Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"The way you manipulate the energy in your body is going to determine how you identify yourself, along with sense of the world you inhabit. If the energy in your body’s really uncomfortable, whatever world you’ve got out there is going to feel confining. But if you can breathe through it, you can learn to walk through those uncomfortable worlds, dissolve them away." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Close to What You Know"

"The Buddha’s not saying that when you practice renunciation you should simply do without. He provides you with an alternative pleasure: the pleasure of right concentration, the pleasure of jhana. The absorption you get in when you’re fully inhabiting the body, the sense of ease that comes with the breath, the sense of fullness that comes with the breath as you allow it to spread throughout the whole body: When you have this alternative pleasure, you learn how to cultivate it, enjoy it, and then you can use it for getting the mind into even deeper concentration." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sense Pleasures & Sensuality" (Meditations12)

"If you give the breath an hour to do its healing work, totally opening up the body to allow the breath to bathe every nerve out to every pore, you know that you’ll come out at the end of the hour with a body and mind in much better shape. The body will be soothed; the mind, bright and alert. And you don’t need to stop being bathed in the breath when the hour is up. You can keep it going in all your activities. That way, even though you may not be armed with a whole set of plans for facing the future, at least you’re in a position where you don’t need that kind of armor. You’ve got the armor of a healthy body and mind. You’ve got an invisible armor: the force-field of this all-encompassing breath, continually streaming out from your center to every pore, protecting you on all sides. That’s something you feel in every cell of your body, something you know for sure, for you can sense it all around you, right here, right now. And you know that whatever the future brings...

"Turn your sense of the body inside out. It’s not the solid body that the breath has to push into. The breath is there first. It’s got every right to be there first. The other sensations of solidity and warmth and coolness: They come after. When you turn things inside out like this, you get a new perspective, and it loosens up a lot of your old attachments." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Switch the Context"

"We try to develop this sense of well-being in the body as our refuge. As the Buddha points out, if we didn’t have any other alternative to pain, we’d just go for nothing but sensuality, because that would be the only other option out there offering some pleasure. So, it’s important that you find a strong sense of pleasure simply sitting here in the body as it’s felt from inside." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "See Your Thoughts as Strange" (Meditations10)

"Focus on the breath. Even though you’re walking and looking ahead to make sure you don’t trip over things, you want to maintain the sense of being centered in the breath as much as possible. Don’t let the looking and the walking pull you away from your center. This requires practice, maintaining a center in the midst of movement. This is important for two main reasons. One, as I said just now, is that it gets you used to maintaining your center in other activities as well, so that even when you’re engaged in complex activities, even when you’re thinking about things, you can still have a sense of inhabiting the body, being centered within the breath. You may have so many other things going on that you can’t keep track of when the breath is coming in or going out, but you should be able to maintain a sensitivity to the energy tone in the body — where it’s relaxed, where it’s tight, what you can do to keep it relaxed and comfortable in all situations. You’re inhabiting the body. Yo...

"So you want to work on developing a sense of pleasure in the form of the body as sensed from within, rather than in visualizing the attractive details of the human body’s appearance. In other words, you take your sense of the body as you inhabit it right here, right now. How do you relate to it? How can you find pleasure simply in sitting here and being aware of the fact that you’re inhabiting this body?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Lust" (Meditations5)

"Then you allow the mind to get more and more steady. What perceptions allow it to get more steady? Perception of the breath as a whole body process gets it more steady. Your perception that you’re not separate from the breath, that you’re not in one part of the body or inhabiting one part of the body and watching the breath in some other part of the body, but you’re actually one with the breath, immersed in the breath, bathed in the breath, surrounded by breath: That perception helps steady the mind even further." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Balancing Tranquility & Insight"

"No matter how the breath is cycling through the rest of the body, keep the sense of relaxation in your feet and your hands as steady as possible. It doesn’t have to be an enormous relaxation, just enough for you to know that it’s more relaxed than before. One way of checking it is to compare one hand to the other, one foot to the other. See which one is more tense and then allow it to relax as much as the other one." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Grass at the Gate" (Meditations3)

"So breathe in a way that feels good, deep down inside. Think of the breath as a whole-body process. It goes through all the nerves in the nervous system, all the vessels in the circulatory system — out to the tips of the fingers, out to the tips of the toes. You have to think of yourself not sitting here looking at the breath but wearing the breath: surrounded by the breath, bathed in the breath, immersed in the breath, with the breath all around you, flowing smoothly. It soothes the body and it can also soothe the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Economy of Goodness"

