Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

Majjhima Nikāya 118 Ānāpānasati Sutta: Mindfulness of Breathing (extract), translated from the Pāli by Thānissaro Bhikkhu “Now how is mindfulness of in-&-out breathing developed & pursued so as to be of great fruit, of great benefit? “There is the case where a monk, having gone to the wilderness, to the shade of a tree, or to an empty building, sits down folding his legs crosswise, holding his body erect, and establishing mindfulness to the fore.1 Always mindful, he breathes in; mindful he breathes out. “[1] Breathing in long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in long’; or breathing out long, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out long.’ [2] Or breathing in short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing in short’; or breathing out short, he discerns, ‘I am breathing out short.’ [3] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in sensitive to the entire body.’2 He trains himself, ‘I will breathe out sensitive to the entire body.’ [4] He trains himself, ‘I will breathe in calming bodily fabrication.’3 He train...

"Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe. Simply by learning how to breathe calmly around the emotional problem, you can begin to take it apart. Just two weeks ago, I was reading that some scientists had done a study showing that calm breathing calms the mind. How do you say “Duh!” in French? Mais bien sûr . Of course it calms the mind. We’ve been doing that for 2,500 years." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind"

"Years back, I knew someone who was going to study in Thailand and she’d been practicing Ajaan Lee’s method. She was staying with an ajaan who didn’t have any background in Ajaan Lee’s method, and he told her, “Why are you adjusting the breath? It’s just a fabrication.” She told me that, and my response, although I didn’t say it to him, was, “Well, why are you washing your body? Why do you clean your body? It’s just a fabrication.” You have to take care of these things because they’ll then take care of you. And in taking care of them skillfully, you learn an awful lot about the body and the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Tapping into the Breath" (Meditations9)

"You hold a label in your mind and apply it to what you’re experiencing. The label can be a mental picture, a feeling, a word, or even just a kinetic sense that you have of the breath in the body. In other words, you might have a mental picture of how the breath goes into the body. Or you may create a particular feeling through the breath. You can focus on a point someplace around the middle of the chest and find a quality of feeling there that feels nice. You try to maintain that niceness, that pleasant feeling, so that nothing in the in- breath and nothing in the out-breath touches it or disturbs it. This is where the Buddha’s image of holding a baby chick in your hand comes in handy. You gently hold that nice feeling all way through the in-breath, and all the way through the out-breath, adjusting your breathing so that it doesn’t disturb the feeling. Or you can just keep in mind the word “breath,” ”breath,” “breath,” as a way of reminding yourself not to leave the breath, when ...

"You explore variations in the breath to see which ways of breathing will be energizing — to provide the refreshment — and comfortable, to provide the pleasure. When those feelings have been activated, you expand your awareness to fill the whole body and let those feelings spread throughout the body as you’re aware of it. As we noted above, this is where it’s very helpful to think of breathing as a whole-body process, so that the pleasure and refreshment can spread along with the flow of breath energy. In this way, you have body, feelings, and mind all occupying the same space: Awareness and a feeling of pleasure and refreshment fill your sense of the body. You energize the body in this way — this corresponds to the step of gladdening the mind in the third tetrad — and then you calm bodily fabrication. In other words, you let the breathing grow calm." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Undaunted: The Buddha’s Teachings on Aging, Illness, Death, & the Deathless"

" Note 2. The commentaries insist that “body” here means the full length of the breath, but this is unlikely in this context, for three reasons: (a) The first two steps already require being aware of the entire length of the breath. Otherwise, the meditator wouldn’t know if a breath was short or long. (b) The fourth step — without further explanation — refers to the breath as “bodily fabrication.” If the Buddha were using two different terms to refer to the breath — “body” and “bodily fabrication” — in such close proximity, he would have been careful to signal that he was redefining his terms (as he does below, when explaining that the first four steps in breath meditation correspond to the practice of focusing on the body in and of itself as a frame of reference). But he doesn’t. (c) As AN 10:20 indicates, the fourth step refers to bringing the mind to the fourth jhāna, a state in which in-and-out breathing grows still (SN 36:11; AN 10:72) and the body is filled w...

"If you think of the breath simply as the air coming in and out of the nose, that influences how you’re going to breathe and the way you experience the breath. But if you think about the energy in the body as being breath, then it can go anywhere in the nervous system. It can go through anything at all. That gives you another perception. It’s going to change the way you actually experience the breath. You can start to think of all those little tiny nerve endings going all the way out to the pores of your skin. They’ve got breath energy, too. If you hold that perception in mind, how does that change the way you breathe? How does it change the way you feel in the present moment? Does it feel more pleasant? If not, what other perception of breathing can you think of that would? So as you focus on working and playing with the breath, you’re getting some conscious experience in learning how to manipulate what the Buddha calls bodily fabrication, verbal fabrication, and me...

"In the course of working through these [breath] energies, you get more sensitive to how thoughts form. The formation of a thought has both a physical side and a mental side, and the breath is the ideal place to see this. After all, it is a physical property, but of the physical properties, it’s closest to the mind and the most sensitive to what’s going on in the mind. When a thought comes up, you can see that it reverberates both in the body and in the mind. You make up your mind that you’re not going to, as they say in Thai, continue the weave of the thought. As soon as a thought appears, you zap it. In other words, you take that skill you have of breathing through patterns of tension, and use it wherever you sense any tension around the inchoate thought. You don’t have to even think of whether it’s physical or mental tension at that point. But there’s an act of construction, an act of fabrication, beginning to put things together, and there’s going to be some tension and some s...

"Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe. Simply by learning how to breathe calmly around the emotional problem, you can begin to take it apart. Just two weeks ago, I was reading that some scientists had done a study showing that calm breathing calms the mind. How do you say “Duh!” in French? Mais bien sûr . Of course it calms the mind. We’ve been doing that for 2,500 years." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind"

"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"

"The way you focus on the body has an impact on how you perceive the body, how you actually sense the body. We think of sensations as being primary, the raw material, the basic building blocks of experience, but there are conscious decisions being made that precede the sensations. Look at the teaching on dependent origination. Sankhara, or “fabrication” is way down there, prior to the sensations you feel in terms of form, feeling, and so forth. So how are you going to fabricate the body? If there are feelings of tension in the body, sometimes that’s a sign of too much earth property, so you can think of the breath. This is one of the reasons we start with the breath. It’s the property that’s most easily manipulated — classically it’s called the kaya-sankhara, the factor that fashions the body. It’s also the property that most directly works through tension. Wherever there’s a sense of tension, focus on it and see if you can get a sense of gentle, healing motion going through it....

"With the breath, you can see that it is a kind of fabrication. The way you breathe sometimes goes totally on automatic pilot, but there is an intentional element, and all too often that automatic pilot disguises some underlying intentions you don’t notice. So you try to bring them up into consciousness. Ask yourself: “I’m deciding when to breathe in, when to breathe out, so how can I do that well? How can I find a sense of ease and well-being through the breath? And then how can I calm the effect of the breath on the mind?” " ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Anupassana" (Meditations10)

"So we’re learning the skills we need to bring to our experience, and we start with the breath. This is one of the fabrications, as the Buddha calls it: one of the intentional elements we bring to experience. Try to get really sensitive to how you breathe. Most of our lives, we’re interested in other things. The breath gets pushed into the background. It goes on automatic pilot. As a result, we don’t get as much out of it as we could. So now as we meditate, we’re learning to be more sensitive to this dimension of our experience. The more you get sensitive to the breathing and its impact on the body, the more you see that it’s going to have an impact on the mind. You can adjust the breath, work the breath energies in the body so that they have a good impact. At the same time, you’re priming yourself to be alert, at the very least, to what you’re bringing with the body, because the body is where emotions get lodged. A thought comes through the mind, and it’s not just a thought. It g...

"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...

"The steps in this second tetrad are these: You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure, to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication — which are your feelings and perceptions — and then to breathe in and out calming mental fabrication. With regard to the first step, of inducing rapture, note that the word for rapture here, pīti, can also mean refreshment. In some instances and for some people, these sensations will be strong and clearly rapturous, even ecstatic. For others, they will be gentler and simply refreshing. This is not a measure of the power of your concentration. It’s simply an indicator of how much energy your body has been lacking, and how it responds when the energy becomes more full. The Buddha says elsewhere that the kind of rapture you’re trying to induce here is both physical and mental. You induce physical rapture or fullness by the way you breathe; you induce mental rapture by the percept...

Question: If I correctly understood your teaching this morning, the breath should be a pleasant flow, with no holding or pressing, etc. In yoga practice, there is kapalbhati breathing and alternate-nostril breathing, where we hold the breath for 16, 20, or even more counts, which is not always pleasant. How is this breathing technique related to meditative breathing? Thanissaro Bhikkhu: The technique we’re teaching here is basically designed to get the mind energized through the processes of bodily and mental fabrication and then get it to calm down with a sense of ease. In other words, the main emphasis is on the effect on the mind. We do it as a means for giving rise to insight and tranquility together. As for the yoga technique, that’s mainly for the sake of bodily health. But you can also use the Ajaan Lee technique for bodily health as well. He himself discovered this technique after he had had a heart attack deep in the forest, and he was able to recover from the heart attack ...

"Years back, I knew someone who was going to study in Thailand and she’d been practicing Ajaan Lee’s method. She was staying with an ajaan who didn’t have any background in Ajaan Lee’s method, and he told her, “Why are you adjusting the breath? It’s just a fabrication.” She told me that, and my response, although I didn’t say it to him, was, “Well, why are you washing your body? Why do you clean your body? It’s just a fabrication.” You have to take care of these things because they’ll then take care of you. And in taking care of them skillfully, you learn an awful lot about the body and the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Tapping into the Breath" (Meditations9)

"Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe. Simply by learning how to breathe calmly around the emotional problem, you can begin to take it apart. Just two weeks ago, I was reading that some scientists had done a study showing that calm breathing calms the mind. How do you say “Duh!” in French? Mais bien sûr . Of course it calms the mind. We’ve been doing that for 2,500 years." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind"

"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...

"Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe. Simply by learning how to breathe calmly around the emotional problem, you can begin to take it apart. Just two weeks ago, I was reading that some scientists had done a study showing that calm breathing calms the mind. How do you say “Duh!” in French? Mais bien sûr . Of course it calms the mind. We’ve been doing that for 2,500 years." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind"