Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"You want to think about the breath very consistently and evaluate it very carefully. Give it your full sensitivity. How does the breath feel? Where do you feel it? If it doesn’t feel comfortable, what can you do to make it feel more comfortable? What way of experimenting with the breath is too heavy-handed, and what way is just right? These are things you have to find out by paying full attention, being very, very sensitive. Ajaan Fuang’s most frequent meditation advice was: Be observant. Watch the breath. Watch how the mind relates to the breath. Then try to figure out how can you get the two of them together, more and more snugly, more and more consistently, so that you’re with the breath all the way in, all the way out; then all the way in again, all the way out again, without break. You find that it interests you because, after all, the health of the body depends on the breath energy. At the very least, you want to make sure the breath energy is flowing well in the different ...

"You focus on the breath. Stay with it all the way in, all the way out, and notice what feels comfortable. As the Buddha says, you try to make yourself sensitive to the whole body and then try to breathe in a way that gives rise to feelings of ease. So that’s what you experiment with as you meditate — sometimes feelings of ease, sometimes feelings of more energy, depending on the body needs. Learn how to read the needs of your body, and see the extent to which you can fulfill those needs by the way you breathe. Sometimes you want good deep breathing, especially when you’re tired: good long deep in-breaths, less emphasis on the out-breath, again and again and again. That will help energize the body. In the other direction, if you find yourself tense, you may need to relax, so try a short in-breath and a long relaxed out-breath. Think of the out-breath carrying away all the tension in the body. And then try to maintain that sense of ease." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Even Shame ...

"In music, they have the term ostinato, which means a theme that’s repeated over and over and over again, usually in the bass. The mind has its ostinato, too. You dig down deep enough, and you find it asking a question all the time: “What’s next? What to do next? What to do next?” If the answer’s clear, the mind tends to be happy. If it’s not clear, if there are confusing signals being sent, then it gets uncertain, ill at ease. So, to get your mind settled in right now with a sense of certainty and ease, just tell yourself that you’re going to do one thing right now. You’re going to stay with the breath — all the way in, all the way out. You don’t have to go anywhere else. There will still be some questions as you’re staying with the breath, as how to get settled in with the breath, and how to deal with other thoughts that come up. But as long as you’ve established your priorities clearly, then the mind will feel more at ease." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Mind’s Ostinato...

"You stay with the breath, but you’re not clamping down on it. You try to stay with it smoothly. Try to make the breath like silk: smooth all the way in, smooth all the way out. That requires a certain steadiness of focus, and the question will come up: What’s next? This is what’s next: the next breath. And you do the same thing there, the same thing with the next one, and the next one." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No Foolproofing"

"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)

Question: When I observe my breath as given in the instructions, I have the sense that I’m controlling it. This doesn’t seem natural. What advice could you give me? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The mind is always controlling the breath to one extent or another, but a lot of the control is sub-conscious. Here we’re trying to bring this aspect more into your consciousness. As you become more conscious of it, the first thing you do is that you will probably mess it up. But as you get more sensitive to what actually feels good, then your sense of control actually becomes more refined and more skillful. As Ajaan Fuang once said, you’re always going to be controlling your breath until your first stage of awakening, so you might as well learn how to do it well." ~ The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind

"For example, if you have a sense of being on one side of a blockage, try thinking of being on the other side. Try being on both. Think of the breath as coming into the body, not through the nose or mouth, but through the middle of the chest, the back of the neck, every pore of your skin, any spot that helps reduce the felt need to push and pull. Or start questioning the need to push and pull at all. Do you feel that your immediate experience of the body is of the solid parts, and that they have to manage the mechanics of breathing, which is secondary? What happens if you conceive your immediate experience of the body in a different way, as a field of primary breath energy, with the solidity simply a label attached to certain aspects of the breath? Whatever you experience as a primary body sensation, think of it as already breath, without your having to do anything more to it. How does that affect the level of stress and strain in the breathing? And what about the act of staying f...

"As the Buddha pointed out, this is a harmless pleasure — harmless in the sense that it doesn’t place any burdens on anyone else and in the sense that it doesn't obscure your vision. If our pleasure depends on things outside, we get blinded because pleasure that’s based outside has to have its drawbacks, yet we don’t want to see the drawbacks, so we close our eyes to them. But this is a kind of pleasure that doesn’t require that you close your eyes. You may need to close your eyes in the beginning, as you meditate, just to prevent distractions. But as you get more and more grounded in the breath, more absorbed in the breath, you not only keep your physical eyes open, you keep your mental eyes open as well. You see where the pleasure comes from, and you can see that it causes no harm to anyone. That allows the mind to open and be more sensitive to all kinds of areas that it used to desensitize itself to. So as long as the mind is going to feed and cling, have it fe...

