When you focus on the breath, you're fully inhabiting your body

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 energy and it’s good energy that you’re creating with the breath.

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.

And it is your protection: it protects you from outside energies. So there are lots of good reasons for fully inhabiting your body right now. Try to keep it going as you go through the day. If you’ve found that you’ve lost it, stop whatever you’re doing and take a couple of good breaths. Think of spreading, spreading, spreading the breath, working through any patterns of tension, relaxing any muscles that are preventing the breath from flowing freely. Just keep that going throughout the day, and you find at the end of the day that your energy is better. You’re actually living off — giving off — a good energy.

So there are lots of benefits. Try to keep them in mind, because that’s your way of encouraging yourself to keep with this practice.

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu

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