Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Give the mind a chance to settle down, and try to learn just the right amount of pressure to put on the breath to keep it there. For a lot of people, if you could take a picture of what they’re doing to their mind as they’re practicing concentration, it’s as if they’re strangling it, which is why the mind rebels. Other people are just barely touching it, so of course the mind wanders off. The Canon has an image of holding a baby chick in your hand. If you squeeze the chick too much, it is going to die; if you hold it too loosely, it’s going to fly away. So you have to be sensitive to what’s just the right amount of pressure to place on the breath, to place on the body. Actually, you can’t place pressure on the breath. As soon as you do, you’re not really focusing on the breath, you’re focusing on the solid or the liquid parts of the body. The breath is something that flows back and forth or stays still, but you can’t catch it. You can simply be aware of where it is. ...

"As Ajaan Fuang used to say, “You have to be crazy about the meditation in order to do it well.” This is where, if you have obsessive tendencies, they’re useful. You have a few free minutes, you focus on your breath. You stop at a stop light, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a doctor’s office in a waiting room, you focus on your breath. You’re standing in line, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a boring meeting, you focus on your breath. Every time you’ve got a chance, you keep coming back to the breath. That kind of persistence is going to pay off." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Defeatism? - Anything But"

"When Ajaan Fuang noticed that I was having trouble getting my head around the concept of breath energy in the body the first time I was there — the concept appealed to me, but I wasn’t quite sure how to handle it — he said that it refers to the sense of feeling already there throughout the body, it’s just a matter of learning to recognize that feeling as breath energy. Then you just start working with what you already feel, seeing it as a type of breath. So take that concept and see how it helps you to get the mind to settle down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Language of the Heart (1)"

"One of Ajaan Fuang’s students talked about the time when he was meditating in a bus — he wasn’t normally that good a meditator, but for some reason when he sat on a bus he found it very easy for the mind to settle down — and the breath felt delicious. Well, how do you make the breath delicious? How does that happen? In other words, try things out. Use your ingenuity. Use your imagination." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Beginner's Mind"

"Ajaan Fuang has a nice passage where he talks about the breath as being like a nursemaid who’s been looking after you for all your life, but you haven’t paid that much attention to her to see what kind of person she is, why she’s been so kind to you. Whether you pay attention or not, she keeps breathing in, breathing out. Of course, if she’s neglected she can’t do her best for you. So, give her some attention. How does the breath feel right now? Is it long? Is it short? Heavy? Light? What kind of breathing feels good right now? — because the breath is nourishment for the body, and it’s most nourishing when it feels refreshing. The breath becomes even a better friend if you make friends with it. You do it in the same way that you make friends with someone: You have to listen, you have to ask questions, notice. People don’t tell you all about themselves all at once, and often the things they don’t tell you are most important for establishing a friendship. So try to be observant. Wh...

"Start from your immediate experience and branch out from there. That’s the way Ajaan Fuang used to teach meditation. He’d have people get in touch with their breath. He’d use a few analogies and similes, and then he’d listen to the words they used to describe their own experience of meditation, when the breath felt “sticky,” when it felt “solid” or “dense,” when it felt “full.” And then he’d use their vocabulary to teach them further. For instance, one of his students would talk about the “delicious breath,” so Ajaan Fuang would start his instructions to that student by saying, “Get in touch with the delicious breath.” In this way, the meditation is not something imposed from outside. It’s something that develops from your own inner sensitivity." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Private Matter" (Meditations4)

"Give the mind a chance to settle down, and try to learn just the right amount of pressure to put on the breath to keep it there. For a lot of people, if you could take a picture of what they’re doing to their mind as they’re practicing concentration, it’s as if they’re strangling it, which is why the mind rebels. Other people are just barely touching it, so of course the mind wanders off. The Canon has an image of holding a baby chick in your hand. If you squeeze the chick too much, it is going to die; if you hold it too loosely, it’s going to fly away. So you have to be sensitive to what’s just the right amount of pressure to place on the breath, to place on the body. Actually, you can’t place pressure on the breath. As soon as you do, you’re not really focusing on the breath, you’re focusing on the solid or the liquid parts of the body. The breath is something that flows back and forth or stays still, but you can’t catch it. You can simply be aware of where it is. ...

