Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"You’re perfectly free to breathe in any way you like, perfectly free to try deep breathing, say, for a while, to see if it feels really good. There’s nobody out there to say, “Well, you failed that test, or you are not right, this is not as comfortable as it could be.” You’re the one who is gauging the results, and it’s up to you to decide what feels good over the long term. Sometimes you’ll find the rhythm of the breathing will change, as your physical condition changes, as the mind begins to settle down. Other times you’ll find there is a fairly steady rate that feels good, and all you have to do is stay with that steady rate. But it is entirely up to you. After all, this is a time for the mind to look after itself, and so it has the freedom to decide what to do with the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Our Primary Responsibility"

"So make sure you get the basics down. Stay with the breath. Keep the breath comfortable. If you fall off, get back with the breath. Do it all with a sense of good humor, because it’s a skill that requires you stick with it for the long haul. And don’t be discouraged by how much effort it takes, because the results, when they come, are more than worth the effort." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Breathing Game"

"You have to treat your experience of the breath, not as an end in itself, but as a tool for understanding the role of perception in creating suffering and stress. You do this by de-perception: questioning your assumptions about breathing, deliberately changing those assumptions, and observing what happens as a result." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "De-perception"

"You’re perfectly free to breathe in any way you like, perfectly free to try deep breathing, say, for a while, to see if it feels really good. There’s nobody out there to say, “Well, you failed that test, or you are not right, this is not as comfortable as it could be.” You’re the one who is gauging the results, and it’s up to you to decide what feels good over the long term. Sometimes you’ll find the rhythm of the breathing will change, as your physical condition changes, as the mind begins to settle down. Other times you’ll find there is a fairly steady rate that feels good, and all you have to do is stay with that steady rate. But it is entirely up to you. After all, this is a time for the mind to look after itself, and so it has the freedom to decide what to do with the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Our Primary Responsibility"

"When we work with the breath, it may seem like a detour but it’s not. When you’re with the breath, you’re in the present moment. As you work with the breath to make it comfortable, to make it energizing, whatever the body needs right now, you’re making it easier and easier for the mind stay in the present moment. Why is the present moment so important? Because this is where you’re making all the decisions in your life, the things you’re going to say, you’re going to do, you’re going to think. It’s important you try to do these things skillfully. Now, you can get yourself worked up and tied up in knots about making mistakes, so to prevent that, that’s another reason why we work with the breath: so that you’re coming from a state of ease and well-being. The more ease and well-being you can feel in this way, the easier it is to make the right choices, the easier it is to admit your mistakes when you see them, so that you can respond to the mistakes in the right way — “right way” her...

"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...

"After telling Rahula to make his mind like earth, [the Buddha] then taught him the steps for breath meditation, which involve a lot of proactive involvement with the breath, a lot of experimentation where you have to learn how to judge the results of your experiments in a reliable way. You’re not just sitting there letting the breath come in and go out any old which way. In fact, the Buddha criticized those who practiced breath meditation by just letting the breath come in and go out while trying to be equanimous all the time. In the Buddha’s sixteen steps, you train yourself to breathe being aware of the whole body, you try to calm down the effect that the breath has on the body, you breathe in a way that gives rise to rapture, that gives rise to a sense of pleasure and ease, you learn to breathe in a way that calms down the effect of feelings and perceptions on the body and on the mind. And while you’re breathing in and out, if you see that the mind needs to be gladdened, you g...

 "There’s a story in Ajaan Lee’s autobiography of a senior monk in Bangkok who was sick and so Ajaan Lee went to visit him. Now, this senior monk had very little use for the Wilderness Tradition, so it wasn’t the case that he had a lot of faith in Ajaan Lee. But Ajaan Lee just sat in one corner of the room and meditated. After a while the senior monk began to have a sense that something was coming from Ajaan Lee’s corner, having an effect on his body. So he asked Ajaan Lee, 'What are you doing?' and Ajaan Lee said, 'I’m making a gift of quiet, a gift of silence.' And the senior monk said, 'Well, whatever it is, keep on doing it. It feels really good.' And so Ajaan Lee would go back every day to meditate in the senior monk’s room. After a while, they started talking, and he actually taught meditation to the senior monk, who had never meditated before. As a result, he changed the senior monk’s ideas about the Wilderness Tradition and about the possibility ...

