Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"The Buddha mentions that sometimes meditation can get dry, in which case it’s good to stop and think about themes that give a sense of refreshment and inspiration to the mind. You might want to think of all the people who have been good to you through your life. An attitude of gratitude can often give rise to a sense of ease and well-being. Then notice that the breath changes when you’re thinking thoughts that are good like this. Then let that same ease of breath continue as you drop the thought and return to the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Technique & Attitudes"

"If you want to understand the process of intention, one, set up a really good, clear intention. Like right now: You’re going to stay with the breath, to watch the breath come in, watch the breath go out. Then you learn how to augment that intention, because simply making the intention is not going to make it last. You’ve got to learn how to nurture it and keep it going. You can do this by experimenting with the breath. Make this a process of exploration. You’re not tying the mind down to something boring, you’re actually focusing on something interesting: this breath energy in the body. When we use the word breath, it’s not just the air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the whole movement of energy, the quality of energy throughout the body, all the way through the nervous system and out to every pore. How does your in-and-out breathing affect that energy? You can experiment with long breathing, short breathing, or in long, out short; in short, out long; deep, shallow, heavy,...

"If you find that you’re having trouble staying with the breath, you can use goodwill [mettā] as a way of reminding yourself that this is why you’re here: for your true happiness. It’s because you really do wish yourself well. This means that the meditation is not a burden that’s being placed on you. There are difficulties in the practice but you’re following this practice because you wish yourself well. You’re not trying to punish yourself. That attitude of goodwill is another guardian meditation." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Furnishing Your Home for the Mind"

"Just the way you breathe, sitting here focusing on your breath, makes a difference in the mind’s sense of well-being. And it’s potentially always there. Sometimes you’ll find yourself in a mood that takes a while to get back there, but it’s there. The more quickly you can tap into this sense of well-being, the easier it is to deal with unpleasant things coming up inside. You find that you can breathe right through them. And it helps to alleviate that pressure that you sometimes feel, that you’ve just got to get it out of your system by saying something nasty to someone else, or saying something hurtful, or whatever. The old attitude that “As long as I’m suffering, I might as well make everyone else suffer” — you realize that it doesn’t accomplish anything at all. It just makes things worse. So when the pressure builds up inside, you can tell yourself, “I can just breathe through it, allow it to dissipate.” This gives you an immediate handle that this conviction is som...

"When everything else seems to be crazy in life, just say, “Okay, I’m going to stay right here. If I don’t know anything else for sure, what I do know for sure is that the breath is now coming in, the breath is now going out. Let’s just hang out here for the time being.” In that way you can weather whatever crisis comes up, and it gives you the strength to deal with things, to recover. I was reading recently about studies they’ve done of major disasters and catastrophes — huge hurricanes, earthquakes, fires. They’ve noticed how people immediately after a catastrophe feel a bizarre sense of euphoria. They develop a sense of common purpose as they drop their normal concerns and band together to rebuild, to recover. Then, after a while, once things get back to normal again, everybody goes back to their old ways. As one researcher pointed out, right after a catastrophe there’s a suspension of time; people’s normal narratives stop functioning and there’s a sense of liberat...

"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...

"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 ...

"You stay with the breath, get to know the breath, be friends with the breath. This is important. Many times, when we’re working with a meditation object and things don’t seem to be going well, the meditation object seems to become our enemy. If that’s your attitude, you’ll never be able to settle down with it. Realize that the breath is your friend. It’s what’s keeping you alive. If you get to know it, you find it has all sorts of other good qualities, other than maintaining mere survival. It can create a sense of ease, a sense of well-being, here in the present moment. You breathe in and feel full throughout the body; you breathe out and feel relaxed throughout the whole body. There’s a sense of energy and well-being that comes when you get to know the breath and learn to deal with it properly. When the sense of ease, energy, and well-being is solid, you can turn your attention to the issue of suffering." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Bright Tunnel"

"As the Buddha said, a real test of your discernment is seeing the things that you like to do that are going to give trouble in the long run, and learning how to talk yourself out of them. The same with the things that you don’t like to do, but are going to be good for you in the long run: like meditating every day. You’re able to talk yourself into wanting to do them. You have to ask yourself: Well, why don’t you like it? You’re just sitting here breathing, and if the breath is uncomfortable, you’ve got permission to make it comfortable. Experiment, learn to gain some control, learn to gain some familiarity with your own breathing. After all, this is going to be with you all the way to the end. If you can gain some sense of how to make the breath comfortable, it makes everything a lot easier. You have better associations with the meditation, so that it’s something you remember that you do like to do. It’s a comfortable time. Even if your mind is wandering off, every time you com...