"As Ajaan Fuang used to say, “You have to be crazy about the meditation in order to do it well.” This is where, if you have obsessive tendencies, they’re useful. You have a few free minutes, you focus on your breath. You stop at a stop light, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a doctor’s office in a waiting room, you focus on your breath. You’re standing in line, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a boring meeting, you focus on your breath. Every time you’ve got a chance, you keep coming back to the breath. That kind of persistence is going to pay off." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Defeatism? - Anything But"

Question: When I observe my breath as given in the instructions, I have the sense that I’m controlling it. This doesn’t seem natural. What advice could you give me? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The mind is always controlling the breath to one extent or another, but a lot of the control is sub-conscious. Here we’re trying to bring this aspect more into your consciousness. As you become more conscious of it, the first thing you do is that you will probably mess it up. But as you get more sensitive to what actually feels good, then your sense of control actually becomes more refined and more skillful. As Ajaan Fuang once said, you’re always going to be controlling your breath until your first stage of awakening, so you might as well learn how to do it well." ~ The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind

"Your mind may be talking at you, it may be shouting at you, but you can still stay with the breath. One of the effective ways of dealing with these thoughts is to try to notice: Where in the breath energy in the body do you feel any blockage or constriction that goes along with the thought? Where does it feel to be weighing you down? Once you notice it, think of the breath going right there and exploding that tension. Ajaan Fuang used to use that word a lot, explode the breath throughout the body. You can zap your thoughts in this way. Keep that sense of ease and well-being as full in the body as possible." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breathing Easy"

"When you breathe in, the incoming energy simply melds with the old energy. It doesn’t fight it, doesn’t have to be pushed against anything. It just suffuses and energizes what’s already there. There’s no clear line of demarcation. When the in-breath reaches a point where you feel you’ve had enough incoming energy, the breath goes out. So try not to impose too many strict, preconceived notions on the breath. Just watch how the process feels and hold that perception in mind: that the whole body is a field of breath energy and the in-breath is simply charging up the breath energy already there. Then when things feel too charged, you allow the breath to go out. When it’s going to start coming in again, that’s its business. You’re just there to watch it. To use the Thai word Ajaan Fuang would use, “prakhawng” — hover around it, look after it, make sure it feels good. You can pose some questions in the mind: “What kind of breathing would feel better right now? What kind of breathing w...

"Ajaan Fuang would comment on this often, on how the ability to breathe easy is a source of nourishment. You can have all the physical food you might want, and the body can still feel starved if the breath is starved. There’s no one forcing us to breathe in a way that’s difficult. There’s no breath police. They haven’t privatized the breath. It’s all yours. So try to realize the full implications of that, expand your sense of the possibilities of what the breath can do, and it’ll be your friend as long as you’re together." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breathe Easy"

"Give the mind a chance to settle down, and try to learn just the right amount of pressure to put on the breath to keep it there. For a lot of people, if you could take a picture of what they’re doing to their mind as they’re practicing concentration, it’s as if they’re strangling it, which is why the mind rebels. Other people are just barely touching it, so of course the mind wanders off. The Canon has an image of holding a baby chick in your hand. If you squeeze the chick too much, it is going to die; if you hold it too loosely, it’s going to fly away. So you have to be sensitive to what’s just the right amount of pressure to place on the breath, to place on the body. Actually, you can’t place pressure on the breath. As soon as you do, you’re not really focusing on the breath, you’re focusing on the solid or the liquid parts of the body. The breath is something that flows back and forth or stays still, but you can’t catch it. You can simply be aware of where it is. If you’re put...

"I went through a period once when I found it very difficult to breathe. At the end of the meditation, everything in the body seemed to be clamped down. Ajaan Fuang was far away. It was a month or so before I saw him. So I mentioned this to him when I finally met him. He said, “You’re focused on the earth element; focus instead on space.” That solved the problem right there. So sometimes our problems are due to things we don’t really know we’re doing. I was holding the perception of earth someplace in my head, and that was getting imposed on the body. And thinking of the body as really solid, it seemed impossible to squeeze the breath into that lump of solidity. So you can think of the space in the atoms or between the atoms. Or you can think that your experience of the body is primarily energy. You look at the body in the mirror and what you see is solid. You hit it against things and it’s solid. But how you feel it from inside: That’s energy. So don’t use your perce...

