Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"I had a student one time who had Marfan syndrome. It’s a hereditary disease of the connective tissue, and people who have it tend to die about age 20 or 30. In addition to having the disease, and she was a co-founder of the National Marfan Foundation. She died around the age of 50 from a stroke. Before she died, she asked that I preside at her memorial service. So at the service, there was a combination of her Buddhist friends and her Marfan friends. At the beginning of the ceremony, I gave a guided meditation, like the guided meditation I’ve been giving to you. Afterwards, people gave eulogies. One woman talked about how her nephew had Marfan syndrome. When he was 13, he had to go in for a heart operation, and when he came out of the operation, no amount of medication could help relieve the pain. So my student went to visit this boy to see if she could help. She listened to his symptoms for a while and then she said, “Breathe through your butt.” The woman who was giving the eul...

"The emphasis on fabrication means that you’re not just learning about the breath here. You’re also learning about the mind. Some people object to doing breath meditation, on the grounds that when you die, you won’t have a breath to focus on, so your meditation object will abandon you right when you need it. But given that we’re using the breath to become more sensitive to the mind’s activity of fabrication, the breath is actually leading us to the mind in a way that helps us master the processes of fabrication, knowledge that will be especially useful both in daily life and as we encounter death." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mindfulness of Breathing"

"There are pains in some parts of your body, pleasant feelings in other parts, and nondescript neutral feelings in still other parts. It’s not that you have just one feeling at any one time. It’s not the case that there’s nothing but pain. As Ajaan Lee once said, if your body were totally in pain with no pleasure at all, you’d die. You’re alive, so there is pleasure someplace. Ferret it out. Look for it." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Second Frame of Reference"

"As we practice concentration, we get the mind into a different kind of pleasure. When it finally does settle down with the breath and there’s a sense of really belonging here in the body, that’s a different order of pleasure, and it’s much better than sensual pleasure. It puts you on a wavelength where — if you happened to die at this moment and didn’t lose this sense of being centered right here — you’d go to a really good place. So learn how to appreciate this pleasure and see it as higher and better and more reliable than the pleasures that come from sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations. That allows you to think more calmly about the fact that you could go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Think Calmly about Death"