"So when you’re sitting here focusing on bodily fabrication, i.e., the breath, and you’re directing your thoughts and evaluating the breath, that’s verbal fabrication. Then there are the perceptions of the breath. How do you perceive the breath? Is it just a little bit of air coming in and out of the nose? How about thinking of the body as a big sponge with the breath coming in and out of the pores from all directions? What does that perception do to the way you feel the breath? What kind of sense of ease does it create? Or, instead of thinking of the breath as something you have to pull in from outside, remember that the breath is energy, and the energy doesn’t come from outside. It comes from within. The air comes from outside, but the movement of energy in the body that brings the air in is actually something that starts inside, from what Ajaan Lee calls the resting spots of the breath. These include the area right above the navel, the spot right at the end of the breastbone, t...

"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...

"You’re ready to learn from the meditation regardless of how well or how poorly it may go. You’re not so neurotic or brittle that you have to pretend that there is no such thing as poor meditation. Sometimes the meditation just doesn’t work. Okay, it doesn’t work. Recognize that it’s not going well and pose some questions in your mind. Exactly what’s going wrong? Tease things out. Is there something wrong with the breath, something wrong with the body? Is it the state of mind you’re bringing? The beliefs you’re bringing? Something that happened today and got you all stirred up? Learn how to separate these things out, so that regardless of how well or poorly the meditation goes, you know how to learn from it, to learn how to benefit from it. The lessons you learn, the benefits you get, may not be the ones you planned, but you’ve got to learn how to appreciate them so that your sense of conviction stays strong and gets more and more reliable. You learn to appreciate the...

"The more attention you pay to the breath, the more you realize what it can do for you. For most people the breath just keeps them alive, that’s all. But if you pay attention to how the breath feels in the body, you begin to realize that you can breathe in a way that feels good in the stomach, feels good in the chest. This is good for the different organs in your body. Breathe in a way that your shoulders don’t tense up as you breathe in, and you’re not holding on to tension in your shoulders as you breathe out. You can think of whatever tension or tightness or heaviness there is as dissolving away as you breathe out. And you can think of the breathing as a whole-body process. When the texts talk about the breath, it means any sensation of energy, movement, or aliveness in the body. Parts of the breath energy in the body feel still; other parts move. But if you think of them as all being breath, then you don’t create divisions in the body, as when you think of one pa...

"Playing with the breath also helps you stay in the present — and stick with the meditation over time — because it gives you something interesting and engaging to do that can show immediate benefits. This keeps you from getting bored with the meditation. As you see the good results arising from adjusting the breath, you become more motivated to explore the potentials of the breath in a wide variety of different situations: how to adjust the breath when you’re sick, how to adjust it when you feel physically or emotionally threatened, how to adjust it when you need to tap into reserves of energy to overcome feelings of exhaustion. The pleasure and refreshment that can come from working and playing with the breath provide your ardency with a source of inner food. This inner food helps you deal with the obstreperous members of the committee of the mind who won’t back down unless they get immediate gratification. You learn that simply breathing in a particular way gives rise to an imme...