 "You’re sitting here learning how to breathe in a way that feels really good. Have some goodwill [mettā] for the breath, goodwill for yourself. Be happy when the breath is comfortable. When it’s not comfortable, show some compassion. Try to figure out why it’s not comfortable. Are you putting too much pressure on it? Are you focusing in the right place or the wrong place? What perception of the breath do you have in mind? Is there a perception that can make things easier? I’ve talked about the perception of the body as being like a sponge, where the breath can come in and out of the body from all directions. You’re aware of the whole sponge, and there’s nothing in the way. You could also remember that, of the various elements in the body, the breath is first. So if it runs into a pain, don’t think of the pain as being able to block the breath or to hem it in. The breath was there first. The breath can penetrate anything. If there’s a feeling of pressure someplace in the body, th...

"It’s crucial to have a center for the mind. But to maintain that center, you have to enjoy it. If you don’t, it simply becomes one more burden to carry in addition to your other burdens, and the mind will keep dropping it when your other burdens get heavy. This is why we spend so much time working on the skill of playing with the breath, making it comfortable, making it gratifying, making it fill your body with a sense of ease. When you have that kind of inner nourishment to feed on, you’re less hungry for things outside. You don’t need to feed on the words and actions of other people. You don’t have to look for your happiness there. When you can develop a sense of inner fullness simply by the way you breathe, the mind can stay nourished no matter what the situation. You can sit in a boring meeting and yet be blissing out — and nobody else has to know. You can watch all the good and bad events around you with a sense of detachment because you have no need to feed on them. It’s no...

"Find a spot in the body where you feel that you can easily settle down and stay here. It might be in the middle of the head, the middle of the chest, the abdomen, anywhere in the body where you feel that your attention can settle in settle in, settle down, and begin to fit together. All the scattered little parts of your mind come together and they click into place. So you’re fully here with the breath. You can fully observe it, get more acquainted with it, in all its many aspects. After all, the breath isn’t just in and out. There’s the breath energy that flows up as you breathe in; there’s the breath energy that flows down as you breathe in. If it flows up too much, you tend to get a headache. If it flows down too much, you get drowsy. So try to balance things. There’s breath energy that comes in from the back, breath energy that comes in from the front. As you get more sensitive to it, you begin to realize there is breath energy that’s constantly waiting to come into the pores...

"Once the breath gets comfortable, think of that sense of ease, the sense of healthy energy spreading through the body. Then keep it going. When you’re fully with the body, it’s very hard to go into the past, very hard to go into the future. It’s as if the past and the future were little tubes and you had to get yourself very small to go down the tube. We do it very quickly. We’re very good at that: focusing on one little thing and just running with it. But if you’re fully inhabiting the present moment, you can’t fit down the tubes. You’ve got an enlarged awareness that feels comfortable here and keeps you firmly established here." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Fully in the Present"

"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"

"For the Buddha, the big issue in life is suffering, so we start with a minor version of it — a minor sense of discomfort coming from the breath. Why breathe in a way that’s uncomfortable? Nobody’s forcing you. It’s your own lack of attention that allows the breath to get uncomfortable. So pay attention and then learn to work with the breath. See what kind of rhythm feels good, because when the breath goes well it gives you strength, a sense of well-being, a sense of being nourished, around which all your other good qualities of mind can gather. When they can gather together, they strengthen one another." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Taking a Stance" (Meditations3)

"What we’re working on here is something that’s called piti in Pali. You can translate it as rapture; you can translate it as fullness; you can translate it as refreshment. The basic meaning is that it feels really good, really nourishing. The Buddha lists it as one of the energizing factors of awakening. It’s also a kind of food. There’s that passage where he says that, when we meditate, we feed on rapture like the radiant gods. The problem with the word rapture is that sometimes it seems too intense for the way some people experience it. Some people feel it as a tingling through the body, their hair standing on end. For others, it’s gentler — a sense of balanced, full well-being. Some people feel it in waves coming over the body. And for some people it’s so intense that the body starts moving. The intensity is not a measure of the intensity of your concentration. It’s more a measure of how starved of energy the body’s been feeling. If it’s been feeling really starved, the sens...

"Then you can focus on the breath. Here, again, it’s not just awareness of the breath. There are also your perceptions, your visualizations. How do you visualize the breath to yourself? How do you visualize your relationship to your body? Do you feel comfortable in your own skin? Comfortable inside your body? If not, can you at least create a beachhead, some one spot in the body that’s your spot? Tend to it carefully. Look after it. Treat it well. Eventually a sense of belonging here will grow. The breath will begin to expand out through the body, and there will be a sense of everything breathing together. It feels really good to be here." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Accepting the Way Things Function"

"Bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. Breathe in long and out long for a couple of times, focusing on any spot in the body where the breathing is easy to notice, and your mind feels comfortable focusing. This could be at the nose, at the chest, at the abdomen, or any spot at all. Stay with that spot, noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don't force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your focus. Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of how it feels. Savor it, as if it were an exquisite sensation you wanted to prolong. If your mind wanders off, simply bring it back. Don't get discouraged. If it wanders 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Show it that you mean business, and eventually it will listen to you. If you want, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. If long breathing feels comfortable, stick with it. If it doesn't, change it to whatever rhythm feels soothing to the body. You can try short breathing, ...

