Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Don’t be surprised if something else will come along and push you off the breath or lead you astray, but don’t just take it lying down. Get up and focus on the breath again. Know that you’re going to have some contrary impulses, but they don’t have to have the upper hand. You just keep coming back, coming back, coming back. Each time you come back, try to reward yourself with a really nice breath. And try to figure out ways that make it interesting to stay here. Explore the different ways that the breathing feels in the body. When you breathe in, which parts of the body are participating in the breath process? Which parts are actually doing the work? Which ones are getting some nourishment? And which parts don’t seem to be having any role at all? Can you get everybody involved? Think of the breath not just as the air coming in and out of the lungs but also as the flow of energy in the body. You know that if the energy flows throughout the body, every part of the bod...

"Give the mind a chance to settle down, and try to learn just the right amount of pressure to put on the breath to keep it there. For a lot of people, if you could take a picture of what they’re doing to their mind as they’re practicing concentration, it’s as if they’re strangling it, which is why the mind rebels. Other people are just barely touching it, so of course the mind wanders off. The Canon has an image of holding a baby chick in your hand. If you squeeze the chick too much, it is going to die; if you hold it too loosely, it’s going to fly away. So you have to be sensitive to what’s just the right amount of pressure to place on the breath, to place on the body. Actually, you can’t place pressure on the breath. As soon as you do, you’re not really focusing on the breath, you’re focusing on the solid or the liquid parts of the body. The breath is something that flows back and forth or stays still, but you can’t catch it. You can simply be aware of where it is. ...

"As you get the mind into right concentration, feelings of pleasure and refreshment develop, which you then work through the body in the same way that a bathman works water through a ball of “bathing dough.” Becoming sensitive to how the energy flows through the various parts of the body is very useful in allowing those feelings to spread and saturate your sense of the body, giving the mind a place to settle in with a strong sense of wanting to stay." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Meditation in Practice"

"Get the mind really to settle down and be at ease with one object: the breath. Think of the breath as the energy flowing through the body that helps the air come in and out of the lungs. And you can look at that flow of energy anywhere in the body. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths and notice: Where do you feel that energy flow most prominently? Focus there. And then ask yourself if it feels good. If the way you’re breathing right now doesn’t feel good, you can change it. Make it longer, shorter, or in-long out-short, in-short out-long, fast, slow, heavy or light. There are lots of ways you can adjust your breathing. Try different ones for a while and see which ones seem to have the best effect, are easiest to stay with, and actually feel really good. Notice that some areas of the body are more sensitive to the flow of breath energy than the others. For some people, the most sensitive spot is in the area around the heart. For others, it’s in the a...

"Learn how to develop an interest in the breath. After all, it is your  breath. It’s the force of life that keeps you with the body, keeps the mind and the body together. And if the breath is good, it’s nourishing. If the breath energies flowing through the nervous system and circulatory system are good, that’s going to have a good impact on the health of the body. When the body feels healthy and strong, the mind is going to find it easier to stay here. So take an interest in this and develop the ability to ask questions not only about your meditation, but also about the rest of your life." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Ask Yourself the Buddha's Question"

"When anger comes, when fear comes, when you’re lying awake at night and can’t get to sleep, you can focus on the breath. It’s like having something to play with, or a friend to talk to at any time at all. And as with any friend, when you don’t know the friend very well, you just sit there and you have no idea what to say. The friend doesn’t know what to say. But after a while, you start asking questions, and the other person starts answering. If you don’t ask the questions, there are no answers. So you can ask questions about the breath. What kind of breathing would be good for your lungs? What kind of breathing would be good for your intestines? How about the tension in your shoulders or a pain in your back: What kind of breathing is good for that? As you get to know the breath, you realize it’s not just air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the whole flow of energy in the body. For the most part, we ignore it, and then we miss out on the benefits that can come f...

