Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing 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"

"Try to relax around the breath. Don’t make the meditation too much of a chore. Think of it as an opportunity to breathe easy. Each breath is another opportunity to breathe easy. When the mind can rest a bit, then it can look at itself more clearly. So whatever lessons you’ve learned on how to let the mind rest with the breath and let that sensation of resting spread out: Remember them." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Getting the Most Out of the Present"

"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"

"So as far as you’re concerned right here, right now, this is all there is: the right here, the right now — this breath, this breath . If you see any thoughts arising in the mind about how much longer we’re going to be sitting here or how long we have been sitting here, just let them blow away. Think of the breath as going right through them, not giving them any space to land. You’ll find, as you stay fully immersed in the breath like this, that a lot of the good qualities you want to develop in the practice come along without your having to think about them. You don’t have to worry." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Just This Breath"

"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

"You use the breath as your anchor. When you’re with the breath, you know you’re in the present and you have the tools for dealing with whatever discomfort arises there. You can breathe in ways that minimize suffering or actually become actively refreshing, satisfying, absorbing. You find with this simple act of staying with the breath — as you stay with it longer and longer, trying to keep yourself as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels, making a little adjustment here, a little adjustment there — that a sense of ease comes without your having to think about giving rise to it apart from what you’re doing with the breath. It’s just there from the continuity of your focus, the sensitivity of your focus. There can even be a sense of rapture, a sense of fullness. You breathe in feeling really refreshed, breathe out feeling really refreshed. And the more you get absorbed in the present moment like this, the further away the past and the future seem to be." ~ Thanissa

"Then when the breath gets comfortable, what do you do with that? You’ve got to be careful, because there is a tendency when the breath gets comfortable to start focusing on the ease and well-being, and to forget about the breath, or to hope that the concentration will go on automatic pilot. That’s like falling asleep at the wheel, hoping that the car will take you where you want to go. You’ve got to keep your attention with the breath, no matter how comfortable it gets. Remind yourself that the sense of ease and well-being will do their work in easing the body, soothing the mind, without your having to wallow in them. So you let the breath be comfortable, and let that comfort stay, but you stay focused on the breath. Then as that comfort develops, you think about how you might spread it through different parts of the body. Because what you’re aiming at here is a sense of full-body awareness, fully aware of the breath energies: not only the obvious ones where you fee

"You stay with the body as much as you can. Try to make the sense of the breath as refreshing as you can. You don’t want to have just a sense of equanimity as you go through life. You want to have a sense of positive enjoyment in how it feels to have a body. One of the reasons you work with the breath is so that you feel comfortable inside your body. No matter what the world outside may say about your body, you’re perfectly fine with it inside. That way, you’ve got a friend inside. You’ve got a sense of well-being so that you’re not so hungry to go outside and look for something to snatch and grab and chew on outside. So as you’re meditating, realize that having a sense of fullness, having a sense of rapture, is a necessary part of the practice. Try to develop it as much as you can while you’re sitting. Then try to carry that through the day as your food. It’s like your lunch bag for the day. When you have the sense of feeling comfortable inside yourself, you’re less

"In the body, of course, the first thing we’ve got is the breath. You can explore the breathing. There’s a lot more to the breath than just in and out. Try to notice, when it comes in, how does it come in? What are your subconscious actions around bringing the breath in? Do you have to tense up a part of the body? All too often, we tense up in our joints, in our extremities. It’s almost as if they act as a fulcrum so that the breath energy could be brought in, but remind yourself the breath energy is actually already there in the body. The air outside is what you bring in, but the breath energy is what flows inside and it doesn’t require any tension. So start with the fingers and work your way up, to relax the tension. I’ve noticed that the outline of the body, especially the outline of the hands, is a good place to start to relax and to keep things relaxed as you breathe in, as you breathe out. Then do the whole outline of the arm. Start with the feet, up through the outline, aro

