Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Your memories of yesterday’s breath and yesterday’s meditation are going to get in the way of seeing what’s actually happening with the breath right here, right now. In that way, you have to forget, wipe the slate clean. Try to come to the meditation with the same attitude of exploration that you had when you first started meditating. Your problems right now may be the “old hat” problem. Everything seems to be kind of old, and you’re not expecting too much anymore, so you don’t feel all that encouraged to put in much effort or to pay a lot of attention. That cynical attitude is one you’ve got to put aside. You’ve got this breath right here, right now: How can you make the most of it? And remember where that cynical attitude came from. It came from the fact that yesterday’s meditation was really good, or that maybe last year’s meditation was really good, and in the meantime, things have not been so good. So you get cynical about the whole process, believing that no matter how good...

"I received a phone call this evening from someone who asked, “How do I stick with the breath throughout the day? Do I just not care about other people? Do I not take in what they’re saying?” I said, “No, that’s not the case at all.” When you’re with the breath, you’re giving yourself a solid place to stand as you take on your other responsibilities. And you’re actually more able to be sensitive to other people when the basis of your attention is your breath, rather than what it normally is: your moods, your preoccupations. So you look for whatever opportunity there is to practice. There’s a common phrase that you try to bring your practice into your life. Actually, it should be the other way around. You try to bring your life into the practice. In other words, the practice is the container. Your awareness of the breath should be the container for the day. And even when you can’t focus entirely on the breath, or give it your 100% attention, you can still make it the...

"We use the breath as an anchor for the mind to stay in the present moment. We try to make the breath as comfortable as we can to make the present moment a nice place to stay. If the breath feels labored — if it feels too tight, too short, too long — you’re not going to want to stay. It’ll be one more reason to leave. So watch for a while to see what kind of breathing feels best for the body right now. What are the body’s needs? When you breathe in, start asking yourself questions about the process of breathing in, breathing out: When you breathe in, where does the impulse to breathe in start? And how do you know when to stop and rest and then let the breath go out? What are the sensations that tell you that? Where are they in the body? After all, there’s a lot more to the breath than just the air coming in and out through the nose. There’s the whole movement of energy in the body. It comes in waves over the body. Try to find where the waves begin, where they end, and then how the...

"Have goodwill [mettā] toward your breathing, compassion, appreciation, equanimity towards your breathing. In other words, allow the breath to be comfortable so that you can have a foundation. Where it’s not comfortable, work at making it more comfortable: That’s compassion. Where it is comfortable, appreciate it. Sometimes, especially in the very beginning, the states of comfort seem to be very minor and not impressive at all. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to be more impressive. You’ve got to give them a little space. It’s like oak trees. They start out as tiny little acorns. Or even better, think of coastal redwoods. They start as the tiniest little seeds, and yet the tallest trees on earth come from these tiny, tiny seeds. Develop the conditions, allow them to grow and they become a huge forest. It’s the same with a sense of well-being in the body. First find areas that are simply not in pain, that seem okay. That’s good enough. Just be very ...

"If something difficult comes up, you breathe in a different way, you think in a different way, you apply different labels and perceptions. Train yourself beforehand to have a good stock of these things on hand. This is why we listen to Dhamma talks, why we read the Dhamma: so that we can increase our stock of good tools. Then we work on the concentration to have a sense of well-being underlying all of this. Remember the Buddha’s image of the practice as being like a fortress. You’ve got the soldiers of right effort. You’ve got the gatekeeper, which is mindfulness. You’ve got the well-plastered wall, which is your discernment. And you’ve got a storehouse full of food, which is your concentration. If you can give yourself a sense of well-being simply by the way you breathe, by the way you settle your mind inside, then you find you’ve got something you can tap into anytime of the day, in any situation, because the breath is always there." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Looking afte...

"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"

"They’ve done studies of people going through psychotherapy, trying to figure out which method — Jungian, Freudian, or whatever — works best. And they’ve discovered that the actual method doesn’t make all that much difference. What does make a difference is the ability of the patient to get inside his or her body, to fully inhabit the body, and then from that standpoint to work through whatever issues there are in the mind. This is what you’re doing as you work with the breath. You’re getting into the body, getting more sensitive to the body, creating a new center of gravity for yourself, a new area of sensitivity." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Seeing with the Body" (Meditations4)

"Get so that you’re a real connoisseur of your breathing. Here it is: something that’s free. It hasn’t been privatized yet. Nobody’s going to take your breath away and then try to sell it back to you. You’ve got it right here. Here’s an opportunity to develop this resource inside that you can ultimately use in all kinds of ways. You’ll find that when you’re tired, if you’ve really been observant about your breathing, you know ways to breathe that will give you more energy. If you’re feeling tense, you’ll find ways of breathing to relax. When you’re feeling hot or cold, you have ways of breathing that make you feel more comfortable. When you’re angry, there are ways to breathe that get rid of the sense that you’ve just got to get the anger out of your system. Instead of bottling it up or letting it all out, you can breathe in a way that feels relaxed all the way down to your fingertips, all the way down to your toes, and the sense of feeling stifled by the anger will g...

"Bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. Breathe in long and out long for a couple of times, focusing on any spot in the body where the breathing is easy to notice, and your mind feels comfortable focusing. This could be at the nose, at the chest, at the abdomen, or any spot at all. Stay with that spot, noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don't force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your focus. Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of how it feels. Savor it, as if it were an exquisite sensation you wanted to prolong. If your mind wanders off, simply bring it back. Don't get discouraged. If it wanders 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Show it that you mean business, and eventually it will listen to you. If you want, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. If long breathing feels comfortable, stick with it. If it doesn't, change it to whatever rhythm feels soothing to the body. You can try shor...

"When anger comes, when fear comes, when you’re lying awake at night and can’t get to sleep, you can focus on the breath. It’s like having something to play with, or a friend to talk to at any time at all. And as with any friend, when you don’t know the friend very well, you just sit there and you have no idea what to say. The friend doesn’t know what to say. But after a while, you start asking questions, and the other person starts answering. If you don’t ask the questions, there are no answers. So you can ask questions about the breath. What kind of breathing would be good for your lungs? What kind of breathing would be good for your intestines? How about the tension in your shoulders or a pain in your back: What kind of breathing is good for that? As you get to know the breath, you realize it’s not just air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the whole flow of energy in the body. For the most part, we ignore it, and then we miss out on the benefits that can come f...

"In music, they have the term ostinato, which means a theme that’s repeated over and over and over again, usually in the bass. The mind has its ostinato, too. You dig down deep enough, and you find it asking a question all the time: “What’s next? What to do next? What to do next?” If the answer’s clear, the mind tends to be happy. If it’s not clear, if there are confusing signals being sent, then it gets uncertain, ill at ease. So, to get your mind settled in right now with a sense of certainty and ease, just tell yourself that you’re going to do one thing right now. You’re going to stay with the breath — all the way in, all the way out. You don’t have to go anywhere else. There will still be some questions as you’re staying with the breath, as how to get settled in with the breath, and how to deal with other thoughts that come up. But as long as you’ve established your priorities clearly, then the mind will feel more at ease." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Mi...

"This is the best thing you could be doing right now: getting the mind to settle down, getting a sense of being at home with the breath, being friends with the breath. Don’t think of the meditation as a struggle. If you regard your breath as your enemy, you’re really in bad shape, because wherever you go, there it is. Learn to be friends with it. Listen to it. Work with it. Play with it. Learn how the breath and the mind can cooperate with each other. This requires paying careful attention. As with any friendship, it takes time. But that length of time can be shortened if you’re really attentive, if you really watch." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Friends with the Breath"

"If you find that the goodwill [mettā] meditation is getting dry, you stop and you work on your breath, trying to develop a way of breathing that feels good inside, nourishing inside. Ajaan Lee once said that if you don’t have any sense of well-being or pleasure inside, then it’s hard to wish for other beings’ happiness. He gave the image of a large water tank. If there’s water in the tank, then when you open the faucet, cool water comes out. If there’s no water in the tank and you open the faucet, nothing but air comes out. And it’s the same with your goodwill. There has to be a sense of well-being inside for it to really have force and to really be cooling. So breath meditation and goodwill meditation help each other along. There are times when you need to develop goodwill in order to just be able to settle down with the breath, and other times where you need to work with the breath so the goodwill has a felt sense of well-being inside. So you practice these thing...

"So look at the way you breathe. Can you breathe in a calm way even though other people are doing outrageous things? Remind yourself that, at the very least, if you can breathe more calmly, you can think more calmly. And calm thinking doesn’t mean not caring. It means looking at the situation as it really is rather than through the red eyes of anger. Wherever you see that you’ve built up feelings of tension or tightness in the body through the way you’ve been breathing, breathe through them. That gives you the alternative to getting it out by expressing the anger or bottling it up." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Angry" (Meditations10)

"This is what we do as we meditate: You find one spot in the body that you can  make livable through the way you focus on it, through the way you breathe, the way you conceive the breath going in and out of that spot. You protect that spot. As for the other parts of the body that you can’t make nice, that you can’t saturate with rapture, can’t saturate with pleasure because there’s pain: Just let them go for the time being. Work on shoring up your position of strength, the position that allows you to stay here in the present moment with at least some measure of well-being." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Clearing Your Space"

"In the course of working through these [breath] energies, you get more sensitive to how thoughts form. The formation of a thought has both a physical side and a mental side, and the breath is the ideal place to see this. After all, it is a physical property, but of the physical properties, it’s closest to the mind and the most sensitive to what’s going on in the mind. When a thought comes up, you can see that it reverberates both in the body and in the mind. You make up your mind that you’re not going to, as they say in Thai, continue the weave of the thought. As soon as a thought appears, you zap it. In other words, you take that skill you have of breathing through patterns of tension, and use it wherever you sense any tension around the inchoate thought. You don’t have to even think of whether it’s physical or mental tension at that point. But there’s an act of construction, an act of fabrication, beginning to put things together, and there’s going to be some tension and some s...

