Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"The bliss of concentration is an acquired taste. It’s a specific kind of happiness, which the Thais call santi-sukha, which literally means the happiness of peace. This is a basic level of well-being that we tend to overlook because it carries no excitement, no thrills. It’s just a basic sense of ease that’s steady, like the flame of an oil lamp. For most of us, we notice pleasure and pain because of the back-and-forth, the ups and the downs. When things are steady and on an even keel, we tend to lose interest and not notice them. But that’s precisely the kind of well-being we’re working on here: the kind of happiness that’s steady, that doesn’t go up and down. We have to learn how to appreciate that. As we stick with it more and more, we begin to realize that we wouldn’t want to be without this kind of happiness, without this kind of well-being. But then the next question is, is it really steady? As you examine it, you find that it, too, involves a certain level of...

"There’s a real lightness that comes from being able to find happiness simply sitting here breathing. It means that your happiness is dependent on very few contingencies. The people with money, the people with investments, are the ones who have to read the newspapers every day to figure out what’s safe, what’s not safe out there in the world. But if your investment is in the skills of the mind, then no matter what the situation, you’re secure." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Wilderness Wealth"

"Simply by sitting here breathing — the breath coming in, going out comfortably — you don’t require any sensual pleasures at all to make you happy. That’s what you learn when you meditate: You’ve got the resources inside that allow you to breathe in a way that feels really satisfying, and it’s all for free. It has nothing to do with sensual desires at all. That’s what renunciation means." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Five Precepts, Five Virtues"

"So, work with the breath right now. Create this state of becoming, because it functions in several ways that are going to be useful on the path. One is that when you have this state of well-being inside the body — with the happiness that comes from that state, the pleasure that comes from that, the sense of refreshment that can come from that — you can see that it’s a harmless pleasure, a harmless refreshment. It’s not like the pleasures of the senses. The pleasures of the senses can get us all wound up in greed, aversion, and delusion, and we end up doing a lot of unskillful things. But the pleasure that comes from breathing in a comfortable way has never led anybody to kill or steal or have illicit sex, to lie or to take intoxicants. It’s a safe pleasure, a nourishing pleasure. So it’s okay to indulge in it. And you realize it’s much better than a lot of the other pleasures you’ve had outside senses. That enables you to step back from the process of how you engage...

"If you find that you’re having trouble staying with the breath, you can use goodwill [mettā] as a way of reminding yourself that this is why you’re here: for your true happiness. It’s because you really do wish yourself well. This means that the meditation is not a burden that’s being placed on you. There are difficulties in the practice but you’re following this practice because you wish yourself well. You’re not trying to punish yourself. That attitude of goodwill is another guardian meditation." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Furnishing Your Home for the Mind"

"So spend some time right here. Breathe in, breathe out, in a way that feels refreshing, that feels soothing, that feels comfortable — whatever the body needs right now, whatever the mind needs right now. Give it some good breathing. That way, you’ll be able to find the peace that comes when you’re not constantly being pulled into paying attention outside. And from that peace comes a deep and lasting happiness." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Paying Attention Inside"

"Is there anybody out there that you can’t wish that happiness for? Learn how to straighten your thoughts out around this issue. When you can do that, it’s a lot easier to settle down with the breath or whatever your topic of meditation is. Otherwise, there are going to be simmering resentments that don’t allow you the measure of happiness that you could find if you could let go of them. So you’ve got to check out your mind to see what needs to be taken care of. If there are areas of unfinished business in terms of resentment or whatever, take care of them and then settle down with the breath. But here again, the instructions are not cast in stone. Sometimes it’s hard to feel goodwill [mettā] for others unless you can have some sense of well-being or refreshment inside yourself. So work on the breath first until that feels good, then you can start thinking about goodwill for others." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "No One Size Fits All"

"So if you’re looking for happiness outside, you’re going to have to fight other people off, whereas if you’re looking for happiness within, nobody going to be able to take your sensation of your breath away from you. That’s yours. Nobody else can come and say, “I want that sensation of the breath,” or “I want that sensation of the body as you feel it from within,” or “I want your sensation of your mind.” They can’t take it. It’s yours. So you’re free to work with these areas of your awareness that are totally yours. They can be cultivated. They can be nourished. You can breathe in a way that gives rise to ease. You can think of the breath energy spreading through the body to take that ease everywhere in the body so that you feel bathed all around, out to the skin. That’s something you can do with this territory of yours. You can spread your awareness so that it’s not just confined to one little topic. It fills the whole body with a sense of expansiveness. You can think thought...

