Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

 "There’s a story in Ajaan Lee’s autobiography of a senior monk in Bangkok who was sick and so Ajaan Lee went to visit him. Now, this senior monk had very little use for the Wilderness Tradition, so it wasn’t the case that he had a lot of faith in Ajaan Lee. But Ajaan Lee just sat in one corner of the room and meditated. After a while the senior monk began to have a sense that something was coming from Ajaan Lee’s corner, having an effect on his body. So he asked Ajaan Lee, 'What are you doing?' and Ajaan Lee said, 'I’m making a gift of quiet, a gift of silence.' And the senior monk said, 'Well, whatever it is, keep on doing it. It feels really good.' And so Ajaan Lee would go back every day to meditate in the senior monk’s room. After a while, they started talking, and he actually taught meditation to the senior monk, who had never meditated before. As a result, he changed the senior monk’s ideas about the Wilderness Tradition and about the possibility ...

"You need the sense of rapture or refreshment that comes when the mind settles down and there’s a sense of balance inside the body and in the relationship between the mind and the body. That way, this bath of breath really does feel refreshing, and it goes deep, deep, deep into the brain, deep, deep into the heart, all the parts of your body that you tend to close off to any kind of outside influence. When you close the body off to outside influences, make sure you don’t close it off to your good inside influences. Have your heart open to the breath. Have the deep part of your brain open to the breath. All the nerves that feel especially frazzled after you’ve gone through a day of dealing with difficult people: Let them be open to the breath. Try to get a sense of what’s the quickest, most efficient, and most effective way of refreshing them. Sometimes it’ll require breathing in ways you’ve never breathed before, thinking of the breath energies coming into different spots that had...

"Ajaan Lee talks about the bases of the breath, which correspond pretty closely to what the Indians call chakras. These are the sensitive energy centers in the body. You can find one that feels congenial to you, one where you’ll notice if you’re putting undue pressure on the breath, either with the in-breath, or with the out-. Try to maintain a sense of ease and just-rightness there at that spot, all the way through the in-breath, all the way through the out-. To do this, you’ve got to relax tension in different parts of your body. This is why this is called a center of breath energy, because it’s connected with a lot of other energy channels, where energy flows in the different parts of the body. If you can keep this spot open and relaxed, you’ll find that its influence automatically radiates out through different parts of the body. Then you think of the breath spreading from there to other parts as well. If you find that there are some areas where the energy doesn’...

"When we focus on the breath, we focus on the sense of movement in the body, the energy-flow. When you breathe in, where does that energy-flow seem to start? How do you know when to stop breathing in? When to start breathing out? Explore these things. The more you explore them, the more you get sensitive to what’s going on here. Instead of sloughing over things and saying “Of course, of course, of course! I know this,” ask yourself, “Well, do you really know it?” A lot of the great discoveries in the history of science happen when people look again in places where everybody thought they knew everything already, and realizing that they didn’t. Think of Isaac Newton. Everybody knew it was the nature of objects to fall. Certain objects fell; other objects didn’t fall. The moon didn’t fall, for instance, which meant, they thought, that the moon was made of something different from, say, apples or rocks. But he asked a question that everybody thought was a stupid question: “Why do th...

"So try to be aware of what you’re doing. And the best place to be aware of that is right here at the breath, because the breath is where the body and the mind meet. If the mind is going to have an influence on the body, it’s going to be through the breath. If the body’s going to have an influence on the mind, it’s through the breath. So here you get to see the traffic going back and forth. What’s coming out of the mind? Is it being alert? Is it being wise? Or is it just being its ordinary old self? You can train it, you know. This is why we’re here meditating: to train the mind, realizing that the big issue in life is what the mind does." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Straighten Things Out Inside"