" 1) You’re not concerned with your breath as it might be observed by a doctor or a machine outside you. You’re concerned with your breath as only you can know it: as part of your direct experience of having a body. If you have trouble thinking of these energies as “breath,” see if thinking of them as “breathing sensations” or “body sensations” helps — whatever enables you to get in touch with what’s actually there. 2) This is NOT a matter of trying to create sensations that don’t already exist. You’re simply making yourself more sensitive to sensations that are already there. When you’re told to let the breath energies flow into one another, ask yourself if the sensations you feel seem unconnected to one another. If they do, simply hold in mind the possibility that they can connect on their own. This is what it means to allow them to flow. 3) These energies are not air. They’re energy. If, while you’re allowing the breath energies to spread through the various parts of the bod...

"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...

"Hope lies right here in this fathom-long body, as he called it, with its perceptions and intellect. That’s where the potentials lie. In the body, of course, the first thing we’ve got is the breath. You can explore the breathing. There’s a lot more to the breath than just in and out. Try to notice, when it comes in, how does it come in? What are your subconscious actions around bringing the breath in? Do you have to tense up a part of the body? All too often, we tense up in our joints, in our extremities. It’s almost as if they act as a fulcrum so that the breath energy could be brought in, but remind yourself the breath energy is actually already there in the body. The air outside is what you bring in, but the breath energy is what flows inside and it doesn’t require any tension. So start with the fingers and work your way up, to relax the tension. I’ve noticed that the outline of the body, especially the outline of the hands, is a good place to start to relax and to keep things ...

"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"

"So do your best to get acquainted with the breath energy issues in the body, what it means for the breath to flow well, and be ingenious at finding new ways of solving new problems as they come up. That way, this area of the body, this area of the mind that tends to get closed off, you can start to reclaim and you can use that dimension of your awareness to your own advantage — your own skillful advantage. This is one of those meditative skills that’s meant to be used throughout the day, so don’t leave it on your meditation cushion. Take it with you. It’ll be your support in times of need." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reclaim Your Breath"

"So follow the Buddha’s instructions. Try to get sensitive to how the way you breathe has an impact on the body, and use the breath in a way that feels soothing, gives rise to feelings of pleasure, gives rise to feelings of refreshment. When the body’s been energized, then you can allow it to grow calm. At the same time, look at the perceptions you’re holding in mind right now. What kind of perception do you have of the breath? If you think of it simply as air coming in and out through the nostrils, it’s going to be hard to use the breath to help spread those feelings of ease and well-being around the body. But if you think of the breath as a flow of energy, it’ll be easier. After all, the muscles have to move, the body has to move so that the air can come in and out of the lungs — well, what is that movement? It’s breath energy. Where does it come from? Where does it originate in the body? And as you feel that movement spreading through the body, does it feel good or does it feel...

"Give the mind a chance to settle down, and try to learn just the right amount of pressure to put on the breath to keep it there. For a lot of people, if you could take a picture of what they’re doing to their mind as they’re practicing concentration, it’s as if they’re strangling it, which is why the mind rebels. Other people are just barely touching it, so of course the mind wanders off. The Canon has an image of holding a baby chick in your hand. If you squeeze the chick too much, it is going to die; if you hold it too loosely, it’s going to fly away. So you have to be sensitive to what’s just the right amount of pressure to place on the breath, to place on the body. Actually, you can’t place pressure on the breath. As soon as you do, you’re not really focusing on the breath, you’re focusing on the solid or the liquid parts of the body. The breath is something that flows back and forth or stays still, but you can’t catch it. You can simply be aware of where it is. ...

"You try to learn which ways of breathing feel good for the body. I’ve had people ask me what kind of breathing is best, and the answer is that you have to figure out for yourself what your body needs right now. What it needs right now may not be what it needs tomorrow, or even at the end of the hour. You have to be on top of what kind of breathing feels good each time you breathe: what kind of feelings you can create by the way you breathe, different feelings of pleasure in different parts of the body. When you have a feeling of pleasure, how do you spread it around? Think of the image of the bathman kneading water through the dough of the bath powder he’s trying to create. How do you do that in a way where you’re not forcing things too much, one where you allow things to flow? When you force the breath too much — even though it starts out comfortable — the fact that you’re squeezing it too much or pushing it too much turns it into something else. This is a skill you have to lear...

