Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"How do you adjust the breath? If you put too much pressure on the breath to adjust it, then no matter how much you adjust it, it’s not going to feel good because you can’t get a sense of ease through pressure. So you have to learn a light touch. Just hold in mind the perception: “The breath is going to feel good all the way in, all the way out,” and see what that does to the way the body actually breathes." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Discernment in Concentration"

"Bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. Breathe in long and out long for a couple of times, focusing on any spot in the body where the breathing is easy to notice, and your mind feels comfortable focusing. This could be at the nose, at the chest, at the abdomen, or any spot at all. Stay with that spot, noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don't force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your focus. Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of how it feels. Savor it, as if it were an exquisite sensation you wanted to prolong. If your mind wanders off, simply bring it back. Don't get discouraged. If it wanders 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Show it that you mean business, and eventually it will listen to you. If you want, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. If long breathing feels comfortable, stick with it. If it doesn't, change it to whatever rhythm feels soothing to the body. You can try shor...

"You breathe in the way that feels refreshing: It refreshes your torso, refreshes all the different parts of the body where you can feel the breathing process. It starts out very gently, just a sense that things feel okay; they feel like they’ve settled in where they belong. But if you give this sense of “okay” some space, give it some time, it’ll grow. So don’t put any squeeze on it. Breathe in in a way that doesn’t build up tension inside and you don’t hold onto any tension when you breathe out. Just protect that “okay” area wherever you feel it. Things feel full and pleasant. If you give them more time, that sense of feeling full will grow, that sense of pleasure will grow. Over time, you’ll find that you can tap into this more and more regularly." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Pain of Conviction"

"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....

"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...

"For bodily serenity, you work with the breath. Remember the Buddha’s instructions that once you’re aware of long breathing and short breathing, try to make yourself aware of the whole body and then notice the effect that the breath is having on the body. Then try to make that effect more serene, make it more refined. Try to breathe in a way that’s gentle to the body. This helps to calm things down within the body. All the different processes calm down. Whatever tightness you may feel here or there in the body: Think of it dissolving away. If there’s a sense that the breathing requires a lot of effort, just remind yourself: The breath is going to come in and out on its own. There are pores all over your body. You don’t have to pull it in or push it out. The breath will come in naturally, go out naturally. Any perception you can hold in mind that helps to make the breath easier: Experiment to see what way of picturing the breath to yourself helps to make the process of...

"We talk about giving rise to a feeling of pleasure with the breath, pleasure with the concentration. Where does it come from? You can’t push pleasure into the body. You have to realize that there are lots of little centers in the body, little sensation centers, and all you have to do is give them a little bit of space, and then a feeling of what seems like neutrality to begin with will actually become pleasurable — if you give it space, if you’re not pushing and pulling it around too much. Then the more consistently you can maintain that sense of space, the greater the pleasure grows. And you let it spread without pressure. It becomes rapture: a sense of refreshment, fullness." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Isolating the Aggregates" (Meditations6)

"How do you adjust the breath? If you put too much pressure on the breath to adjust it, then no matter how much you adjust it, it’s not going to feel good because you can’t get a sense of ease through pressure. So you have to learn a light touch. Just hold in mind the perception: “The breath is going to feel good all the way in, all the way out,” and see what that does to the way the body actually breathes." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Discernment in Concentration"

"One of the instructions in breath meditation is to learn how to breathe in and out in a way that makes you sensitive to rapture, makes you sensitive to pleasure in the body. Now, it takes a while to figure out how to do that. Part of it has to do with the way you breathe, part of it has to do with how you focus your mind. But it’s a skill you can figure out. Part of the problem, of course, is with that word, “rapture.” It sounds like Saint Teresa going into ecstasies. And sometimes there is a very strong sense of thrill that goes through the body. But what the Buddha’s having you focus on more is the sense of refreshment. You breathe in the way that feels refreshing: It refreshes your torso, refreshes all the different parts of the body where you can feel the breathing process. It starts out very gently, just a sense that things feel okay; they feel like they’ve settled in where they belong. But if you give this sense of “okay” some space, give it some time, it’ll g...

"Bring your attention to the sensation of breathing. Breathe in long and out long for a couple of times, focusing on any spot in the body where the breathing is easy to notice, and your mind feels comfortable focusing. This could be at the nose, at the chest, at the abdomen, or any spot at all. Stay with that spot, noticing how it feels as you breathe in and out. Don't force the breath, or bear down too heavily with your focus. Let the breath flow naturally, and simply keep track of how it feels. Savor it, as if it were an exquisite sensation you wanted to prolong. If your mind wanders off, simply bring it back. Don't get discouraged. If it wanders 100 times, bring it back 100 times. Show it that you mean business, and eventually it will listen to you. If you want, you can experiment with different kinds of breathing. If long breathing feels comfortable, stick with it. If it doesn't, change it to whatever rhythm feels soothing to the body. You can try short breathing, ...

