Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"With the breath, you can see that it is a kind of fabrication. The way you breathe sometimes goes totally on automatic pilot, but there is an intentional element, and all too often that automatic pilot disguises some underlying intentions you don’t notice. So you try to bring them up into consciousness. Ask yourself: “I’m deciding when to breathe in, when to breathe out, so how can I do that well? How can I find a sense of ease and well-being through the breath? And then how can I calm the effect of the breath on the mind?” " ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Anupassana" (Meditations10)

"Don’t be surprised if something else will come along and push you off the breath or lead you astray, but don’t just take it lying down. Get up and focus on the breath again. Know that you’re going to have some contrary impulses, but they don’t have to have the upper hand. You just keep coming back, coming back, coming back. Each time you come back, try to reward yourself with a really nice breath. And try to figure out ways that make it interesting to stay here. Explore the different ways that the breathing feels in the body. When you breathe in, which parts of the body are participating in the breath process? Which parts are actually doing the work? Which ones are getting some nourishment? And which parts don’t seem to be having any role at all? Can you get everybody involved? Think of the breath not just as the air coming in and out of the lungs but also as the flow of energy in the body. You know that if the energy flows throughout the body, every part of the body is going to ...

"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 ...

"The mind has spent so much time thinking about random things and about other things that are not quite so random but still scatter you about, but now you’re going to devote its thinking and all of its processes to getting it to settle down. A large part of that strategy lies in making the breath an attractive place to be. That way, when you wander off, the idea of coming back is attractive — you want to come back. If you wander off again, you want to come back again. Each time you come back, reward yourself with a breath that feels especially gratifying. Think of the breath as being all around you, so that you’re not just in one side of the body looking at the breath in another part of the body. You’ve got the breath all around you, surrounding you, bathing you. As for any other thoughts, any other responsibilities you may have right now, you don’t have to think about them. You’ll come back to them some other time, but not right now. You want to honor your original intention, wh...

"Each time you wander off, try to catch yourself as quickly as you can and come right back to the breath. Do it in a friendly but a firm way. It’s often wise to reward yourself with a particularly nice breath when you come back. If it feels really good coming back, the mind will be more and more inclined to want to come back. If you yell at it and get really upset, it’s not going to want to come back. It’ll wander off and want to stay away. So try to catch it each time, and try to catch it more and more quickly, and give yourself rewards." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Directed Thoughts, Random Thoughts"

"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)

"You know there’s air coming in and out of the lungs, but as you begin to get more sensitive to how you experience the process, you begin to see there’s also a sense of energy that flows through the body. And that has a huge impact on how you’re going to be sitting here for the rest of the hour. If the energy is allowed to flow smoothly and freely, you’re more likely to be here with a sense of comfort. In fact, when the Buddha talks about the mind settling in, it’s to develop pleasure and rapture. It’s right here, in the way the breath energy flows, that the pleasure and the rapture are going to appear. So you work with that. Once you find a sense of ease, what can you do to maintain that ease? You can’t clamp down on it. But you can’t take a cavalier attitude toward it, either. It’s something you want to protect. You have to be very observant as to how you’re experiencing the body in the present moment and to what ways you can experiment with that experience. Notice which ways of...

"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...