"The way you manipulate the energy in your body is going to determine how you identify yourself, along with sense of the world you inhabit. If the energy in your body’s really uncomfortable, whatever world you’ve got out there is going to feel confining. But if you can breathe through it, you can learn to walk through those uncomfortable worlds, dissolve them away." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Close to What You Know"

"You have the power to shape your experience. You learn how you’re already shaping it, and then you use your ingenuity to figure out new and better ways of shaping it. The Buddha gives you some help, but sometimes the particulars, like issues around the breath, are things you’ve got to learn how to explore things on your own. But we explore not just to play around; we play around not just to play around. We play around to learn. From learning, then we can shape the rest of our experience in good ways as well, even while we’re not here meditating. Learn how to inhabit your body fully, so that it is your place. Nobody else can invade it. And then you’ll go through the world with a lot more solidity, both in body and in mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Shaping Your Breath, Shaping Your Life"

"The way you manipulate the energy in your body is going to determine how you identify yourself, along with sense of the world you inhabit. If the energy in your body’s really uncomfortable, whatever world you’ve got out there is going to feel confining. But if you can breathe through it, you can learn to walk through those uncomfortable worlds, dissolve them away." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Close to What You Know"

"If you give the breath an hour to do its healing work, totally opening up the body to allow the breath to bathe every nerve out to every pore, you know that you’ll come out at the end of the hour with a body and mind in much better shape. The body will be soothed; the mind, bright and alert. And you don’t need to stop being bathed in the breath when the hour is up. You can keep it going in all your activities. That way, even though you may not be armed with a whole set of plans for facing the future, at least you’re in a position where you don’t need that kind of armor. You’ve got the armor of a healthy body and mind. You’ve got an invisible armor: the force-field of this all-encompassing breath, continually streaming out from your center to every pore, protecting you on all sides. That’s something you feel in every cell of your body, something you know for sure, for you can sense it all around you, right here, right now. And you know that whatever the future brings...

"It’s good to remember that there’s another kind of pleasure, because we go for sensuality thinking that there’s no other escape from pain. But the Buddha says, there is another escape. It’s right here. We focus on the breath, we focus on the internal sense of the body, we’re aware of the different elements in the body, we learn how to bring them into balance. This can give rise to a very strong sense of pleasure, a very nourishing sense of pleasure that causes no harm." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sensuality"

"The way you manipulate the energy in your body is going to determine how you identify yourself, along with sense of the world you inhabit. If the energy in your body’s really uncomfortable, whatever world you’ve got out there is going to feel confining. But if you can breathe through it, you can learn to walk through those uncomfortable worlds, dissolve them away." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Close to What You Know"

"If there’s a chronic pain in some part of the body, how do you breathe around it? How do you breathe through it? How do you get your awareness around it? Get so that you feel that you inhabit the body, you feel that this is your space, in the sense that you’re not going to let the pain push you out. Of course, there’s a paradox here. On the one hand, ultimately we don’t want to lay claim to the body as us or ours, but before you can really let go of it, you’ve got to fully inhabit it, make use of the space. Because only if you can fully inhabit the space can you be fully at ease with your own mind. And that’s when the mind can really settle down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Occupy Your Body"

"You come to realize that this spot being here with the breath — where you can watch what’s happening in the mind, watch what’s happening in the body — is really the best place to be. You can monitor things. You can gain some control. There’s even an element of control over the body as you get more sensitive to the comfortable sense of the breath. You can learn to maintain that in different situations, and it’s good for the health of the body. A sense of the breath energy flowing throughout the whole body means that every part of the body is getting properly nourished with energy, with the blood flow. It’s much more likely to stay healthy, and you cut through a lot of stress diseases. As for the mind, it’s good to have a place to stay. After all, the world is swept away. But here you’ve got a home that’s not swept away by the world. You’ve got a place where you can take shelter. The world doesn’t give you shelter but you can make your own shelter here. When things co...

" 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...

"Take the noble eightfold path. The Buddha teaches it as middle that avoids sensual indulgence and self torture. This doesn’t mean that you lead a middling life halfway between torture and indulgence, torturing yourself a little bit and allowing yourself a little pleasure. The path actually involves a very intense level of pleasure in right concentration. But it’s a different kind of pleasure, and you relate to it in a different way from how you normally relate to pleasure. That takes it off the continuum. To begin with, it’s a pleasure based not on the pleasures of the senses, but on the ability of the mind to settle down and be still. This is off the continuum of sensual pleasure and sensual pain. It’s a pleasure that comes simply from inhabiting the form of your body, being with the breath, the breath energy all around the body, all through the body, experiencing it from the inside. That’s form. It’s also a pleasure that can come as you learn how to direct the ene...