Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"You’ve got something good here. The breath can be as comfortable as you want. Just learn how to maintain that sense of well-being inside, because it is perfectly harmless, and it does give you the strength you need to overcome greed, aversion, and delusion when they come and try to pull you away again. ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Battle Inside"

"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. ...

"Learn how to develop a sense of ease, a sense of fullness and refreshment right here in the body. Make that your food. Try to preserve and protect that level of the mind. That’s the skill in how you look at things and listen to things: maintaining this sense of the center in the body, a sense of ease, refreshment, and fullness no matter what happens outside. That puts the mind on a higher plane — and in a much better position." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Skill of Restraint" (Meditations4)

"The ability to maintain your center and to breathe comfortably in any situation can be a genuine lifesaver, keeping the mind in a position where you can more easily think of the right thing to do, say, or think when your surroundings get tough. As a result, the people around you are no longer subjected to your greed, anger, and delusion. And as you maintain your inner balance in this way, it helps them maintain theirs. So make the whole world your meditation seat, and you’ll find that meditation both on the big seat and the little seat will get a lot stronger. At the same time, it’ll become a gift both to yourself and to the world around you." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu “Strength Training for the Mind”

"So keep that image of the acrobat in mind. The primary consideration is that you maintain your balance. This is why we’re meditating: to give rise to a sense of solidity inside. Once you’ve got that sense of solidity, the sense of ease and well-being that comes as you work with the breath and develop a good solid center inside, then in your relationships with other people you’re less grabbing. You’re not looking so much for what you can get out of the other person. You’ve got something to give." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Acrobat"

"If the breath feels really good, you gain a sense that you really don’t want to go anywhere else. You like being right here; it’s like coming home. You have a sense that this is where you belong. So try to maintain that. The problem is that after feeling refreshed like this for a while, you say, “Okay, enough. I’m ready to go someplace else.” Remind yourself: There are deeper levels of pleasure that you won’t experience unless you really stay here for a long period of time. Things begin to open up, open up, open up over time. So try to be patient. If you find yourself wondering, “What shall I do next?” ask yourself, “Is there a way of breathing that could be even more comfortable?” Parts of the body that are not getting any breath energy: Look for those. In other words, you have to work on this sense of well-being. Otherwise, the mind begins to get drowsy and slips off. So there’s always more to observe right here. Just go deeper and deeper, and you get more and mo...

"If the breath feels comfortable, learn to maintain it. It’s okay to be attached to the breath when it’s comfortable. Desire can also be a good thing, when you learn how to be skillful in what you desire. We tend to think that the Buddha said desire serves no other purpose than to cause suffering, but that isn’t true. Skillful desire, the desire to be skillful, to let go of unskillful mental states, to develop skillful ones, is actually a part of the path. It comes under the factor of right effort." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Don't Listen to This Talk"

"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...

"As you walk down the street, be sensitive to the breath. Learn how to watch your perceptions. Notice what there is along the street that pulls you out. This is easier to see if you’re walking down the street with that sense of fullness. Can you maintain it while you’re walking? This is one of the reasons we do walking meditation: to keep that sense of fullness, refreshment, pleasure going no matter what we do. Try to develop a sense of a steady center." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Fabrication at the Breath"

"If you want to understand the process of intention, one, set up a really good, clear intention. Like right now: You’re going to stay with the breath, to watch the breath come in, watch the breath go out. Then you learn how to augment that intention, because simply making the intention is not going to make it last. You’ve got to learn how to nurture it and keep it going. You can do this by experimenting with the breath. Make this a process of exploration. You’re not tying the mind down to something boring, you’re actually focusing on something interesting: this breath energy in the body. When we use the word breath, it’s not just the air coming in and out of the lungs. It’s the whole movement of energy, the quality of energy throughout the body, all the way through the nervous system and out to every pore. How does your in-and-out breathing affect that energy? You can experiment with long breathing, short breathing, or in long, out short; in short, out long; deep, shallow, heavy,...

