Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"You’re ready to learn from the meditation regardless of how well or how poorly it may go. You’re not so neurotic or brittle that you have to pretend that there is no such thing as poor meditation. Sometimes the meditation just doesn’t work. Okay, it doesn’t work. Recognize that it’s not going well and pose some questions in your mind. Exactly what’s going wrong? Tease things out. Is there something wrong with the breath, something wrong with the body? Is it the state of mind you’re bringing? The beliefs you’re bringing? Something that happened today and got you all stirred up? Learn how to separate these things out, so that regardless of how well or poorly the meditation goes, you know how to learn from it, to learn how to benefit from it. The lessons you learn, the benefits you get, may not be the ones you planned, but you’ve got to learn how to appreciate them so that your sense of conviction stays strong and gets more and more reliable. You learn to appreciate the...

"You’re ready to learn from the meditation regardless of how well or how poorly it may go. You’re not so neurotic or brittle that you have to pretend that there is no such thing as poor meditation. Sometimes the meditation just doesn’t work. Okay, it doesn’t work. Recognize that it’s not going well and pose some questions in your mind. Exactly what’s going wrong? Tease things out. Is there something wrong with the breath, something wrong with the body? Is it the state of mind you’re bringing? The beliefs you’re bringing? Something that happened today and got you all stirred up? Learn how to separate these things out, so that regardless of how well or poorly the meditation goes, you know how to learn from it, to learn how to benefit from it. The lessons you learn, the benefits you get, may not be the ones you planned, but you’ve got to learn how to appreciate them so that your sense of conviction stays strong and gets more and more reliable. You learn to appreciate the results that...

"Watch out for the way the mind will often say, “Well, this is just the way things have to be. How can a mind function without some greed, aversion, and delusion?” It may not put it quite in those terms, but you have certain ways of talking to yourself that seem to be a normal part of how you survive in life. You come to think of them as your armor as you go through the day. Well, remember what armor is like. It’s big and clunky and it weighs you down. The armor you get with the breath, though — if you’re fully with the breath and the breath energy is good — creates a force field around you, where the things that you used to have to fight off with your spite or malice or whatever, you can deflect without having to use any of those unskillful mind states. You need to develop some confidence in the breath until see that you don’t really need these defilements. When you see that you don’t need them, you can begin looking more carefully into, well, why do you like them? T...

"So when you’re learning how to concentrate the mind, the ability to get the mind really, really still is an important part of minimizing the mental pain around whatever physical or mental pain there may be. You learn how to relax around the pain. This is why Ajaan Lee talked about finding a part of the body that’s comfortable. He compares it to a house where some of the floorboards are good and some are rotting. You don’t walk on the areas where the floorboards are rotting, you don’t lie down on them, because if you do, you’re going to fall through. You walk or lie down on the areas where the floorboards are sound. As he points out, if there were no place in the body at all where there was a sense of ease, you’d be dead. So there must be someplace. If you have trouble finding it, think about the sense of space around the body. Focus there. And every movement of the mind that would pull you away from that, just let it go, let it go. Focus on the sense of well-being that you create...

"The breath has a lot of potential. As the Buddha said, it can get the mind into a state of concentration where there’s full mindfulness, full alertness, awareness filling the body. And before you get there, there’s pleasure filling the body, rapture filling the body. It’s all in this constricted area right here: just your awareness with a body. It does have those potentials. There are also the potentials of the mind that are applied here, where you can watch to see how the mind fashions its experiences with its perceptions, with its ways of talking to itself. You can fashion them in all kinds of ways. But you want to fashion them in a way that leads the mind to want to settle down. These potentials are all here. Just be confident that they are, and then learn to look for them. But it’s important as you’re doing concentration that you do restrict yourself here. That forces you to make the most of what you’ve got." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Success with Breathing...

"Watch out for the way the mind will often say, “Well, this is just the way things have to be. How can a mind function without some greed, aversion, and delusion?” It may not put it quite in those terms, but you have certain ways of talking to yourself that seem to be a normal part of how you survive in life. You come to think of them as your armor as you go through the day. Well, remember what armor is like. It’s big and clunky and it weighs you down. The armor you get with the breath, though — if you’re fully with the breath and the breath energy is good — creates a force field around you, where the things that you used to have to fight off with your spite or malice or whatever, you can deflect without having to use any of those unskillful mind states. You need to develop some confidence in the breath until see that you don’t really need these defilements. When you see that you don’t need them, you can begin looking more carefully into, well, why do you like them? They provide ...

"The breath has a lot of potential. As the Buddha said, it can get the mind into a state of concentration where there’s full mindfulness, full alertness, awareness filling the body. And before you get there, there’s pleasure filling the body, rapture filling the body. It’s all in this constricted area right here: just your awareness with a body. It does have those potentials. There are also the potentials of the mind that are applied here, where you can watch to see how the mind fashions its experiences with its perceptions, with its ways of talking to itself. You can fashion them in all kinds of ways. But you want to fashion them in a way that leads the mind to want to settle down. These potentials are all here. Just be confident that they are, and then learn to look for them. But it’s important as you’re doing concentration that you do restrict yourself here. That forces you to make the most of what you’ve got." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Success with Breathing"