"When you’re focused on the breath, it’s good not to hold anything back. Just think of yourself plunging into the breath and the body, totally. The reward is that you develop an all-around experience of ease and refreshment. If part of you is pulled back, there’s a part of you that’s not sharing in this, that’s not gaining anything of real value. So try to come to the practice with the attitude that it’s all about giving." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Better to Give than Consume" (Meditations6)

"Start out by trying to breathe in a way that feels really good, really satisfying inside. You’re going to be giving up a number of other pleasures as you practice, but the compensation is that you can develop a sense of well-being by being right here, breathing in, breathing out, simply being very sensitive to the process of breathing. And you’re totally free to breathe any way you like. The Dhamma doesn’t say you have to breathe long, or breathe short or whatever. Here is one area where your preferences can reign for the time being. What kind of breathing do you want to focus on now? What kind of breathing would you like to create for yourself to focus on? Go ahead and create it. As you do this, you’re learning an important lesson: There’s a fair amount in the present moment that you can shape. So, shape it in a good direction. Turn it into a path, something that goes someplace. All too many pleasures are not paths at all. You experience them and then they’re gone,...

"Have goodwill [mettā] towards your breathing, compassion, appreciation, equanimity for your breathing. In other words, allow the breath to be comfortable so 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 become more impressive with time. You’ve got to give them a little space. It’s like oak trees: When they first come out of the ground, they’re pretty small — a little tiny acorn. Of an even better analogy is a coastal redwood tree, which has 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 the sense of well-being in the body. First find areas that are simply not in pain, t...

"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...

"Regard each present moment as a gift. There’s something new that’s going to come, there’s a new potential for energy in each present moment. In this way, what’s been going through the day, the narratives you’ve been telling yourself in the course of the day, don’t have to determine the meditation right now. You’ve got this breath; you’ve got this opportunity to talk to yourself in a new way. You can breathe in a new way; you can hold new perceptions in mind. And as you change the dialogue inside, and change the pictures you hang on the wall — in other words, the perceptions that run things — you find that even though the breath may not be the best breath possible, at least you’ve got the right attitude. After all, the attitude is what you’re going to be able to take with you, even as you leave the body." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Free Sources of Energy"

"If you find that you’re having trouble staying with the breath, you can use goodwill [mettā] as a way of reminding yourself that this is why you’re here: for your true happiness. It’s because you really do wish yourself well. This means that the meditation is not a burden that’s being placed on you. There are difficulties in the practice but you’re following this practice because you wish yourself well. You’re not trying to punish yourself. That attitude of goodwill is another guardian meditation." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Furnishing Your Home for the Mind"

"The second question is, “As you’re focusing on the breath, why do you mess around with the breath? Why don’t you just leave it alone?” The answer is that it’s very hard to leave the breath alone because the breath is an intentional process in the body. It’s what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication, and we have a lot of issues with the breath. Often we don’t realize it, but they’re there. You can start digging them up as you meditate. You find that as you work with the breath energy in certain parts of the body, memories come up. Attitudes come up. Emotions come up, because the way you breathe is an important part of the emotions. There was once a teacher who heard that one of my former students was working on the breath this way. He said to her, “Why are you fooling around with the breath? Why are you trying to straighten out the breath? The breath is just a fabrication. It’s just a sankhara.” She mentioned that to me, and I told her that if he had said that to me, I would have...

Question: In the teachings called The Basics, you talk about the possibility of comparing our attitudes to the breath to those of the brahmavihāras . The tensions that I feel in my body have developed so that in the course of my practice they now occupy principally only one part of the body. So in reciting the names of the brahmavihāras like a mantra, I find that I can address myself a bit to both sides. That permits me to better stay in contact with this difference between the two sides of the body. Is it possible that a chant that you recite internally is one of the tools you can use in meditation? And is it wise to choose a tool specifically for the difficulty you’re encountering? If so, could you please give me some examples? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: There are times when chanting a particular word will help, and this will vary from person to person. But when I talked about using the brahmavihāras or comparing them to your approach to the breath, I was thinking not only of the names...

"Have good will [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 ...

"The Buddha mentions that sometimes meditation can get dry, in which case it’s good to stop and think about themes that give a sense of refreshment and inspiration to the mind. You might want to think of all the people who have been good to you through your life. An attitude of gratitude can often give rise to a sense of ease and well-being. Then notice that the breath changes when you’re thinking thoughts that are good like this. Then let that same ease of breath continue as you drop the thought and return to the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Technique & Attitudes"

"Start out by trying to breathe in a way that feels really good, really satisfying inside. You’re going to be giving up a number of other pleasures as you practice, but the compensation is that you can develop a sense of well-being by being right here, breathing in, breathing out, simply being very sensitive to the process of breathing. And you’re totally free to breathe any way you like. The Dhamma doesn’t say you have to breathe long, or breathe short or whatever. Here is one area where your preferences can reign for the time being. What kind of breathing do you want to focus on now? What kind of breathing would you like to create for yourself to focus on? Go ahead and create it. As you do this, you’re learning an important lesson: There’s a fair amount in the present moment that you can shape. So, shape it in a good direction. Turn it into a path, something that goes someplace. All too many pleasures are not paths at all. You experience them and then they’re gone, that’s it. Or...