Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Try to maintain that sense of being centered, all-around, and equal, because that’s the kind of awareness you’re looking for. You need an awareness that’s all-around. The reason the mind slips off to the past or the future is because it gets very small. It’s as if the route to the past and the future is a little tube, and you usually make the mind small enough to fit down the tube. But here you’ve got the mind enlarged. It won’t fit. Another image is that when you’re thinking about something, you have to narrow down your awareness of the body so that you can create your little thought world. But as long as you can maintain this full-body awareness, when it’s really solid, there’s no space for the thought worlds to appear, or if they do appear, there’s no space for you to move into them, because you’re consciously too big. In Pali this is called mahaggatan cittam, the enlarged mind. When your mind is enlarged and all-around like this, then when you’re hunting for your defilements...

"It’s important to think of the breath energy in the body as giving off a kind of radiation, a protective field to prevent those other negative energies from coming in to affect you. If you just leave yourself wide open, you pick up negative things from other people. So you’ve got to be careful. This is when you need a kind of barrier around you, a protective energy barrier, the breath flowing throughout the whole body like this does provide that. Just be alert to that potential, learn how to maintain it. As you do this, you find another effect happening as well: your energy becomes a more positive influence on other people. The way people react to you will change, the influence you have on other people will become a better influence. And you begin to see that the effort put into maintaining this inner sense of openness and well-being while you’re doing other things is not simply adding one more task onto all the other tasks you’ve got in the world. It actually simpl...

"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...

"It’s important to think of the breath energy in the body as giving off a kind of radiation, a protective field to prevent those other negative energies from coming in to affect you. If you just leave yourself wide open, you pick up negative things from other people. So you’ve got to be careful. This is when you need a kind of barrier around you, a protective energy barrier, the breath flowing throughout the whole body like this does provide that. Just be alert to that potential, learn how to maintain it. As you do this, you find another effect happening as well: your energy becomes a more positive influence on other people. The way people react to you will change, the influence you have on other people will become a better influence. And you begin to see that the effort put into maintaining this inner sense of openness and well-being while you’re doing other things is not simply adding one more task onto all the other tasks you’ve got in the world. It actually simpl...

"It’s important to think of the breath energy in the body as giving off a kind of radiation, a protective field to prevent those other negative energies from coming in to affect you. If you just leave yourself wide open, you pick up negative things from other people. So you’ve got to be careful. This is when you need a kind of barrier around you, a protective energy barrier, the breath flowing throughout the whole body like this does provide that. Just be alert to that potential, learn how to maintain it. As you do this, you find another effect happening as well: your energy becomes a more positive influence on other people. The way people react to you will change, the influence you have on other people will become a better influence. And you begin to see that the effort put into maintaining this inner sense of openness and well-being while you’re doing other things is not simply adding one more task onto all the other tasks you’ve got in the world. It actually simplifies things a...