Hope by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (extract)

"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, around the legs, up around the torso, in the head. Then go through the inside. Try to get deeper and deeper as you work in. You’ll have a much more comfortable place to stay that way.

In this way, you’re using your intellect and the body at the same time. The intellect asks the right questions and gives you ideas. You’re using your perceptions. What is your perception of what’s necessary for the breath to come in? What’s necessary for the breath to go out? Do you have to push it out? Actually, you don’t really have to push it out. It’ll go out on its own. The question is simply: At what rate do you allow it to go out? To what extent do you want to change the rhythm to counteract any imbalance there may be in the body? Sometimes the body gets in a vicious cycle. You breathe in a weird way and it sets up patterns of tension that make you breathe continually in weirder ways. So it’s good to learn how to break the cycle.

I found, back when I had migraines, that I’d get into a cycle of breathing where it felt really constricted. The more I allowed it to be constricted, to avoid disturbing the pain, the worse it got. The only way to break out was to breathe in a way that was actually painful. Expand my abdomen as much as possible to the point where the abdomen felt painful. Doing that for a couple of minutes would reset everything. When you have migraines, you start getting afraid of the pain and you breathe in ways that go around the pain so as not to disturb it. If you disturb the pain, it seems to make it worse, but what actually happens is that you get more and more tied up inside.

This is where the Thai ajaans’ image of having a knife is good to use as well. Wherever there are bands of tension — like rubber bands around your head, rubber bands around your body — think of a knife, cutting through, cutting through. Any thoughts that connect like bands around your mind: Cut those through as well. Remind yourself that your awareness is larger than your thoughts, and you can step outside.

What happens all too often is that when you’re in a thought, it’s like being in a colored bubble. Everywhere you look, it’s the color of the bubble. But if you step outside, pop the bubble, you realize that not everything has to be colored by the bubble. In the same way, centering your attention on the breath in the body is a good way of stepping out of your thoughts. Or you can think of having a sense of the breath energy around the body — a cocoon that surrounds the body. Think of your awareness being sensitive to that all around.

I know people who say they can see people’s auras, and the quality of the aura will tell them what kind of pains the person is having, what that person’s mind state is like, what that person’s physical state is like. So think of the energy surrounding you and think of it being turned into a healthy energy and it’s there to support you. It’s there to nourish you.

These are ways of exploring the potentials in the body. You realize that your experience of the body, sitting right here in the present moment, is not just a given. It does come to some extent from your past actions, but it’s also shaped by your present intentions and your present understanding. If you change the intentions and change the understanding, you can stimulate these potentials."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Hope" https://www.dhammatalks.org/audio/evening/2022/220103-hope.html

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