Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"So as far as you’re concerned right here, right now, this is all there is: the right here, the right now — this breath, this breath. If you see any thoughts arising in the mind about how much longer we’re going to be sitting here or how long we have  been sitting here, just let them blow away. Think of the breath as going right through them, not giving them any space to land. You’ll find, as you stay fully immersed in the breath like this, that a lot of the good qualities you want to develop in the practice come along without your having to think about them. You don’t have to worry." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Just This Breath"

"Ajaan Chah says that sometimes your mind will say, “How much longer am I going to sit here?” And your answer should be, “I don’t know. Let’s see. Can I sit with this breath? Can I sit with the next breath?” Sit with one breath at a time and you find after a while that you get a lot of breaths under your belt without you’re having to carry them around or find them oppressive or burdensome." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Four Bases of Success"

"Ask yourself if you’re being too demanding. Does the breath feel okay? Are you trying to force it to be better than okay? If that’s what’s happening, be patient. Stick with the okay breath and give it some time. Your impatience may be putting too much strain on it. Allow it some time to relax and develop on its own." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"Think of the breath and try to keep the breath in mind: That’s mindfulness, the keeping-in-mind part. You have to start out with the intention that you’re going to stay with the breath all the way in with the in-breath, all the way out with the out-breath — and then with the next breath and then the next. But take it one breath at a time. If you start thinking about how many breaths you’re going to have to follow in the course of the hour, you’ll lose it. You’ve got just this one breath right now. Then watch what’s going on. That’s alertness, to see how the breath feels, and also be alert to notice when the mind is beginning to wander off. If it wanders off, bring it right back. That’s the beginning of the quality called ardency. In other words, you really do want to work at doing this meditation skillfully. So when the mind wanders off, you don’t let it take a long time to wander around before it comes back. As soon as you catch it wandering off, you don’t even have to let the t...

 "You sometimes hear people say that they won’t be able to breathe easy until a particular problem is solved or a situation gets resolved. But how many times have you seen the problems of the world get totally solved once and for all? One problem is usually replaced by another. When that’s the case, if you can’t breathe easy in the midst of problems, you’ll never be able to breathe easy. And that’ll make the problems more and more difficult to endure. So one of the lessons of breath meditation is that you can choose to breathe in a way that’s on your side, you can make the breath your friend, you can breathe easy even in the midst of difficult situations." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breathe Easy"

"A lot of healing has to be done in the body — all the areas of tension and tightness and discomfort that you’ve allowed to take hold in the body. The breath has to very gently massage them, very gently heal them, and sometimes this takes time. Just like a wound. You can’t just say, “Poof,” and it’s gone. You have to put the medicine on and let it stay there for hours. In the same way, the process of healing your inner energy field takes time, so be patient with the breath. When things get still, stay with it. And even though things may not seem to be happening, there’s a slow, steady process of healing going on in the body." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Small, Steady Flame" (Meditations2)

"Ask yourself if you’re being too demanding. Does the breath feel okay? Are you trying to force it to be better than okay? If that’s what’s happening, be patient. Stick with the okay breath and give it some time. Your impatience may be putting too much strain on it. Allow it some time to relax and develop on its own." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"One of the most powerful elements of fear is your unwillingness to think of what you can do. You don’t even want to think of the situation. But if you actually sit down and think about it patiently, step by step, you realize you can handle it. You might have to muddle through, and things might get difficult, but you can handle it. And as you’re thinking this, it’s helpful to have the breath coming in, going out really comfortably. So learn how to use the breath, reclaim your breath. Get in touch with your inner adult and fortify the inner adult with what you now know about the breathing. That’ll change the balance of power in the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Nurturing Your Inner Adult" (Meditations7)

"Ajaan Chah says that sometimes your mind will say, “How much longer am I going to sit here?” And your answer should be, “I don’t know. Let’s see. Can I sit with this breath? Can I sit with the next breath?” Sit with one breath at a time and you find after a while that you get a lot of breaths under your belt without you’re having to carry them around or find them oppressive or burdensome." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Four Bases of Success"

"We were talking about sitting in a meeting. You don’t have to be bored by the meeting. You can play with your breath energies. You find that even as you get involved in more and more complex activities, you can still have some sense of the breath energy in the body. It may be too much to ask you to keep track of whether the breath is coming in or going out, but just have a sense of the general field of energy and whether it feels connected — whether it feels at ease. And any parts that are not at ease, you breathe right through. This now enables you to put up with situations that otherwise might be very unpleasant and say, “At least I’ve got a friend here.” This is the key to learning patience and endurance. You don’t focus on the bad things that are happening around you; you focus on the things that you have some control over that you can make pleasant. This way, it’s not simply a matter of bearing up, bearing up, bearing up against something that’s difficult. You’re got some fr...