"One perception I’ve found useful is one that Ajaan Fuang recommended. He said, there is a line of breath energy running down the middle of your body. When the breath comes in, it comes in to nourish that line, and when it goes out, it goes out of that line. So it’s not like you try to pull the breath in just through the nostrils. The breath is coming in from every direction, to fill up that line in the middle. Then you want to make sure the line doesn’t get squeezed out even as you breathe out. Keep it full, so that whatever breath energy is helpful stays in the body, and only those breath energies that seem excessive or unpleasant at the moment can go. Another useful perception is of the body as a big sponge, with all the holes in the sponge connected, so that when you breathe in one part of the body, it can connect with every other part of the body. Or you can find whatever other perceptions help to keep the breath as calm, to keep that sense of ease in the body as calm as poss...

"Years back, when I first went to stay with Ajaan Fuang, he said, "Your only responsibility in all your activities is to stay with the breath." He meant it in a way to unload my mind, to clear away thoughts of other responsibilities. What it did of course was to make the breath seem suddenly onerous. It was a weight. It was a responsibility, something I had to worry about all the time. But then as I worked with it, one of the big lessons came in learning how to be with that responsibility and not make it a weight, not make it a burden. After all, why should the breath be a burden? It's what you do to stay alive. It's the basic process, the basic force that keeps you alive. That was a good lesson in seeing how the mind can create problems out of even the simplest things, things that are in its own interest. Learning how to be with the breath comfortably, learning how to breathe comfortably: You can make that a big issue, a big weight. But if you step ...

"Sometimes you can get stuck on very subtle breathing, which may seem very still, very relaxing, very calming, and you stick with it sometimes for days on end. What it can sometimes do, though, is to drain the energy in the body. Years ago, Yom Thaem, an old woman who had been studying with Ajaan Fuang, came to stay at the monastery. As we were sitting in meditation one evening, he called out to her. “You’ve been stuck on cool breathing now for weeks,” he said. “It’s not good for you” — cool breathing here meaning a very subtle, very still, very relaxed level of breath. Sometimes it’s good to breathe in a way that’s relaxing, but other times you’ve got to find a way of breathing that’s more energizing. You’ve got to learn how to read what your body needs." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Three Levels of Evaluation" (Meditations6)

"You don’t have to feel compelled to get the best possible breath. Don’t turn it into a chore. Make it something you enjoy. You’re here to play with the meditation. That was one of Ajaan Fuang’s instructions that always sounded the strangest. He said to meditate playfully. Not in a desultory way, but enjoy it. Think of all the different crazy ways you can breathe right now. It’s like getting a new stereo. You turn up the treble, you turn up the bass — not because you seriously want to hear your music all treble or all bass, but because it’s just fun to see what you can do with the machine. After you’ve explored some of the extremes, then you start fine-tuning it until you get it to the point where it sounds just right. The important thing is that the breath not become a chore. If breathing becomes a chore, that simply makes life that much heavier. The breath can be something you enjoy playing with. It can become your sport. Then you have something to play with all th...

"As you get more and more sensitive to the breath, you find that you develop the sensitivity you need to dig deeper into the heart. At the same time, it gives you a sense of exactly how much suffering you’re unnecessarily causing yourself even just by the way you breathe, something we do every day: breathe in, breathe out. Again, it’s just one of those things that’s part of life, but if you turn your attention to the breath and really focus on it, you begin to realize that there are comfortable breaths and uncomfortable breaths. And why on earth would you want to breathe an uncomfortable breath? Nobody’s forcing you. It’s just something you take for granted. But once someone points out, “Hey, you can breathe in a lot more comfortable ways,” you can start exploring that. And as you explore it, you become more sensitive to whole areas of your being in the present moment that you tended to cover up before, tended to ignore. So this simple technique we have of just being...

"As Ajaan Fuang used to say, “You have to be crazy about the meditation in order to do it well.” This is where, if you have obsessive tendencies, they’re useful. You have a few free minutes, you focus on your breath. You stop at a stop light, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a doctor’s office in a waiting room, you focus on your breath. You’re standing in line, you focus on your breath. You’re sitting in a boring meeting, you focus on your breath. Every time you’ve got a chance, you keep coming back to the breath. That kind of persistence is going to pay off." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Defeatism? - Anything But"