"The bliss of concentration is an acquired taste. It’s a specific kind of happiness, which the Thais call santi-sukha, which literally means the happiness of peace. This is a basic level of well-being that we tend to overlook because it carries no excitement, no thrills. It’s just a basic sense of ease that’s steady, like the flame of an oil lamp. For most of us, we notice pleasure and pain because of the back-and-forth, the ups and the downs. When things are steady and on an even keel, we tend to lose interest and not notice them. But that’s precisely the kind of well-being we’re working on here: the kind of happiness that’s steady, that doesn’t go up and down. We have to learn how to appreciate that. As we stick with it more and more, we begin to realize that we wouldn’t want to be without this kind of happiness, without this kind of well-being. But then the next question is, is it really steady? As you examine it, you find that it, too, involves a certain level of feeding. Yo...

"Focus on the breath. Take a couple of good long deep in-and-out breaths first, to highlight your sense of the body as you feel it from within. And if long breathing feels good, keep it up. If it doesn’t, you’re free to change. Try shorter breathing, or in short, out long; in long, out short; fast, slow; heavy, light; deep, shallow. Try to get sensitive to what the body really needs right now. In this way, you’re showing goodwill for yourself, of course, and it spreads out to others. If you can create a sense of well-being, a sense of being centered inside, people will find you a lot better person to be around. So as we work on showing goodwill to ourselves in this way, we’re learning some important lessons about goodwill, and, in fact, all of the brahmaviharas in general. One of the first lessons is that happiness doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. There are so many areas out in the world where it’s just that. One person gains, another person has to loose. But here it’s gaining ...

"This is when the quality of the heart begins to grow — when you do have a sense of well-being that comes from the practice. The mind can settle down, be with the breath in the present moment, and simply breathing in and breathing out is a refreshing experience, an energizing experience, a calming experience: whatever the mind needs at that time. When you’ve got your own true happiness covered, then it’s a lot easier to have a warm feeling for other people. You feel sorry for them because they’re missing out on the food you’ve got." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Goodwill in Heart & Mind"

"When we work with the breath, it may seem like a detour but it’s not. When you’re with the breath, you’re in the present moment. As you work with the breath to make it comfortable, to make it energizing, whatever the body needs right now, you’re making it easier and easier for the mind stay in the present moment. Why is the present moment so important? Because this is where you’re making all the decisions in your life, the things you’re going to say, you’re going to do, you’re going to think. It’s important you try to do these things skillfully. Now, you can get yourself worked up and tied up in knots about making mistakes, so to prevent that, that’s another reason why we work with the breath: so that you’re coming from a state of ease and well-being. The more ease and well-being you can feel in this way, the easier it is to make the right choices, the easier it is to admit your mistakes when you see them, so that you can respond to the mistakes in the right way — “right way” her...

"Find a way of breathing that feels good right now and allow that sense of comfort to spread through the body. Relax around the breath. We have these potentials for happiness in life and if we don’t make the most of them, then we get discouraged and we resent other people’s happiness, too. So here’s an opportunity to develop some very basic resources that you have with you all the time, so that wherever you are, you can relax into the breath no matter what the situation is, and at the very least you’ll have that amount of pleasure to nourish the mind. This ability to find pleasure where it’s skillful is an important skill to have in life, because otherwise we go looking for unskillful pleasures." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Using Your Wealth"

"If you find that the goodwill [mettā] meditation is getting dry, you stop and you work on your breath, trying to develop a way of breathing that feels good inside, nourishing inside. Ajaan Lee once said that if you don’t have any sense of well-being or pleasure inside, then it’s hard to wish for other beings’ happiness. He gave the image of a large water tank. If there’s water in the tank, then when you open the faucet, cool water comes out. If there’s no water in the tank and you open the faucet, nothing but air comes out. And it’s the same with your goodwill. There has to be a sense of well-being inside for it to really have force and to really be cooling. So breath meditation and goodwill meditation help each other along. There are times when you need to develop goodwill in order to just be able to settle down with the breath, and other times where you need to work with the breath so the goodwill has a felt sense of well-being inside. So you practice these thing...