"You breathe in the way that feels refreshing: It refreshes your torso, refreshes all the different parts of the body where you can feel the breathing process. It starts out very gently, just a sense that things feel okay; they feel like they’ve settled in where they belong. But if you give this sense of “okay” some space, give it some time, it’ll grow. So don’t put any squeeze on it. Breathe in in a way that doesn’t build up tension inside and you don’t hold onto any tension when you breathe out. Just protect that “okay” area wherever you feel it. Things feel full and pleasant. If you give them more time, that sense of feeling full will grow, that sense of pleasure will grow. Over time, you’ll find that you can tap into this more and more regularly." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Pain of Conviction"

"How do you adjust the breath? If you put too much pressure on the breath to adjust it, then no matter how much you adjust it, it’s not going to feel good because you can’t get a sense of ease through pressure. So you have to learn a light touch. Just hold in mind the perception: “The breath is going to feel good all the way in, all the way out,” and see what that does to the way the body actually breathes." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Discernment in Concentration"

"What we’re working on here is something that’s called piti in Pali. You can translate it as rapture; you can translate it as fullness; you can translate it as refreshment. The basic meaning is that it feels really good, really nourishing. The Buddha lists it as one of the energizing factors of awakening. It’s also a kind of food. There’s that passage where he says that, when we meditate, we feed on rapture like the radiant gods. The problem with the word rapture is that sometimes it seems too intense for the way some people experience it. Some people feel it as a tingling through the body, their hair standing on end. For others, it’s gentler — a sense of balanced, full well-being. Some people feel it in waves coming over the body. And for some people it’s so intense that the body starts moving. The intensity is not a measure of the intensity of your concentration. It’s more a measure of how starved of energy the body’s been feeling. If it’s been feeling really starved, the sens...

"The Pāli word for “rapture” (pīti) is related to the verb pivati, to drink. Several passages in the discourses describe rapture as the food of the Radiant devas, inhabitants of a brahmā world into which meditators can be reborn through mastery of the second jhāna (DN 1; Dhp 200; AN 4:123). “Rapture” thus carries connotations of refreshment and rejuvenation. In the standard similes for the four jhānas, rapture is symbolized by movement: the movement of water through the bathman’s ball of bathing powder in the simile for the first jhāna, and the natural movement of spring water throughout the lake in the simile for the second. Only in the third jhāna, where rapture is absent, does the water of the lake fall still. Rapture can be felt both mentally and physically, a fact indicated by two passages from the discourses. The description of the seven factors for awakening in MN 118 speaks of the meditator who has attained rapture as a factor of awakening as being “enraptured in heart.” T...

"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." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Power of Perception"

"For bodily serenity, you work with the breath. Remember the Buddha’s instructions that once you’re aware of long breathing and short breathing, try to make yourself aware of the whole body and then notice the effect that the breath is having on the body. Then try to make that effect more serene, make it more refined. Try to breathe in a way that’s gentle to the body. This helps to calm things down within the body. All the different processes calm down. Whatever tightness you may feel here or there in the body: Think of it dissolving away. If there’s a sense that the breathing requires a lot of effort, just remind yourself: The breath is going to come in and out on its own. There are pores all over your body. You don’t have to pull it in or push it out. The breath will come in naturally, go out naturally. Any perception you can hold in mind that helps to make the breath easier: Experiment to see what way of picturing the breath to yourself helps to make the process of...

"For bodily serenity, you work with the breath. Remember the Buddha’s instructions that once you’re aware of long breathing and short breathing, try to make yourself aware of the whole body and then notice the effect that the breath is having on the body. Then try to make that effect more serene, make it more refined. Try to breathe in a way that’s gentle to the body. This helps to calm things down within the body. All the different processes calm down. Whatever tightness you may feel here or there in the body: Think of it dissolving away. If there’s a sense that the breathing requires a lot of effort, just remind yourself: The breath is going to come in and out on its own. There are pores all over your body. You don’t have to pull it in or push it out. The breath will come in naturally, go out naturally. Any perception you can hold in mind that helps to make the breath easier: Experiment to see what way of picturing the breath to yourself helps to make the process of...