogy, of course. There are times when you listen very, very carefully for very subtle sounds and that helps to refine the breathing, because the mind is more intent and more sensitive at that time. That’s when it’s really ready for refined breathing. But if you’re not ready for it, you just drop off to sleep. So in the same way that you would, say, listen to the inner voices of a piece of music, the ones that are hard to hear, or to a very soft sound off in the distance, try to make yourself really, really quiet, and very, very intent. That will help make the breath more subtle without your forcing the breath too much. But listen to the body and the mind: If you run up against th

"The Buddha has us sort out which kinds of pleasure are actually harmful and which ones are harmless. The main harmless ones are those based on getting the mind into concentration, because this is a pleasure where you're not in conflict with anybody. When you're sitting here looking at your breath, nobody is trying to elbow you out of the way so that they can hog your breath. It's totally yours. It's an entire field open for you to explore, to reap what pleasure you can. And that's a very rare kind of pleasure in the world. You're not creating any bad kamma with anybody. You're not creating any unskillful mental states." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Well-Thatched Roof" (Meditations5)

"Years back, when I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, he said, "Your only responsibility in all your activities is to stay with the breath." He meant it in a way to unload my mind, to clear away thoughts of other responsibilities. What it did of course was to make the breath seem suddenly onerous. It was a weight. It was a responsibility, something I had to worry about all the time. But then as I worked with it, one of the big lessons came in learning how to be with that responsibility and not make it a weight, not make it a burden. After all, why should the breath be a burden? It's what you do to stay alive. It's the basic process, the basic force that keeps you alive. That was a good lesson in seeing how the mind can create problems out of even the simplest things, things that are in its own interest. Learning how to be with the breath comfortably, learning how to breathe comfortably: You can make that a big issue, a big weight. But if you step

"Sometimes you can get stuck on very subtle breathing, which may seem very still, very relaxing, very calming, and you stick with it sometimes for days on end. What it can sometimes do, though, is to drain the energy in the body. Years ago, Yom Thaem, an old woman who had been studying with Ajaan Fuang, came to stay at the monastery. As we were sitting in meditation one evening, he called out to her. “You’ve been stuck on cool breathing now for weeks,” he said. “It’s not good for you” — cool breathing here meaning a very subtle, very still, very relaxed level of breath. Sometimes it’s good to breathe in a way that’s relaxing, but other times you’ve got to find a way of breathing that’s more energizing. You’ve got to learn how to read what your body needs." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Three Levels of Evaluation" (Meditations6)