"So learning how to create this sense of well-being [with your breath] is not a selfish pursuit of happiness. Some people think that Buddhism is narrow and selfish, with each Buddhist looking out only for himself, but that’s not the case. If you can find a good solid happiness inside, that means you’re not irritated or frustrated in your search for happiness. People who are irritated and frustrated tend to take that irritation and frustration out on other people. Here you have happiness inside, so you take that “out on” other people, but a better way to put it would be that you take it out and offer it to other people too. Your thoughts and words and deeds come from a sense of well-being inside. And those are not afflictive, either to you or to others." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Heart & Mind of Goodwill"

"There’s a real lightness that comes from being able to find happiness simply sitting here breathing. It means that your happiness is dependent on very few contingencies. The people with money, the people with investments, are the ones who have to read the newspapers every day to figure out what’s safe, what’s not safe out there in the world. But if your investment is in the skills of the mind, then no matter what the situation, you’re secure." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Wilderness Wealth"

"Think about the breath and then be aware of the breath as it comes in and goes out. Keeping your thoughts directed to the breath: That’s mindfulness. Being aware of the breath as it comes in and out: That’s alertness. Keep those two aspects of the mind together. If you want, you can use a meditation word to strengthen your mindfulness. Try Buddho, which means “awake.” Think bud- with the in-breath, dho with the out. Try to breathe as comfortably as possible. A very concrete way of learning how to provide for your own happiness in the immediate present — and at the same time, strengthening your alertness — is to let yourself breathe in a way that’s comfortable. Experiment to see what kind of breathing feels best for the body right now. It might be long breathing, short breathing; in long, out short; or in short, out long. Heavy or light, fast or slow, shallow or deep. Once you find a rhythm that feels comfortable, stay with it for a while. Learn to savor the sensati...

"So, work with the breath right now. Create this state of becoming, because it functions in several ways that are going to be useful on the path. One is that when you have this state of well-being inside the body — with the happiness that comes from that state, the pleasure that comes from that, the sense of refreshment that can come from that — you can see that it’s a harmless pleasure, a harmless refreshment. It’s not like the pleasures of the senses. The pleasures of the senses can get us all wound up in greed, aversion, and delusion, and we end up doing a lot of unskillful things. But the pleasure that comes from breathing in a comfortable way has never led anybody to kill or steal or have illicit sex, to lie or to take intoxicants. It’s a safe pleasure, a nourishing pleasure. So it’s okay to indulge in it. And you realize it’s much better than a lot of the other pleasures you’ve had outside senses. That enables you to step back from the process of how you engage with your sen...

"As Ajaan Lee says, learn to converse with your breath, asking it how it feels, listening to what it has to say. Make the breath your companion for the time being. And as you get to know the breath, you get to know the mind a lot better as well. It gives you a good foundation so that when someone else comes in and wants to talk, you can say, “No, I’ve already got a good conversation going right here.” And no matter how insistent they are, you can say, “Look, I want to develop this relationship and then we’ll talk about you after a while.” Most of those other thoughts that are coming in are old friends, old enemies, old whatever anyhow. You don’t need to go with them. You know them already. You want to make better friends with the breath right now. So as long as the mind is going to be chatting with itself, chat with the breath, chat about the breath. This way you can shed a lot of the other things that would come in and bother you. You can really focus on this one con...

"Each time you breathe in, think of the body as a clean slate. The breath can go everywhere, anywhere, all at once. It can go in strange directions and do all kinds of things, whatever is needed to keep the body feeling buoyant. An important point to notice here when you breathe out is that you not breathe out too long. The more you breathe out long, the tighter things become in the body. So allow the breath to go out just right, then breathe in again, breathe out again, breathe in again, and allow the breath to dissolve anything that seems uncomfortable, that seems blocked. After you’ve played with the breath like this for a while, ask yourself what feels right, what feels balanced in the body, in terms of the breath. Are things too light? Too heavy? Too warm? Too cold? See if you can use the breath to bring them into balance. In doing this, you create a sense of ease in body and mind, a sense of harmony, so that the peace that you feel inside is palpable. It’s not ...