Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Breathe through your discomfort and dissolve it away. Let the breath create physical feelings of ease and fullness, and allow those feelings to saturate your whole body. This physical ease helps put the mind at ease as well. When you’re operating from a sense of ease, it’s easier to fabricate skillful perceptions as you evaluate your response to the issue with which you’re faced." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras"

"Breathe through your discomfort and dissolve it away. Let the breath create physical feelings of ease and fullness, and allow those feelings to saturate your whole body. This physical ease helps put the mind at ease as well. When you’re operating from a sense of ease, it’s easier to fabricate skillful perceptions as you evaluate your response to the issue with which you’re faced." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras"

"Try to look at what in your mind is skillful and what’s unskillful, try to notice the qualities that lead to skillful action and unskillful action. You can start by asking those questions about your breath: What way of breathing feels good? What way of breathing doesn’t feel good? Pose that question in your mind and then experiment with different kinds of breathing. You’ll start noticing that certain rhythms of breathing or certain ways of conceiving the breath feel better than others. Then you ask yourself, “How can I maintain those ways of breathing? And how I you ride with the waves of change that go through your body?” Sometimes a particular rhythm feels good for a while, but then the body doesn’t need that rhythm anymore. It needs a different rhythm. How do you sense that? It’s like riding a surfboard. How do you sense shifts in the wave so you can stay balanced? And when you can maintain that sense of ease, how do you spread it through the body? This involves asking yourse...

"You want to keep things basic, simple. That way you maintain your focus, which is what it’s all about: getting the mind to be really solidly focused on one activity over and over and over again. Thinking about the breath, being aware of the breath, reminding yourself not to leave the breath: It’s a cluster of activities, but it’s focused in one direction, toward the breath. And as you get more precisely focused in, you can drop some of the extra activities. When the breath feels comfortable coming in, going out, think of spreading that sense of comfort throughout the body. When you can maintain that sense of full-body awareness as you breathe in, as you breathe out, there’ll come a point where you don’t have to evaluate things anymore. You can’t improve the breath and you see that evaluation is actually getting in the way of settling down further. So you simplify things. You drop the evaluation. Just stay with the sensation of the breath. This is a lot of what the p...

"As you work with the breath and try and make it more comfortable, you’re dropping, as the Buddha said, unskillful mental qualities. You’re not really thinking about the sensual pleasures you might look for tomorrow or the sensual pleasures you enjoyed today. You’re focused simply on how the breathing feels right now in the body, the space of the body as you feel it from within, which is a higher level of pleasure. As you develop and work with the breath energy, you develop a sense of ease, well-being, pleasure, called sukha  in Pali. Then there’s the word piti,  which usually is translated as “rapture,” but also means “refreshment.” Sometimes “rapture” seems a bit too strong as a description for what you feel. Other times, “rapture” seems just right, as when there’s a very strong, intense feeling of the energy going in waves through the body. These two very pleasant feelings come from the fact that your mind isn’t engaged in sensuality. It’s more engaged in just looking at th...

"So when you’re sitting here focusing on bodily fabrication, i.e., the breath, and you’re directing your thoughts and evaluating the breath, that’s verbal fabrication. Then there are the perceptions of the breath. How do you perceive the breath? Is it just a little bit of air coming in and out of the nose? How about thinking of the body as a big sponge with the breath coming in and out of the pores from all directions? What does that perception do to the way you feel the breath? What kind of sense of ease does it create? Or, instead of thinking of the breath as something you have to pull in from outside, remember that the breath is energy, and the energy doesn’t come from outside. It comes from within. The air comes from outside, but the movement of energy in the body that brings the air in is actually something that starts inside, from what Ajaan Lee calls the resting spots of the breath. These include the area right above the navel, the spot right at the end of the breastbone, t...

"Bit by bit you’ll find yourself adjusting to staying right here comfortably: that’s the directed thought, that’s the evaluation. But you don’t have to give those processes those names. Just be right here, be aware right here, be comfortable right here, and the fullness of your awareness will develop over time without your having to plan ahead, without your having to pace yourself. Give yourself fully right now. If you give yourself fully right now and if it grows fuller in the course of time, fine. If not, you’ve done everything you can, so there’s no need to worry about it. You don’t have to ask yourself where you are in the grand arc of the hour. You don’t have to save yourself for the last lap. It’s not like being a runner who has to pace himself. You give yourself fully to the breath right now, right now, and don’t have to worry about what you’re going to have left at the end of the hour. The full-giving right now is what’s going to see you through the hour. So, ...

