Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe. Simply by learning how to breathe calmly around the emotional problem, you can begin to take it apart. Just two weeks ago, I was reading that some scientists had done a study showing that calm breathing calms the mind. How do you say “Duh!” in French? Mais bien sûr . Of course it calms the mind. We’ve been doing that for 2,500 years." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind"

"As the Buddha said, you can breathe in ways that give rise to pleasure, breathe in ways that give rise to rapture, fullness, a sense of well-being right here. So you experiment. What kind of breathing feels good right now? What kind of breathing would lead to a sense of pleasure? When you find something that feels good, you stick with it, but don’t go on automatic pilot, because the rhythm that feels good right now may not feel so good five minutes from now. So you keep on top of this: “What does the body need right now?” And watch out for the mind’s tendency to say, “Okay, I’ve figured out that problem, what’s next?” The next problem is how to maintain that sense of well-being, how to let it grow. In the beginning it may not feel like much. It’s okay, but just okay. The question is, how do you protect what’s okay so it has a chance to grow into something more than okay? This is where mindfulness and effort have to keep going, keep going, keep going. Otherwise, the mind will sta...

"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...

"Breath instructions often begin by saying, “Watch the breath.” But that can create some problems. Tell yourself, “Don’t watch the breath. Feel it. Wear it. Bathe yourself in it.” After all, you’re dealing with proprioception, the body as you feel it from within, and the breath is not in front of your eyes. If anything, it’s behind them. So back into the breath. See what that perception does." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Brahmaviharas at the Breath"

"The breath is something that’s always there and always immediately relevant to whatever is going on in the mind. If there’s anger in the mind, the breath gets involved. If there’s lust, the breath gets involved. If there’s fear, the breath gets involved. When you’re sleepy, the breath gets involved. When you’re anxious, restless, the breath gets involved. And although there are times when it’s hard to grab hold of the issues going through the mind, it’s a lot easier to focus on the breath. It’s like two sides of the same coin. There’s the mental side and there’s the physical side. We work first on things from the physical side, because it’s easier to see and easier to work with. There’s in and there’s out. There can be a long in, and short in, or long out, short out. Fast, slow, heavy, light. It may not seem like much to work with, but as you get more and more in touch with the breath, you find that you get a better and better sense of precisely which kind of breathing is good fo...

"So do your best to get acquainted with the breath energy issues in the body, what it means for the breath to flow well, and be ingenious at finding new ways of solving new problems as they come up. That way, this area of the body, this area of the mind that tends to get closed off, you can start to reclaim and you can use that dimension of your awareness to your own advantage — your own skillful advantage. This is one of those meditative skills that’s meant to be used throughout the day, so don’t leave it on your meditation cushion. Take it with you. It’ll be your support in times of need." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Reclaim Your Breath"

"I once had a student who was manic-depressive. She found that a large part of the problem was anticipating her ups and downs. The anticipation in and of itself would exacerbate the extremes. But she also found that in her extreme moods, the experience of the body was very different. This is where the breath became helpful. When she was feeling down, she could breathe in a way that would add more breath energy, make the body lighter, lighter, lighter, so she didn’t feel so weighed down all the time. And without the physical experience of being weighed down, her depressive mind states didn’t have so much to latch onto. This began to cut through the pattern. Similarly, when she found she was getting more manic, she could breathe in a way that made the body heavier. She would think a lot about the earth element, find whatever sensations in the body were solid, still, heavy, and substantial, and just focus on those sensations. That would balance things out. It would balance out the en...

 "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"

"Start with the breath in and of itself. That’s pretty neutral. And ask yourself, “What’s going on in the process of breathing?” You breathe in until breathing in starts getting uncomfortable. Then you breathe out until breathing out starts getting uncomfortable. Then you start breathing back in again. You’re bouncing back and forth between the discomfort of too much in and too much out. Yet you need to breathe. If you tried to stop breathing by holding your breath, that would be painful too. You’ve got to breathe, yet it’s breathing between one extreme of breathing out too long, and the other extreme of breathing in too long. The breath is an impersonal process, something you can watch in and of itself, and it teaches you a lesson about suffering in and of itself. Fortunately for us there are not too many elaborate theories about the deeper meaning of breath. Just the fact: The breath is now coming in; the breath is now going out. You can’t watch your future breaths; you can’t w...

"The other set of problems has to do with your image of the breath energy in the body. For many people, this is a very strange or exotic notion, but actually it’s something very directly present to your awareness: your sense of the body as you feel it from within. It’s simply a matter of interpreting what you already feel in a different way. If you were to hold out your arm, the sensations that tell you that you have an arm there could be interpreted as perceptions of solidity or as perceptions of breath energy. The choice is yours. The sensations are the same, but the perceptions — and what you can do with the sensations based on the perception — will be different. The advantage of seeing the sensations as energy is that you can do things with energy that you cannot do with solidity. For example, if there’s a spot in your back that you think of as solid, you will simply leave it as solid. However, if you perceive it as energy and you realize that the energy is blocked, then you c...

"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...

