The Uses of Pleasure & Pain by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (extract)

"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: seclusion here meaning that you’re not thinking about past, not thinking about the future, you’re right here with the present moment. Things are settling in, and there’s a snugness to how things feel. It feels good, it feels secure, being right here.

Look at what the Buddha has to say about the tasks with regard to each of the noble truths. The task with regard to stress and suffering is to comprehend it. The task with regard to the path is to develop it, which means you want to develop that sense of ease, the sense of rapture that comes as the mind begins to settle down in concentration. What you’re doing is taking one of the aggregates — the aggregate of feeling — and instead of latching onto it or pushing it away, you learn how to use it as a tool.

When pain and stress and suffering come, you want to comprehend them. Comprehending pain and stress teaches you a lot about the mind. The Buddha never said that life is suffering. He just said there’s suffering in life, which is a very different teaching. As long as there’s going to be pain, as long as there’s going to be suffering, get the most use out of them. You find as you focus on pain — as you get to know it, get to comprehend it — that you learn all kinds of things about how the mind is working. In particular, you learn to see what it’s doing to take a physical pain and turn it into mental pain — or, if you’re starting with mental pain, to make it worse.

But to watch that feeling of pain long enough and consistently enough so that you can comprehend it, the mind needs strength, it needs nourishment. Otherwise it gets drained. That’s where the pleasure in the path comes in. That’s your nourishment. Try to create a sense of well-being in the mind as it’s focused in the present moment so that it doesn’t feel threatened by the pain, doesn’t feel drained by the pain, so that you always have a place to go when you need that strength."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Uses of Pleasure & Pain" (Meditations1)

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