"The other set of problems has to do with your image of the breath energy in the body. For many people, this is a very strange or exotic notion, but actually it’s something very directly present to your awareness: your sense of the body as you feel it from within. It’s simply a matter of interpreting what you already feel in a different way. If you were to hold out your arm, the sensations that tell you that you have an arm there could be interpreted as perceptions of solidity or as perceptions of breath energy. The choice is yours. The sensations are the same, but the perceptions — and what you can do with the sensations based on the perception — will be different. The advantage of seeing the sensations as energy is that you can do things with energy that you cannot do with solidity. For example, if there’s a spot in your back that you think of as solid, you will simply leave it as solid. However, if you perceive it as energy and you realize that the energy is blocked, then you c...

"You might ask: “Is this stress caused by the way I perceive the breath? What kind of mental picture do I have of the breathing process? How does that add to the stress? Where does it create barriers in the body that prevent the breath energy from flowing in easily?” If you perceive the body as a bellows with only a tiny hole where the breath can come in, how about changing the perception to one where all your pores are holes where the breath can come in and out so you don’t have to pull it in or push it out? Also, think of the breath permeating everywhere in the body, like water in a sponge. You can find other ways of perceiving, too. Try asking: “When the breath comes in, what direction does it flow in the body? Does it flow up? If it’s flowing up, is it causing headaches?” If that’s the case, let it flow down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Wisdom of Wising Up" (Meditations6)

"Breathe in a way that’s refreshing, that gives rise to a sense of fullness in the body. Think of the breath as the energy flowing around the body, and ask yourself: Where does it feel good? Where does it not feel good? Focus on the areas that you can make good by the way you breathe, and hold in mind the right perceptions that allow that to happen. For example, be careful not to squeeze the end of the in-breath or the end of the out-breath to mark the difference between the two. Think of your experience of the body as being primarily energy. It’s not the case that you’re trying to pump the breath energy into a solid body. It’s more like allowing the breath to flow freely into the energy already there without any clear dividing line between the two. When you hold that perception in mind, it gives rise to a floating feeling in the body. See if you can maintain the position of your focus on that perception, on that feeling of lightness, buoyancy. This is what gives fl...

"Dealing with pain: Pain tends to get glommed together with the earth element, your sense of solidity in the body. Of course, that makes the pain seem solid. So to get past that, you learn how to question the solidity of the pain. You experience the breath before you experience the pain: Think of it in that way. We have a subconscious tendency, when there’s a pain, to allow the breath energy to flow up to the pain and then stop. Well, that makes it worse. We tighten up around the pain in our childish desire to put a boundary around it, to keep it from spreading, and then the energy can’t go through. We feel that the pain is there first and the breath comes second. So reverse that. The breath is first. The pain is second. And the breath is something other than pain. It’s a physical element, but pain is something else. It’s that sharpness, that heightened sense of displeasure or discomfort. But once you untangle it from the solidity of the body, you begin to realize it...

"3. A third common problem is an inability to feel breath sensations in different parts of the body . This is often a problem of perception: The breath sensations are there, but you don’t recognize them as such. Part of your mind may think that it’s impossible for there to be breath energies flowing through the body. If that’s the case, treat this as an exercise in imagination: Allow yourself to imagine that breathing energy can flow through the nerves, and imagine it flowing in some of the patterns recommended in the basic instructions. Or imagine it flowing in the opposite directions. At some point, you will actually start to feel the movement of energy in one part of the body or another, and then this will no longer be an exercise in imagination. In the meantime, survey the body and relax any patterns of tension you may feel in its various parts. Start with the hands and work up the arms. Then start with the feet and work up through the legs, the back, the neck, and into the he...

"This is one of the skills of meditation, learning how to relate to the body in such a way that you can generate a sense of pleasure that doesn’t have to depend on sights, sounds, smells, taste, or tactile sensations outside. It’s purely an internal matter through the way that you breathe and focus on the breath. Breathe in a way that feels refreshing: energizing if you need to be energized, relaxing if you need to be relaxed. Try to gain a sense of what kind of breathing is just right. That, of course, will deal with perception: how you perceive the flow of the energy in the body. There are ways of perceiving it that allow it to flow more easily than others will. So, try to hold in mind a perception that the body is, say, like a sponge: As you breathe in, breath energy can enter anywhere, go out anywhere, and it can flow anywhere inside." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Path of Aggregates"