"To begin with, you can focus your awareness at any one spot in the body where the sensation of breathing is very clear. It might be the tip of the nose, the throat, the middle of the chest, the abdomen, any spot where you know clearly: “Now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out.” There’s a sense of rightness about the spot; it’s an easy spot to maintain your focus. This may seem strange, this emphasis on ease and comfort in the meditation after everything we’ve heard about the Buddha’s teachings on pain, stress, and suffering. But you have to look carefully at what he says about pain, stress, and suffering and also what he has to say about pleasure. Look at the four noble truths. Truth number one, of course, is stress and suffering. But buried down in number four, the path, you find the most important factor of the path, right concentration, which involves getting the mind focused on the breath with a sense of ease and rapture. This rapture comes from seclusion: s

"The ability to maintain your center and to breathe comfortably in any situation can be a genuine lifesaver, keeping the mind in a position where you can more easily think of the right thing to do, say, or think when your surroundings get tough. As a result, the people around you are no longer subjected to your greed, anger, and delusion. And as you maintain your inner balance in this way, it helps them maintain theirs. So make the whole world your meditation seat, and you’ll find that meditation both on the big seat and the little seat will get a lot stronger. At the same time, it’ll become a gift both to yourself and to the world around you." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu “Strength Training for the Mind”

"Begin with the task of trying to get the mind to stay comfortably focused for long periods of time on the breath — and right there you run into two operative assumptions: What does it mean to breathe? What does it mean to be focused? It’s common to think of the breath as the air passing in and out through the nose, and this can be a useful perception to start with. Use whatever blatant sensations you associate with that perception as a means of establishing mindfulness, developing alertness, and getting the mind to grow still. But as your attention gets more refined, you may find that level of breath becoming too faint to detect. So try thinking of the breath instead as the energy flow in the body, as a full body process. Then make that experience as comfortable as possible. If you feel any blockage or obstruction in the breathing, see what you can do to dissolve those feelings. Are you doing anything to create them? If you can catch yourself creating them, then it’s easy to let

"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

"The same approach applies to the remaining types of satipaṭṭhāna: focusing on feelings, on mind states, and on mental qualities in and of themselves. At first glance, these may look like new and different meditation exercises, but the Buddha makes clear that they can all center on a single practice: keeping the breath in mind. When the mind is with the breath, all four frames of reference are right there. The difference lies simply in the subtlety of your focus. So when you’ve developed your skills with the first, most blatant type of satipaṭṭhāna, you don’t have to move far to take up the more subtle ones. Simply stay with the breath and shift your focus to the feelings and mind states that arise from being mindful of the breath, and the mental qualities that either get in the way of your focus or strengthen it. Once you’ve chosen your frame of reference, you treat it the same way you’ve been treating the body: taking it as your frame of reference in and of itself, without refer

"There’s a story in Ajaan Lee’s autobiography of a senior monk in Bangkok who was sick and so Ajaan Lee went to visit him. Now, this senior monk had very little use for the Wilderness Tradition, so it wasn’t the case that he had a lot of faith in Ajaan Lee. But Ajaan Lee just sat in one corner of the room and meditated. After a while the senior monk began to have a sense that something was coming from Ajaan Lee’s corner, having an effect on his body. So he asked Ajaan Lee, “What are you doing?” and Ajaan Lee said, “I’m making a gift of quiet, a gift of silence.” And the senior monk said, “Well, whatever it is, keep on doing it. It feels really good.” And so Ajaan Lee would go back every day to meditate in the senior monk’s room. After a while, they started talking, and he actually taught meditation to the senior monk, who had never meditated before. As a result, he changed the senior monk’s ideas about the Wilderness Tradition and about the possibility of getting results from m

"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)

"And the more interested you can get in the present moment, the more firmly you’ll stay — not only right now, but also as a long-term project. That’s a second benefit that comes from working with the breath: If you see that the meditation is accomplishing something and it’s pleasant — it can be a refreshing and even rapturous place to stay — then it’s a lot easier to stick with it over the long haul." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Work & Play"

"As you work with the breath, you begin to see the power of your perceptions in that the way you conceive of the breath is going to have an influence on how you actually breathe. If you think of the body as a big solid that you’ve got to push the breath through — it feels like this big lump of fat sitting here and you’re trying to force air through the fat — it just doesn’t work. It’s laborious. It’s tiring. But if you perceive the body as an energy field — when you breathe in, it’s just more energy joining with the energy already there — it all flows in smoothly, and you don’t have to push anything through anything else. It changes the way you breathe, changes the sensation of the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Limits of Old Kamma"

"So as a meditator you’ve got to learn how to remind yourself that what you’re doing here is a good thing. All you’re asked to do is to breathe, which you’re going to do anyhow. And then watch the breath, because right here you’re going to learn about your own mind. Isn’t that the most worthwhile thing to learn about? To watch the movements of your mind, to see how, given a particular situation, you can either create a lot of suffering out of it or you can create a lot of joy — the same situation, but you handle it differently: That should be a really fascinating process." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "New Eyes"

"As we practice concentration, we get the mind into a different kind of pleasure. When it finally does settle down with the breath and there’s a sense of really belonging here in the body, that’s a different order of pleasure, and it’s much better than sensual pleasure. It puts you on a wavelength where — if you happened to die at this moment and didn’t lose this sense of being centered right here — you’d go to a really good place. So learn how to appreciate this pleasure and see it as higher and better and more reliable than the pleasures that come from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. That allows you to think more calmly about the fact that you could go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Think Calmly about Death"

"When you meditate, you’ve got to put the mind in the right mood. Sometimes, focusing on the breath is the way to put it in the right mood. You take a couple of long, deep, in-and-out breaths, and it feels good. You can just feel the stress and the strain melting away. The patterns of tension you’ve been holding in your body begin to dissolve. There’s a sense of nourishment that comes from that. So you just drink it in. If, after a while, long breathing doesn’t feel good, you can try other rhythms: short in, long out; long in, short out; or shorter breathing, more shallow, lighter, heavier. You get to explore this area of what they call form: the way you feel the body from within. Sometimes that’s enough to get the mind to settle down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "In the Mood"

"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"

"In the process of working with the breath, you’re learning lessons in how to make yourself happy, how to develop a sense of pleasure within. Once you have that sense of pleasure, that sense of well-being, then it’s a lot easier to spread thoughts of goodwill [mettā] in an unlimited way. Because if you’re feeling put upon, feeling simply the desire to run away, it’s hard to wish happiness for anybody, much less happiness for all living beings unconditionally. Once you develop the sense of pleasure, the lessons in happiness that you can learn from the breath are that, one, you understand what happiness is all about, and, two, you’ve got it. You’re in a position where you want to share. You also understand what you’re doing when you wish happiness for other beings. You wish that they, too, could develop their inner resources." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Lessons in Happiness"

"The Buddha says that when there’s a sense of ease coming with the breath, let it spread throughout the whole body. When you can think of the breath energy as going through the body, it’s a lot easier to let the feeling of ease spread along with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath Energies"

"Allow the sensation of the breathing to be as relaxed as possible. Think of the breath energy as something that already fills the body. As you breathe in, you’re simply adding more breath energy, infusing it into the energy already there. When you breathe out, you’re not trying to squeeze everything out. If all of the breath were squeezed out of the body, you would die. So try to find the right balance. At what point does an out-breath start feeling uncomfortable? When you sense that point, stop breathing out; start breathing in. At what point does an in-breath start feeling uncomfortable? Stop there and allow yourself to breathe out again. Learn how to surf the breath in the same way you’d surf a wave. In other words, try to maintain a balanced sense of ease in the body whether the wave tends right or left. That sense of ease is going to be your friend." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Warrior's Stronghold" (Meditations4)

"So just stay here with the breath. Make the breath the only thing you’re thinking about. Put aside all thoughts of jhana, everything. Just be here with the breath. And then try to notice: Is the breath comfortable or not? If it’s not, you can change." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Don’t Focus on Jhana, Focus on the Breath"

"There’s enough suffering in life. You don’t have to compound it by breathing in a way that’s harsh, uncomfortable, or unhealthy. So you look at the breath and see how it’s affecting the body in different parts: where the breath energy seems comfortable, where it seems strained, what you can do to make it comfortable throughout, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out, and all the way through all the different parts of the body." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill First & Last"