Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Get the mind really to settle down and be at ease with one object: the breath. Think of the breath as the energy flowing through the body that helps the air come in and out of the lungs. And you can look at that flow of energy anywhere in the body. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths and notice: Where do you feel that energy flow most prominently? Focus there. And then ask yourself if it feels good. If the way you’re breathing right now doesn’t feel good, you can change it. Make it longer, shorter, or in-long out-short, in-short out-long, fast, slow, heavy or light. There are lots of ways you can adjust your breathing. Try different ones for a while and see which ones seem to have the best effect, are easiest to stay with, and actually feel really good. Notice that some areas of the body are more sensitive to the flow of breath energy than the others. For some people, the most sensitive spot is in the area around the heart. For others, it’s in the a...

"So follow the Buddha’s instructions. Try to get sensitive to how the way you breathe has an impact on the body, and use the breath in a way that feels soothing, gives rise to feelings of pleasure, gives rise to feelings of refreshment. When the body’s been energized, then you can allow it to grow calm. At the same time, look at the perceptions you’re holding in mind right now. What kind of perception do you have of the breath? If you think of it simply as air coming in and out through the nostrils, it’s going to be hard to use the breath to help spread those feelings of ease and well-being around the body. But if you think of the breath as a flow of energy, it’ll be easier. After all, the muscles have to move, the body has to move so that the air can come in and out of the lungs — well, what is that movement? It’s breath energy. Where does it come from? Where does it originate in the body? And as you feel that movement spreading through the body, does it feel good or does it feel...

"If you’re grim about the meditation, you’re missing an important part, which is that, for the mind to settle down, you want to settle down with a sense of ease, a sense of well-being. Think of your sense of the body as a whole crowd of little feeling points, sensation points. In the normal way we breathe, we run through the body in the course of the day in a way that tends to squeeze these points. But here you give them a chance to open up, to blossom, to grow all over the body. What you’re actually doing is relaxing the muscles in your blood vessels, the little tiny, tiny muscles all along. Allow them to relax everywhere. Relax your nerve endings. What happens here, as everything is allowed to relax in this way, is that you gain a sense of fullness. These are the seeds for what the texts call piti: rapture, refreshment, a sense of fullness where you don’t feel anything physically is lacking right now. Then you can bathe in a sense of ease. When a sense of comfort ...

"When you focus on the breath, try to breathe in a way that feels really refreshing. Think of the breath energizing your entire torso all the way down, and then even beyond the torso down through the legs, down the back. Any part of the body that seems tired or tense, in need of a little refreshment, a little bit of soothing: Let the breath do that. One of the ways you’re going to get the mind to stay here is by making the breath interesting. As I said this afternoon, if you can find a task to do with the breath, so much the better. There may be a tightness or tension in some part of the body. In the monastery where I was first ordained, they had a skeleton hanging in the side of the sala. Sometimes I would sit in front of it and notice that its spine was straight. So I’d ask myself, “Okay, can I tell if my spine is straight now?” I was able to feel that there were different muscles pulling it out of alignment. “So how about allowing those muscles to relax?” Do that a...

"Get the mind really to settle down and be at ease with one object: the breath. Think of the breath as the energy flowing through the body that helps the air come in and out of the lungs. And you can look at that flow of energy anywhere in the body. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths and notice: Where do you feel that energy flow most prominently? Focus there. And then ask yourself if it feels good. If the way you’re breathing right now doesn’t feel good, you can change it. Make it longer, shorter, or in-long out-short, in-short out-long, fast, slow, heavy or light. There are lots of ways you can adjust your breathing. Try different ones for a while and see which ones seem to have the best effect, are easiest to stay with, and actually feel really good. Notice that some areas of the body are more sensitive to the flow of breath energy than the others. For some people, the most sensitive spot is in the area around the heart. For others, it’s in the area in the nec...

"Try to see what kind of breathing feels good for the body right now. Think of the breath as a whole-body process. It’s not just at your nose; it’s not just at your abdomen. The simple fact that the muscles in the body have to expand and contract to let the breath in, let it go out, creates different patterns of energy that flow throughout the whole body. The fact that you’re trying to maintain your balance as these muscles expand and contract means that the balancing muscles, say in the back, are going to get involved, too. They, in turn, are connected to the muscles down in the legs. Everything’s all connected inside. So what kind of breathing feels good for the whole body? That’s something you can explore. You can spend the whole hour doing just that one exploration. But if you find something that you can stay with and it feels good, stay with that breathing. Try to maintain it as long as it feels good. If it reaches a point where it doesn’t feel good anymore, you...