"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"

"The practice of concentration often goes best when you treat it as a game, something you do for enjoyment. After all, some of the factors of right concentration include pleasure and rapture, and these things don’t arise if you treat the concentration as a chore, as something grim you have to slog your way through. So make it a pleasant challenge. How long can you stay with the breath?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Unskillful Thinking"

"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"

"It helps if you can visualize the body as a large sponge with lots of holes all over the place. In other words, all the pores of your skin are open for breath energy to come in and go out. It may be very subtle, and you may not feel anything for a while. But try to hold that picture in mind because you probably, someplace deep down in your brain, have another picture of what’s happening when you breathe, and that picture may not be all that helpful. So bring a new perception in. When you breathe in, it’s not just a little pair of holes here in your nose that the breath can come in. It can come in anywhere in the body. In fact, if you have the perception that it is coming in everywhere, see what happens. It’s not a question of whether it’s true that there is breath energy there or not — or exactly what’s happening. But holding that perception allows you to work with the energy in the body in ways you might not have been able to do if you had other perceptions. You can think of th...

"The more attention you pay to the breath, the more you realize what it can do for you. For most people the breath just keeps them alive, that’s all. But if you pay attention to how the breath feels in the body, you begin to realize that you can breathe in a way that feels good in the stomach, feels good in the chest. This is good for the different organs in your body. Breathe in a way that your shoulders don’t tense up as you breathe in, and you’re not holding on to tension in your shoulders as you breathe out. You can think of whatever tension or tightness or heaviness there is as dissolving away as you breathe out. And you can think of the breathing as a whole-body process. When the texts talk about the breath, it means any sensation of energy, movement, or aliveness in the body. Parts of the breath energy in the body feel still; other parts move. But if you think of them as all being breath, then you don’t create divisions in the body, as when you think of one part of the body...

"Watch out for the way the mind will often say, “Well, this is just the way things have to be. How can a mind function without some greed, aversion, and delusion?” It may not put it quite in those terms, but you have certain ways of talking to yourself that seem to be a normal part of how you survive in life. You come to think of them as your armor as you go through the day. Well, remember what armor is like. It’s big and clunky and it weighs you down. The armor you get with the breath, though — if you’re fully with the breath and the breath energy is good — creates a force field around you, where the things that you used to have to fight off with your spite or malice or whatever, you can deflect without having to use any of those unskillful mind states. You need to develop some confidence in the breath until see that you don’t really need these defilements. When you see that you don’t need them, you can begin looking more carefully into, well, why do you like them? They provide ...

"Of course, another way of breathing easy is what we’re doing right now, breathing easy as we focus on the breath. He says once you’re aware of the way the long breath feels the body, the short breath feels in the body, and you’ve become aware of the whole body as you breathe in, the whole body as you breathe out, the next step is to calm bodily fabrication. Or to put it in simple English, learn how to breathe easy throughout the body, and allow that sense of easy breathing, free-flowing breath energy to seep throughout the whole body: down your arms, out your fingers, down your back, out your legs, out your feet, your toes, all throughout your torso. Try to be as unrestricted as possible in allowing this breath energy to flow. Try to notice the areas where you hold it in, force it, or squeeze it. Then send out the order to all the stations in the body: Let the breath energy flow wherever you find it, so you can get an immediate sense of pleasure that’s very visceral...

"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...

"Some people complain that it's asking too much of them to pay attention to the events of the day and to the breath at the same time. Well, if you're sitting in the back of your head watching the breath in the body and watching things outside, it does add an extra burden: You've got two things to watch at any one time instead of just one. But if you think of yourself as immersed in your body, inhabiting your whole body, this puts you in a different position. You're standing in the breath, in a position of solidity, a position of strength. From that position you watch things outside, so that instead of having extra things to do, you've simply got a better place to maintain your stance." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Immersed in the Body" (Meditations3)

"The way you manipulate the energy in your body is going to determine how you identify yourself, along with sense of the world you inhabit. If the energy in your body’s really uncomfortable, whatever world you’ve got out there is going to feel confining. But if you can breathe through it, you can learn to walk through those uncomfortable worlds, dissolve them away." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Close to What You Know"

"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)"