"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)

"The Buddha says, “Breathe in sensitive to rapture. Breathe out sensitive to rapture.” Well, how do you become sensitive to rapture? Where are you going to find it? You have to look at the breath. You notice where in the sensation of breathing there is a sense of fullness, a sense of refreshment, because that’s the other meaning of the word we translate as rapture, piti . How does the breath feel refreshing? And when it feels refreshing, then the next step is: How do you let that sense of refreshment spread throughout the body? How do you maintain that?" ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "WYSIWYG"

"You hold a label in your mind and apply it to what you’re experiencing. The label can be a mental picture, a feeling, a word, or even just a kinetic sense that you have of the breath in the body. In other words, you might have a mental picture of how the breath goes into the body. Or 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. Or you can just keep in mind the word “breath,” ”breath,” “breath,” as a way of reminding yourself not to leave the breath, when ...

"You want to keep things basic, simple. That way you maintain your focus, which is what it’s all about: getting the mind to be really solidly focused on one activity over and over and over again. Thinking about the breath, being aware of the breath, reminding yourself not to leave the breath: It’s a cluster of activities, but it’s focused in one direction, toward the breath. And as you get more precisely focused in, you can drop some of the extra activities. When the breath feels comfortable coming in, going out, think of spreading that sense of comfort throughout the body. When you can maintain that sense of full-body awareness as you breathe in, as you breathe out, there’ll come a point where you don’t have to evaluate things anymore. You can’t improve the breath and you see that evaluation is actually getting in the way of settling down further. So you simplify things. You drop the evaluation. Just stay with the sensation of the breath. This is a lot of what the p...

"So as you focus on the breath, try to get past the idea that you’re in one part of the head watching the breath in other parts of the body. You want to occupy the whole body, bathed in the whole breath. The breath and the body should be surrounding your sense of where you are. And then you want to maintain that sense of being centered in the body like this, filling the whole body with your awareness as you breathe in, as you breathe out. Why? For one thing, this sense of filling the body helps you stay in the present moment. When the mind goes off thinking thoughts about past and future, it has to shrink its sense of awareness, shrink its sense of itself, down to a small enough dot so that it can slip into the past or slip into the future. In other words, you latch onto the part of the body that you use as a basis for thinking about the past or the future, while other parts of the body get blotted out. But if you’re filling the body with your awareness and can maintain that full ...

"It’s crucial to have a center for the mind. But to maintain that center, you have to enjoy it. If you don’t, it simply becomes one more burden to carry in addition to your other burdens, and the mind will keep dropping it when your other burdens get heavy. This is why we spend so much time working on the skill of playing with the breath, making it comfortable, making it gratifying, making it fill your body with a sense of ease. When you have that kind of inner nourishment to feed on, you’re less hungry for things outside. You don’t need to feed on the words and actions of other people. You don’t have to look for your happiness there. When you can develop a sense of inner fullness simply by the way you breathe, the mind can stay nourished no matter what the situation. You can sit in a boring meeting and yet be blissing out — and nobody else has to know. You can watch all the good and bad events around you with a sense of detachment because you have no need to feed on...

"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. ...

"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...

"Learn to be on good terms with your breath so that you have a sense of well-being simply through the way you breathe. This is your center; this is your home. No matter where you are, this is your home. That way, when situations outside are difficult, you remind yourself, “Okay, they can’t take my home away from me.” That’s your safe place. When you’re operating from a safe place like that, it’s a lot easier to try new things out. It’s a lot easier for you to be more ingenious in thinking up new solutions to problems that present themselves. This is why we keep returning to the breath and learning how to be on good terms with it. Have at least some spot in the body that’s your home, where there’s a sense of well-being. Then learn how to maintain that sense of home and that sense of well-being as you go through life. That way, when something unexpected comes up, at the very least you’re not too far away from home." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "To Take Danger in Stri...

"Learn how to develop a sense of ease, a sense of fullness and refreshment right here in the body. Make that your food. Try to preserve and protect that level of the mind. That’s the skill in how you look at things and listen to things: maintaining this sense of the center in the body, a sense of ease, refreshment, and fullness no matter what happens outside. That puts the mind on a higher plane — and in a much better position." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Skill of Restraint" (Meditations4)