"Breathe through your discomfort and dissolve it away. Let the breath create physical feelings of ease and fullness, and allow those feelings to saturate your whole body. This physical ease helps put the mind at ease as well. When you’re operating from a sense of ease, it’s easier to fabricate skillful perceptions as you evaluate your response to the issue with which you’re faced." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras"

"So now it’s time to bring the mind into line, keeping it with the breath. Wherever it branches out, you just have to cut off that branch and come right back to the breath. Actually, you don’t have to cut it. You just let it go and don’t pay any attention to it, don’t follow it, and it’ll die on its own. Just keep coming back to the breath, back to the breath. Each time you come back, reward yourself with a good, comfortable breath, something that feels really good deep down inside. If there’s any part of the body that seems to be deprived of breath energy, think of opening it up and the breath penetrating in, so that you can touch the Dhamma with the body. That’s an expression the Buddha uses to describe the mind in concentration: the sense of well-being that’s not just in your head. It’s throughout the body. You develop alertness, watching what’s going on, to check and make sure that everything is where you want it. If it’s not, you can change. This way, the mind develops concen...

"Everything you really need for happiness, for peace of mind, for liberation, is all centered right here at the breath. All the information you have to learn and understand, all the fabrications you want to master, are right here at the breath. When you’re focused on the breath, thinking about the breath, and evaluating the breath, the thinking and evaluation are called verbal fabrication. The breath itself is bodily fabrication. The perceptions and feelings that you develop working with the breath: Those are mental fabrications. Everything you need to understand for the sake of awakening is right here. So think about this in a way that gives you a sense of contentment, content with being with the breath, that everything you need to understand about the Dhamma is something you’ll be able to see from the point of view of staying with the breath, so you don’t have to go wandering outside. You don’t have to second-guess the different thoughts that come floating into you...

"You’d like to create a good state of mind. You want to have the breath flowing nicely. What does that mean? People get all tied up in knots, reading about how the breath has to be this way or that way. They think they’re actually going to be pumping air into their nerves. That’s not the case. The breath energy is already there in the body. It’s simply that in some places it’s not flowing well, or that you’ve been breathing in a way that’s laborious or unpleasant in the body. Part of that has to do with your perception of exactly what’s happening when you breathe. So one of the important parts of meditation is learning how to play with your perceptions. Think of the breath energy coming in and out of the pores. See what that’s like. Think of it coming in at certain spots in the body where there’s a trigger point — in other words, wherever there are some knots in your muscles. Think of the breath energy coming in right there, going through the knot. Or you can think of...

"Breathe through your discomfort and dissolve it away. Let the breath create physical feelings of ease and fullness, and allow those feelings to saturate your whole body. This physical ease helps put the mind at ease as well. When you’re operating from a sense of ease, it’s easier to fabricate skillful perceptions as you evaluate your response to the issue with which you’re faced." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Head & Heart Together: Bringing Wisdom to the Brahmavihāras"

"Find someplace, such as the breath, where you can stay with a sense of well-being. And when the question is: “What to do next? What to do next?” the answer is always, at least for the time being: “Just stay right here. Stay right here. Stay right here.” In the beginning, this requires some adjustment. That’s why in the first jhana, there’s directed thought and evaluation. You’re talking to yourself about how well you’re staying with the object: adjusting the mind, adjusting the object so that they fit together well. You hover around both the mind and the object. When you feel that the object is good enough, you can just be with the object. Just be with the breath. It gives you something to rest with." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Poison Your Fantasies"

"So instead of throwing out language or throwing out our social conditioning, we learn how to use them more skillfully. And working with the breath is an ideal place to start. You give space to the mind by breathing in a way that feels good. You can use your linguistic habits to talk to yourself about the breath: How does this breath feel? How does that breath feel? Where would it feel good to breathe right now? Which part of the body needs a larger dose of good breath energy? In this way you get more and more in touch with the immediate feeling of your body so that your linguistic habits can show immediate benefits. It feels good to breathe this way. It feels good to breathe that way. Your mind and your body are getting more intimate so that all the levels of fabrication — physical, verbal, and mental — start working together around a common sense of well-being. In this way they get to communicate with one another. The process of focusing on the breath in a skillful...