"So take whatever concentration you have. If it seems like a little, don’t berate it for being a little. Just work with it. Whatever sense of ease you can get out of the breathing, just stick with that. Even if it doesn’t seem to be the most wonderful breath you’ve ever had, well, okay, work with what you’ve got because these things do develop. If you give them time, they develop." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Keep Things Simple"

"Remember: When the Buddha teaches breath meditation, it’s pretty proactive. You’re going to be breathing in certain ways, trying to induce certain mind states, certain feelings, certain states of awareness, by the way you breathe. But to prepare the mind for that activity, you have to make it as impassive as possible so that when anything undesirable comes up in your meditation, you don’t get excited about it, you don’t get upset by it. You have to see it clearly if you want to deal with it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Secluded from Sensuality"

"You breathe in the way that feels refreshing: It refreshes your torso, refreshes all the different parts of the body where you can feel the breathing process. It starts out very gently, just a sense that things feel okay; they feel like they’ve settled in where they belong. But if you give this sense of “okay” some space, give it some time, it’ll grow. So don’t put any squeeze on it. Breathe in in a way that doesn’t build up tension inside and you don’t hold onto any tension when you breathe out. Just protect that “okay” area wherever you feel it. Things feel full and pleasant. If you give them more time, that sense of feeling full will grow, that sense of pleasure will grow. Over time, you’ll find that you can tap into this more and more regularly." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Pain of Conviction"

"When you focus on the breath, try to breathe in a way that feels really refreshing. Think of the breath energizing your entire torso all the way down, and then even beyond the torso down through the legs, down the back. Any part of the body that seems tired or tense, in need of a little refreshment, a little bit of soothing: Let the breath do that. One of the ways you’re going to get the mind to stay here is by making the breath interesting. As I said this afternoon, if you can find a task to do with the breath, so much the better. There may be a tightness or tension in some part of the body. In the monastery where I was first ordained, they had a skeleton hanging in the side of the sala. Sometimes I would sit in front of it and notice that its spine was straight. So I’d ask myself, “Okay, can I tell if my spine is straight now?” I was able to feel that there were different muscles pulling it out of alignment. “So how about allowing those muscles to relax?” Do that a...

"We have certain preconceived notions of how the breath comes into the body, what we have to do in order to bring it into the body, how the process of breathing relates to the different parts of the body, and then we breathe in line with that. And many times it’s a caricature of what’s actually going on. So we have to learn to look at the process in other ways. Consciously change the way you conceive of your breathing; see what happens. At the very least it’ll give you a good insight into the relationship between mental events and physical events. It’s not always the case that the mind is just reacting to its experiences. Sometimes it’s shaping its experiences, too. If we don’t get a sense of how we shape things, we never really get a chance to look into the mind. For starters there’s the concept of the breath not as the air coming in and out of the lungs but the energy flow in the body. Some people have problems with this; others have no problems at all. But allow yo...

"So we respect concentration, one, by respecting it in theory, reminding ourselves that it’s something we’ve got to do. And two, while you’re doing it, you want to give yourself to it fully. Don’t hold anything back. Immerse yourself in your object. Here we’re working with the breath. When we say to focus on the breath, it’s an unfortunate image. It gives the impression that your mind is like a camera, and you’re going to focus the lens of the camera on something outside of the camera. It’d be better to say, “Wear the breath. Put it on, wear it. Think of it being all around you.” And you want to develop an all-around awareness as well. So you don’t hold anything back. If you hold anything back, you’re off to the side. Be in the middle. When you hold things back, there are big blind spots in the mind. Those blind spots are ignorance, and it’s precisely because of the ignorance that we suffer. So as you begin to settle down and the breath begins to feel good, allow you...

"There are times when you’ll find that your conception of the breath gets confused, as in the tendency to confuse the breath energy with the liquid energy in the body. When liquid runs up against obstacles, it can’t go through. It gets squeezed in. It builds up pressure. But the breath doesn’t have to be squeezed in. Yet when we start breathing as if it were, that creates problems. So, remember: It’s totally free to go anywhere at all, all the time. The neat boundaries we place around it are artificial. Learn to erase them and see what happens. As for the pleasure or rapture you want, that will happen on its own. You can squeeze it, you can force it, but squeezed and forced pleasure is not going to last very long. It’s like squeezing a piece of fruit to make it ripe. You know that ripe fruits are supposed to be soft, so you squeeze your piece of fruit, squeeze it and squeeze it until it’s soft, but that doesn’t ripen it. You just get mush. The right way is to leave th...

"This is where the pleasure in the present moment comes in as you try to stay with whatever pleasant sensations in the body you create through the way you breathe, through the way you perceive your breath. Think of the breath coming in and out through all the pores. It can flow anywhere in the body, so wherever there’s a sense of tightness or blockage, hold in mind the perception that allows your mind to believe, okay, the breath can go through the blockage, no matter how solid your bones or the pains or any other solid-seeming parts may seem. There’s a lot of space inside the atoms of the bones, so you can think of the breath flowing through that space, to create a sense of ease, fullness, refreshment throughout the body." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "In the Present" (Meditations8)