"You can stay with the breath. Each breath coming in, going out, is a new breath. Maybe your last breath was uncomfortable but the next one doesn’t have to be. Think of the breath going throughout the body, surrounding the body. There’s a breath energy that surrounds the body, and sometimes you can sense it when you get really still and the mind gets really sensitive. That kind of breath energy can get tensed up, too, even though it doesn’t have anything directly to do with the muscles. It can be tense; it can be tight. There may be major gaps there. So you work with them. Get a sense of energy that surrounds the body, suffuses the body, that feels good, feels comforting, feels soothing. You can focus on that. You don’t have to focus on the pains." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Light Merit"

"Your frame of reference is just this: the breath coming in and going out; your sense of the body right here, right now. Think of the breath cleaning out all the parts of the breath energy in the body that haven’t been ventilated for a while. We tend to have stagnant areas in different parts of the body, so make a survey. See which parts are not getting as much breath as the other parts. Wherever there’s a sense of blockage or a sense of things tightening up, loosen it up. Remind yourself that the breath can go through anything. It’s like cosmic rays that can cut through rock. The breath can go through anything in the body: the bones, old tight muscles. Try to notice which muscles you tend to tighten up just to hold the body erect. Can you keep the body erect while loosening them? Try to figure out which patterns of tightness in the body are totally unnecessary right now." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Free for the Time Being"

"Stay with the breath. If the mind wanders off, just drop that thought and come right back. It wanders off again, drop the thought, come back again. Don’t get discouraged. Each time you come back, don’t come down hard on yourself for having wandered off. Instead, reward yourself for the fact that you’ve come back, by breathing in a way that feels really good. Think of parts of the body that aren’t getting much nourishment from the breath and think of the breath going right there. And, of course, if you can do one breath like that, you can do two and then three and four. See if you can find a way of breathing that feels really good for the parts of the body that are tired, that have been tense. You’ll find that this ability to stay with the body in the present, with a sense of well-being in the body, can be really nourishing. When the breath feels good, think of that comfortable sensation permeating throughout the body. Think of the whole body breathing, all the nerves in the body ...

"You’d like to create a good state of mind. You want to have the breath flowing nicely. What does that mean? People get all tied up in knots, reading about how the breath has to be this way or that way. They think they’re actually going to be pumping air into their nerves. That’s not the case. The breath energy is already there in the body. It’s simply that in some places it’s not flowing well, or that you’ve been breathing in a way that’s laborious or unpleasant in the body. Part of that has to do with your perception of exactly what’s happening when you breathe. So one of the important parts of meditation is learning how to play with your perceptions. Think of the breath energy coming in and out of the pores. See what that’s like. Think of it coming in at certain spots in the body where there’s a trigger point — in other words, wherever there are some knots in your muscles. Think of the breath energy coming in right there, going through the knot. Or you can think of...

"You can stay with the breath. Each breath coming in, going out, is a new breath. Maybe your last breath was uncomfortable but the next one doesn’t have to be. Think of the breath going throughout the body, surrounding the body. There’s a breath energy that surrounds the body, and sometimes you can sense it when you get really still and the mind gets really sensitive. That kind of breath energy can get tensed up, too, even though it doesn’t have anything directly to do with the muscles. It can be tense; it can be tight. There may be major gaps there. So you work with them. Get a sense of energy that surrounds the body, suffuses the body, that feels good, feels comforting, feels soothing. You can focus on that. You don’t have to focus on the pains." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Light Merit"

"So when you’re learning how to concentrate the mind, the ability to get the mind really, really still is an important part of minimizing the mental pain around whatever physical or mental pain there may be. You learn how to relax around the pain. This is why Ajaan Lee talked about finding a part of the body that’s comfortable. He compares it to a house where some of the floorboards are good and some are rotting. You don’t walk on the areas where the floorboards are rotting, you don’t lie down on them, because if you do, you’re going to fall through. You walk or lie down on the areas where the floorboards are sound. As he points out, if there were no place in the body at all where there was a sense of ease, you’d be dead. So there must be someplace. If you have trouble finding it, think about the sense of space around the body. Focus there. And every movement of the mind that would pull you away from that, just let it go, let it go. Focus on the sense of well-being that you create...

"When you focus on the breath, try to breathe in a way that feels really refreshing. Think of the breath energizing your entire torso all the way down, and then even beyond the torso down through the legs, down the back. Any part of the body that seems tired or tense, in need of a little refreshment, a little bit of soothing: Let the breath do that. One of the ways you’re going to get the mind to stay here is by making the breath interesting. As I said this afternoon, if you can find a task to do with the breath, so much the better. There may be a tightness or tension in some part of the body. In the monastery where I was first ordained, they had a skeleton hanging in the side of the sala. Sometimes I would sit in front of it and notice that its spine was straight. So I’d ask myself, “Okay, can I tell if my spine is straight now?” I was able to feel that there were different muscles pulling it out of alignment. “So how about allowing those muscles to relax?” Do that as you breat...