"These different levels of jhana are a home for the mind in which you settle down with the breath and a sense of ease and well-being. Then as you stay with this longer and longer, you begin to realize that you’ve got it all right here: everything you need for peace of mind, a sense of well-being and ease, the satisfaction that comes with a sense of physical and mental fullness or rapture. You can find it all with the breath. It’s simply a matter of sticking with it and developing a sensitivity to what kind of breathing really does feel good right now. In other words, you’ve got all the raw materials for happiness right here. You don’t have to go traveling around anywhere else. Just pay attention to what you’ve got. The mind has a habit of fabricating things, so have it fabricate right concentration. You’ve got the breath, which is bodily fabrication. You’ve got directed thought and evaluation, which are verbal fabrication. And you’ve got feelings and labels or perceptions, which a...

"You want to keep things basic, simple. That way you maintain your focus, which is what it’s all about: getting the mind to be really solidly focused on one activity over and over and over again. Thinking about the breath, being aware of the breath, reminding yourself not to leave the breath: It’s a cluster of activities, but it’s focused in one direction, toward the breath. And as you get more precisely focused in, you can drop some of the extra activities. When the breath feels comfortable coming in, going out, think of spreading that sense of comfort throughout the body. When you can maintain that sense of full-body awareness as you breathe in, as you breathe out, there’ll come a point where you don’t have to evaluate things anymore. You can’t improve the breath and you see that evaluation is actually getting in the way of settling down further. So you simplify things. You drop the evaluation. Just stay with the sensation of the breath. This is a lot of what the practice is: ma...

"When Ajaan Lee talks about comfortable breath sensations and uncomfortable ones, we already have comfortable breath sensations in at least some parts of the body. There’s already the potential for a sense of fullness, a sense of ease in different parts of the body. It’s simply a matter of applying our directed thought and evaluation. What that means is that we locate these potentials and then work with them for a while. The “working” here many times is simply a matter of protecting them. The word Ajaan Fuang used is “prakhawng,” which means you hover around something to make sure that it’s okay, that nothing happens to it. It’s like trying to start a fire on a windy day. You have to cup your hands around the little tiny flame you begin with, to make sure that the wind doesn’t blow it out, until finally it catches and starts to spread and finally reaches a point when it’s strong enough that you don’t have to cup it any more. So you might want to try a little exercise in how to l...

"You want to think about the breath very consistently and evaluate it very carefully. Give it your full sensitivity. How does the breath feel? Where do you feel it? If it doesn’t feel comfortable, what can you do to make it feel more comfortable? What way of experimenting with the breath is too heavy-handed, and what way is just right? These are things you have to find out by paying full attention, being very, very sensitive. Ajaan Fuang’s most frequent meditation advice was: Be observant. Watch the breath. Watch how the mind relates to the breath. Then try to figure out how can you get the two of them together, more and more snugly, more and more consistently, so that you’re with the breath all the way in, all the way out; then all the way in again, all the way out again, without break. You find that it interests you because, after all, the health of the body depends on the breath energy. At the very least, you want to make sure the breath energy is flowing well in the different ...

"You’d like to create a good state of mind. You want to have the breath flowing nicely. What does that mean? People get all tied up in knots, reading about how the breath has to be this way or that way. They think they’re actually going to be pumping air into their nerves. That’s not the case. The breath energy is already there in the body. It’s simply that in some places it’s not flowing well, or that you’ve been breathing in a way that’s laborious or unpleasant in the body. Part of that has to do with your perception of exactly what’s happening when you breathe. So one of the important parts of meditation is learning how to play with your perceptions. Think of the breath energy coming in and out of the pores. See what that’s like. Think of it coming in at certain spots in the body where there’s a trigger point — in other words, wherever there are some knots in your muscles. Think of the breath energy coming in right there, going through the knot. Or you can think of it coming in...

"Everything you really need for happiness, for peace of mind, for liberation, is all centered right here at the breath. All the information you have to learn and understand, all the fabrications you want to master, are right here at the breath. When you’re focused on the breath, thinking about the breath, and evaluating the breath, the thinking and evaluation are called verbal fabrication. The breath itself is bodily fabrication. The perceptions and feelings that you develop working with the breath: Those are mental fabrications. Everything you need to understand for the sake of awakening is right here. So think about this in a way that gives you a sense of contentment, content with being with the breath, that everything you need to understand about the Dhamma is something you’ll be able to see from the point of view of staying with the breath, so you don’t have to go wandering outside. You don’t have to second-guess the different thoughts that come floating into your mind, wonder...