"So make sure you get the basics down. Stay with the breath. Keep the breath comfortable. If you fall off, get back with the breath. Do it all with a sense of good humor, because it’s a skill that requires you stick with it for the long haul. And don’t be discouraged by how much effort it takes, because the results, when they come, are more than worth the effort." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Breathing Game"

"As you sensitize yourself to the potential for pleasure here just breathing in, breathing out, you’re getting closer and closer to the mind. You’re getting more and more sensitive; your powers of sensitivity are heightened so that they’re equal to the task of seeing deeper inside. This is how your pursuit of pleasure becomes a mature activity. You’ve learned how to be mature about how you find pleasure in life, you’ve learned how to be responsible about how you find pleasure in life, you’ve learned to be wise about how you try to find pleasure in life. And that’s a lot of what it means to be mature, responsible, and wise. Because that’s basically what all our activities are aimed at: finding happiness, finding well-being, pleasure, ease. We’re simply learning how to do it in a way that really gives results: long-term results, harmless results, because harmless pleasure is the only kind of pleasure that could be long-term. So always remain alert to the fact that ther...

"While you’re sitting here and meditating, for instance, how is this breath? And then how is this breath? How about this one? How is your focus? Where are you focused? Is it working? Is it getting results? If you like the results, stick with what you’re doing. If you don’t like the results, you can change. As for the issue of how good a meditator you are, if that somehow pops into the mind, just let it pop out of the mind. It’s really irrelevant. And it can get into the way of deeper insights." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Thoughts with Fangs"

"You’re asked to look at your breathing and to ask questions. What feels good? You get to choose. What do you want to do with the breath? You get to choose. What do you do to get the best results out of it, so that there’s a sense of fullness, a sense of ease, pleasure, simply through the way you breathe. How do you do that? You get to explore." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Bowing & Chanting"

"The more attention you pay to the breath, the more you realize what it can do for you. For most people the breath just keeps them alive, that’s all. But if you pay attention to how the breath feels in the body, you begin to realize that you can breathe in a way that feels good in the stomach, feels good in the chest. This is good for the different organs in your body. Breathe in a way that your shoulders don’t tense up as you breathe in, and you’re not holding on to tension in your shoulders as you breathe out. You can think of whatever tension or tightness or heaviness there is as dissolving away as you breathe out. And you can think of the breathing as a whole-body process. When the texts talk about the breath, it means any sensation of energy, movement, or aliveness in the body. Parts of the breath energy in the body feel still; other parts move. But if you think of them as all being breath, then you don’t create divisions in the body, as when you think of one pa...

"There’s a story in Ajaan Lee’s autobiography of a senior monk in Bangkok who was sick and so Ajaan Lee went to visit him. Now, this senior monk had very little use for the Wilderness Tradition, so it wasn’t the case that he had a lot of faith in Ajaan Lee. But Ajaan Lee just sat in one corner of the room and meditated. After a while the senior monk began to have a sense that something was coming from Ajaan Lee’s corner, having an effect on his body. So he asked Ajaan Lee, “What are you doing?” and Ajaan Lee said, “I’m making a gift of quiet, a gift of silence.” And the senior monk said, “Well, whatever it is, keep on doing it. It feels really good.” And so Ajaan Lee would go back every day to meditate in the senior monk’s room. After a while, they started talking, and he actually taught meditation to the senior monk, who had never meditated before. As a result, he changed the senior monk’s ideas about the Wilderness Tradition and about the possibility of getting results from m...

"As you sensitize yourself to the potential for pleasure here just breathing in, breathing out, you’re getting closer and closer to the mind. You’re getting more and more sensitive; your powers of sensitivity are heightened so that they’re equal to the task of seeing deeper inside. This is how your pursuit of pleasure becomes a mature activity. You’ve learned how to be mature about how you find pleasure in life, you’ve learned how to be responsible about how you find pleasure in life, you’ve learned to be wise about how you try to find pleasure in life. And that’s a lot of what it means to be mature, responsible, and wise. Because that’s basically what all our activities are aimed at: finding happiness, finding well-being, pleasure, ease. We’re simply learning how to do it in a way that really gives results: long-term results, harmless results, because harmless pleasure is the only kind of pleasure that could be long-term. So always remain alert to the fact that there’s a lot of p...