"I remember the story of a tennis pro whose game went into a slump. He could not figure out what had gone wrong. He changed his racket, changed his coach, tried all different kinds of things. Finally, after many, many months of trying to figure out the problem, he realized he’d forgotten Rule Number One when you play tennis: Keep your eye on the ball. So here the rule is: Keep your eye on the breath, on the sensation of the body here." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Persistence"

"Breath instructions often begin by saying, “Watch the breath.” But that can create some problems. Tell yourself, “Don’t watch the breath. Feel it. Wear it. Bathe yourself in it.” After all, you’re dealing with proprioception, the body as you feel it from within, and the breath is not in front of your eyes. If anything, it’s behind them. So back into the breath. See what that perception does." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Brahmaviharas at the Breath"

"3. A third common problem is an inability to feel breath sensations in different parts of the body . This is often a problem of perception: The breath sensations are there, but you don’t recognize them as such. Part of your mind may think that it’s impossible for there to be breath energies flowing through the body. If that’s the case, treat this as an exercise in imagination: Allow yourself to imagine that breathing energy can flow through the nerves, and imagine it flowing in some of the patterns recommended in the basic instructions. Or imagine it flowing in the opposite directions. At some point, you will actually start to feel the movement of energy in one part of the body or another, and then this will no longer be an exercise in imagination. In the meantime, survey the body and relax any patterns of tension you may feel in its various parts. Start with the hands and work up the arms. Then start with the feet and work up through the legs, the back, the neck, and into the he...

"Your memories of yesterday’s breath and yesterday’s meditation are going to get in the way of seeing what’s actually happening with the breath right here, right now. In that way, you have to forget, wipe the slate clean. Try to come to the meditation with the same attitude of exploration that you had when you first started meditating. Your problems right now may be the “old hat” problem. Everything seems to be kind of old, and you’re not expecting too much anymore, so you don’t feel all that encouraged to put in much effort or to pay a lot of attention. That cynical attitude is one you’ve got to put aside. You’ve got this breath right here, right now: How can you make the most of it? And remember where that cynical attitude came from. It came from the fact that yesterday’s meditation was really good, or that maybe last year’s meditation was really good, and in the meantime, things have not been so good. So you get cynical about the whole process, believing that no matter how good...

"We have certain preconceived notions of how the breath comes into the body, what we have to do in order to bring it into the body, how the process of breathing relates to the different parts of the body, and then we breathe in line with that. And many times it’s a caricature of what’s actually going on. So we have to learn to look at the process in other ways. Consciously change the way you conceive of your breathing; see what happens. At the very least it’ll give you a good insight into the relationship between mental events and physical events. It’s not always the case that the mind is just reacting to its experiences. Sometimes it’s shaping its experiences, too. If we don’t get a sense of how we shape things, we never really get a chance to look into the mind. For starters there’s the concept of the breath not as the air coming in and out of the lungs but the energy flow in the body. Some people have problems with this; others have no problems at all. But allow yo...

"There are times when you’ll find that your conception of the breath gets confused, as in the tendency to confuse the breath energy with the liquid energy in the body. When liquid runs up against obstacles, it can’t go through. It gets squeezed in. It builds up pressure. But the breath doesn’t have to be squeezed in. Yet when we start breathing as if it were, that creates problems. So, remember: It’s totally free to go anywhere at all, all the time. The neat boundaries we place around it are artificial. Learn to erase them and see what happens. As for the pleasure or rapture you want, that will happen on its own. You can squeeze it, you can force it, but squeezed and forced pleasure is not going to last very long. It’s like squeezing a piece of fruit to make it ripe. You know that ripe fruits are supposed to be soft, so you squeeze your piece of fruit, squeeze it and squeeze it until it’s soft, but that doesn’t ripen it. You just get mush. The right way is to leave th...

"Like the whole issue of inhabiting your body: We know that ultimately you have to let go of your attachment to the body, but in the meantime, learn how to inhabit it purposely. Be fully aware of the whole body. This is part of the path. Breathe into the body. Think of the whole body breathing. Every cell in the body, your whole nervous system, is engaged in the flow of energy. Think about that. Then look at what sensations you have in the body that would correspond to that. Look at whatever sensations are blocking that sensation. In other words, there may be tightness here, tightness there, that’s getting in the way of the sense of flow in the body. Well, relax the tightness. As long as you’re going to identify with something, identify with this sense of the whole body, inhabit the whole body, and then learn how to stay there. What usually happens is that we inhabit part of the body for a while, then we run off to something else. If you could take a picture of your sense of your ...

"And that sense of balance and stillness: That’s your gift. So learn how to protect it. At first it’s going to be a little awkward, but over time you find that it is possible to keep this balanced state of mind, this balanced sense of the breath being nourishing, open, refreshing inside and doing other things at the same time. This is one of the reasons why we do walking meditation: to learn how to maintain that sense of balance and stillness even though the body is moving. And then from there you can add other activities on top of that. But always think of this as your foundation. It’s not just one more ball to keep in the air as you’re juggling all kinds of things. It’s the spot where you’re standing as you juggle. In other words, it’s an essential foundation for everything else you want to do. When you’ve started getting used to having this sense of the center, you wonder how you functioned before you had it. And although simply concentrating the mind is not going ...

"Bodily fabrication is the way you breathe. Simply by learning how to breathe calmly around the emotional problem, you can begin to take it apart. Just two weeks ago, I was reading that some scientists had done a study showing that calm breathing calms the mind. How do you say “Duh!” in French? Mais bien sûr . Of course it calms the mind. We’ve been doing that for 2,500 years." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Five Faculties: Putting Wisdom in Charge of the Mind"