Fully in the Present by Thanissaro Bhikkhu , short morning talk April 30, 2013 When you focus on the breath, you’re fully inhabiting your body. All too often we leave large sections of our body uninhabited. We’re not paying attention to them. They’re there in the background, of course. When you’re not fully inhabiting the present moment, where are you going? Are you going off someplace else? One way of ensuring that you’re going to stay here is to be fully here with the body. It’s also your protection. You may have noticed when you walk into a crowd of people in a room, you can pick up their energies very quickly. If parts of your body are uninhabited, those energies can get lodged in your own body. You may not notice it at the time, but after a while you begin to realize that you’ve picked up nervous energy or angry energy or whatever the energy is. So this is part of your protection: learning how to fully inhabit your body so that wherever you go, you’re going with your ...

"If you’re grim about the meditation, you’re missing an important part, which is that, for the mind to settle down, you want to settle down with a sense of ease, a sense of well-being. Think of your sense of the body as a whole crowd of little feeling points, sensation points. In the normal way we breathe, we run through the body in the course of the day in a way that tends to squeeze these points. But here you give them a chance to open up, to blossom, to grow all over the body. What you’re actually doing is relaxing the muscles in your blood vessels, the little tiny, tiny muscles all along. Allow them to relax everywhere. Relax your nerve endings. What happens here, as everything is allowed to relax in this way, is that you gain a sense of fullness. These are the seeds for what the texts call piti: rapture, refreshment, a sense of fullness where you don’t feel anything physically is lacking right now. Then you can bathe in a sense of ease. When a sense of comfort ...

"We’ve got the breath, which is bodily fabrication. Well, that’s right here. It’s coming in and going out right now. It’s a fabrication in the sense that you can shape it with your intentions. You can breathe in different ways. It’s one of the few bodily processes that you actually can exert that much control over. So try to shape it well. Notice what kind of breathing feels good for the body right now: long breathing, short breathing, fast, slow. It’s entirely up to you what you like, although if the body doesn’t like it, it’ll let you know pretty quickly. So you’ve got to listen to the body’s needs and notice that the breath, as it comes in, comes together with movement through the muscles. At the very least, they’re the muscles in the chest that rise and fall, along with the muscles in the abdomen. As they’re moving, the body — to maintain its balance — has to move other parts as well. It makes you think of opening up the different blood vessels and nerves going through the bod...

"You can stay with the breath. Each breath coming in, going out, is a new breath. Maybe your last breath was uncomfortable but the next one doesn’t have to be. Think of the breath going throughout the body, surrounding the body. There’s a breath energy that surrounds the body, and sometimes you can sense it when you get really still and the mind gets really sensitive. That kind of breath energy can get tensed up, too, even though it doesn’t have anything directly to do with the muscles. It can be tense; it can be tight. There may be major gaps there. So you work with them. Get a sense of energy that surrounds the body, suffuses the body, that feels good, feels comforting, feels soothing. You can focus on that. You don’t have to focus on the pains." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Light Merit"

"Where do you feel the energy of the breathing? Sometimes it’s at the nose, but sometimes it’s not. It’s more down in the chest and the abdomen. And if the diaphragm expands, it’s not just the diaphragm. Other parts of the body move as well. So, notice where you sense the breathing most clearly and focus your attention there. Try not to tense up around that spot. Allow it to feel comfortable as your breathe in, comfortable as you breathe out. Think of it as a porous sensation. The edges aren’t too well defined. If you define the edges very tightly and very precisely, it means you’re probably tensing up around it. It’s important that you be comfortable with the sensation of breathing." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Sowing Good Seeds"

"We think of the breath coming in from outside, but that’s the air coming in from outside. The breath energy originates in the body. You can think of every cell breathing in, breathing out. Notice where the movement of the energy seems to be smooth and where it seems to be interrupted. Ideally, it should flow smoothly throughout the body. The different organs all get nourished as they’re allowed to breathe in, breathe out. Where there’s tension or tightness, it’s a sign that the breath is not flowing well. So, we can think of the breath either going through those patterns of tension or, if it’s a line of tension, it either goes through the middle of the line or it starts at one end of the line and goes down the line to the other end. Allow parts of the body that seem to be starved of breath energy to have their share. Sometimes you have a sense that some of the muscles are doing most of the work of the breathing, and they get tired after a while, so think of the breath coming in o...

"You’d like to create a good state of mind. You want to have the breath flowing nicely. What does that mean? People get all tied up in knots, reading about how the breath has to be this way or that way. They think they’re actually going to be pumping air into their nerves. That’s not the case. The breath energy is already there in the body. It’s simply that in some places it’s not flowing well, or that you’ve been breathing in a way that’s laborious or unpleasant in the body. Part of that has to do with your perception of exactly what’s happening when you breathe. So one of the important parts of meditation is learning how to play with your perceptions. Think of the breath energy coming in and out of the pores. See what that’s like. Think of it coming in at certain spots in the body where there’s a trigger point — in other words, wherever there are some knots in your muscles. Think of the breath energy coming in right there, going through the knot. Or you can think of it coming in...