"So play around with the breath. Think of fabrication as playing, and you have permission to play. Don't think that playing around in this way is going to get in the way of insight. It actually helps create the conditions for insight to arise. For one, it gives stamina to the practice. If you're simply sitting with whatever comes up, meditation becomes an exercise in brute endurance. If no pleasure's coming up in the meditation, no sense of rapture or gratification, it becomes dull and unattractive. You find it harder and harder to actually sit down and keep up with the practice day after day. But if you allow the meditation to be a process of exploring, of finding what's really comfortable right now, you can stick with it. It becomes something interesting, something you want to do." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Permission to Play" (Meditations5)

"This is why we practice concentration: to get the mind solid in the face of whatever comes up. But that solidity has to come from learning how to develop strengths: a sense of well-being, a sense of ease inside the body, an ease inside the mind, so as to assist in keeping you solid. The secret to patience or endurance is to focus not on the hard things you have to endure, but on where you can still find sources of help, sources of strength. Learning how to be with the breath in a way that induces feelings of pleasure, feelings of rapture or refreshment is an important source of strength both for the body and for the mind. This provides you with a general pattern that you can use throughout life." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Uses of Equanimity"

"So as far as you’re concerned right here, right now, this is all there is: the right here, the right now — this breath, this breath . If you see any thoughts arising in the mind about how much longer we’re going to be sitting here or how long we have been sitting here, just let them blow away. Think of the breath as going right through them, not giving them any space to land. You’ll find, as you stay fully immersed in the breath like this, that a lot of the good qualities you want to develop in the practice come along without your having to think about them. You don’t have to worry." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Just This Breath"

"One of the most powerful elements of fear is your unwillingness to think of what you can do. You don’t even want to think of the situation. But if you actually sit down and think about it patiently, step by step, you realize you can handle it. You might have to muddle through, and things might get difficult, but you can handle it. And as you’re thinking this, it’s helpful to have the breath coming in, going out really comfortably. So learn how to use the breath, reclaim your breath. Get in touch with your inner adult and fortify the inner adult with what you now know about the breathing. That’ll change the balance of power in the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Nurturing Your Inner Adult" (Meditations7)

"The sense of well-being fostered by working and playing with the breath gives you a solid foundation for observing stress and suffering. If you feel threatened by your suffering, you won’t have the patience and endurance needed to watch and comprehend it. As soon as you encounter it, you want to run away. But if you’re dwelling in a sense of well-being in the body and mind, you don’t feel so threatened by pain or suffering. That enables you to watch pain and suffering more steadily. You know that you have a safe place in your body where the breath feels comfortable, where you can focus your attention when the stress or suffering becomes too overwhelming." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"So play around with the breath. Think of fabrication as playing, and you have permission to play. Don't think that playing around in this way is going to get in the way of insight. It actually helps create the conditions for insight to arise. For one, it gives stamina to the practice. If you're simply sitting with whatever comes up, meditation becomes an exercise in brute endurance. If no pleasure's coming up in the meditation, no sense of rapture or gratification, it becomes dull and unattractive. You find it harder and harder to actually sit down and keep up with the practice day after day. But if you allow the meditation to be a process of exploring, of finding what's really comfortable right now, you can stick with it. It becomes something interesting, something you want to do." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Permission to Play" (Meditations5)

"What we’re working on here is something that’s called piti in Pali. You can translate it as rapture; you can translate it as fullness; you can translate it as refreshment. The basic meaning is that it feels really good, really nourishing. The Buddha lists it as one of the energizing factors of awakening. It’s also a kind of food. There’s that passage where he says that, when we meditate, we feed on rapture like the radiant gods. The problem with the word rapture is that sometimes it seems too intense for the way some people experience it. Some people feel it as a tingling through the body, their hair standing on end. For others, it’s gentler — a sense of balanced, full well-being. Some people feel it in waves coming over the body. And for some people it’s so intense that the body starts moving. The intensity is not a measure of the intensity of your concentration. It’s more a measure of how starved of energy the body’s been feeling. If it’s been feeling really starved, the sens...

"Find some way to get interested in the breath. It helps gladden the mind to remember that it’s working on something worthwhile. I found it really helpful when I first got into breath meditation to work with the breath energy at a sore or injured spot. It gave a sense that I was doing something positive and constructive. I could really see some results. You can think of the breath as a healing process or a rejuvenating process. Ajaan Lee noted that as people get older, the out-breath gets longer than the in-breath, and the energy level of the breathing goes down. You might consciously try to fight aging by doing longer in-breaths and shorter out-breaths to see if the breath can have a rejuvenating influence on the body. Whatever technique you find that gives more energy to your practice is helpful. Ajaan Fuang once said, “You have to be really crazy about this to do it well.” Otherwise, you might not be paying close attention when things seem to be going okay, and then “okay” be...

"One of the most powerful elements of fear is your unwillingness to think of what you can do. You don’t even want to think of the situation. But if you actually sit down and think about it patiently, step by step, you realize you can handle it. You might have to muddle through, and things might get difficult, but you can handle it. And as you’re thinking this, it’s helpful to have the breath coming in, going out really comfortably. So learn how to use the breath, reclaim your breath. Get in touch with your inner adult and fortify the inner adult with what you now know about the breathing. That’ll change the balance of power in the mind." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Nurturing Your Inner Adult" (Meditations7)

"Ajaan Chah says that sometimes your mind will say, “How much longer am I going to sit here?” And your answer should be, “I don’t know. Let’s see. Can I sit with this breath? Can I sit with the next breath?” Sit with one breath at a time and you find after a while that you get a lot of breaths under your belt without you’re having to carry them around or find them oppressive or burdensome." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Four Bases of Success"