Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"This is your safe territory. And you want to have a sense of well-being in here, because that enables you to bring well-being into all your interactions with other people. That’s your strength. And the ease of the breath is the nourishment for the well-being of your mind. Otherwise, the mind gets hungry and then it turns into something else. So do what you can to maintain this perception of breath energy. One way of using this perception is that, instead of thinking about the world surrounding you, think of your awareness of the breath surrounding your awareness of the world. You can turn tables on it. The world is moving through. It’s like your awareness is a theater and the world is the show on stage. The theater encompasses the stage. So there’s breath all around your awareness of what other people are doing, what other people are saying. The breath is larger. You can use those images the Buddha gives of the entire earth or the entirety of space — or of the River...

"The body has all kinds of potentials that we rarely take advantage of because we don’t let the mind get quiet enough for them to show themselves. So give this potential — this potential for fullness, a sense of refreshment — some space; give it some time. You’ll find that it really can strengthen your practice and give you a source of energy that you can tap into whenever you need it at any time throughout the day. Whether you’re in formal meditation or not, these potentials are always there. When you can recognize them and learn how to allow them to grow, you’ll have a constant source of food, a constant source of energy that you can take with you wherever you go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Rapture" (Meditations6)

"You explore variations in the breath to see which ways of breathing will be energizing — to provide the refreshment — and comfortable, to provide the pleasure. When those feelings have been activated, you expand your awareness to fill the whole body and let those feelings spread throughout the body as you’re aware of it. As we noted above, this is where it’s very helpful to think of breathing as a whole-body process, so that the pleasure and refreshment can spread along with the flow of breath energy. In this way, you have body, feelings, and mind all occupying the same space: Awareness and a feeling of pleasure and refreshment fill your sense of the body. You energize the body in this way — this corresponds to the step of gladdening the mind in the third tetrad — and then you calm bodily fabrication. In other words, you let the breathing grow calm." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Undaunted: The Buddha’s Teachings on Aging, Illness, Death, & the Deathless"

"Just make sure that you keep at the breath and try to get on good terms with the breath. Don’t regard the meditation object as your enemy or something to be conquered. Think of it as something you want to live comfortably with. You want to be friends. So keep chipping away, chipping away, chipping away, making adjustments here and there, so that the present moment is pleasant. It may not be rapturous, there may not be any bells or whistles or lights flashing, but maybe it’s saving its bells and whistles and flashing lights for later on. Because the thing about pleasure is that if you allow it to stay just pleasant enough, after a while it begins to grow and grow and grow. Not because you pushed it, but because you’ve given it space." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath by Breath"

"This is your safe territory. And you want to have a sense of well-being in here, because that enables you to bring well-being into all your interactions with other people. That’s your strength. And the ease of the breath is the nourishment for the well-being of your mind. Otherwise, the mind gets hungry and then it turns into something else. So do what you can to maintain this perception of breath energy. One way of using this perception is that, instead of thinking about the world surrounding you, think of your awareness of the breath surrounding your awareness of the world. You can turn tables on it. The world is moving through. It’s like your awareness is a theater and the world is the show on stage. The theater encompasses the stage. So there’s breath all around your awareness of what other people are doing, what other people are saying. The breath is larger. You can use those images the Buddha gives of the entire earth or the entirety of space — or of the Rive...

"As you work with the breath and try and make it more comfortable, you’re dropping, as the Buddha said, unskillful mental qualities. You’re not really thinking about the sensual pleasures you might look for tomorrow or the sensual pleasures you enjoyed today. You’re focused simply on how the breathing feels right now in the body, the space of the body as you feel it from within, which is a higher level of pleasure. As you develop and work with the breath energy, you develop a sense of ease, well-being, pleasure, called sukha  in Pali. Then there’s the word piti,  which usually is translated as “rapture,” but also means “refreshment.” Sometimes “rapture” seems a bit too strong as a description for what you feel. Other times, “rapture” seems just right, as when there’s a very strong, intense feeling of the energy going in waves through the body. These two very pleasant feelings come from the fact that your mind isn’t engaged in sensuality. It’s more engaged in just looking at th...

"If there’s a chronic pain in some part of the body, how do you breathe around it? How do you breathe through it? How do you get your awareness around it? Get so that you feel that you inhabit the body, you feel that this is your space, in the sense that you’re not going to let the pain push you out. Of course, there’s a paradox here. On the one hand, ultimately we don’t want to lay claim to the body as us or ours, but before you can really let go of it, you’ve got to fully inhabit it, make use of the space. Because only if you can fully inhabit the space can you be fully at ease with your own mind. And that’s when the mind can really settle down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Occupy Your Body"

"This is your safe territory. And you want to have a sense of well-being in here, because that enables you to bring well-being into all your interactions with other people. That’s your strength. And the ease of the breath is the nourishment for the well-being of your mind. Otherwise, the mind gets hungry and then it turns into something else. So do what you can to maintain this perception of breath energy. One way of using this perception is that, instead of thinking about the world surrounding you, think of your awareness of the breath surrounding your awareness of the world. You can turn tables on it. The world is moving through. It’s like your awareness is a theater and the world is the show on stage. The theater encompasses the stage. So there’s breath all around your awareness of what other people are doing, what other people are saying. The breath is larger. You can use those images the Buddha gives of the entire earth or the entirety of space — or of the River...

"Have goodwill [mettā] toward your breathing, compassion, appreciation, equanimity towards your breathing. In other words, allow the breath to be comfortable so that you can have a foundation. Where it’s not comfortable, work at making it more comfortable: That’s compassion. Where it is comfortable, appreciate it. Sometimes, especially in the very beginning, the states of comfort seem to be very minor and not impressive at all. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to be more impressive. You’ve got to give them a little space. It’s like oak trees. They start out as tiny little acorns. Or even better, think of coastal redwoods. They start as the tiniest little seeds, and yet the tallest trees on earth come from these tiny, tiny seeds. Develop the conditions, allow them to grow and they become a huge forest. It’s the same with a sense of well-being in the body. First find areas that are simply not in pain, that seem okay. That’s good enough. Just be very ...

"You breathe in the way that feels refreshing: It refreshes your torso, refreshes all the different parts of the body where you can feel the breathing process. It starts out very gently, just a sense that things feel okay; they feel like they’ve settled in where they belong. But if you give this sense of “okay” some space, give it some time, it’ll grow. So don’t put any squeeze on it. Breathe in in a way that doesn’t build up tension inside and you don’t hold onto any tension when you breathe out. Just protect that “okay” area wherever you feel it. Things feel full and pleasant. If you give them more time, that sense of feeling full will grow, that sense of pleasure will grow. Over time, you’ll find that you can tap into this more and more regularly." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Pain of Conviction"

"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...

"This is where the pleasure in the present moment comes in as you try to stay with whatever pleasant sensations in the body you create through the way you breathe, through the way you perceive your breath. Think of the breath coming in and out through all the pores. It can flow anywhere in the body, so wherever there’s a sense of tightness or blockage, hold in mind the perception that allows your mind to believe, okay, the breath can go through the blockage, no matter how solid your bones or the pains or any other solid-seeming parts may seem. There’s a lot of space inside the atoms of the bones, so you can think of the breath flowing through that space, to create a sense of ease, fullness, refreshment throughout the body." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "In the Present" (Meditations8)

"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 ...

"The body has all kinds of potentials that we rarely take advantage of because we don’t let the mind get quiet enough for them to show themselves. So give this potential — this potential for fullness, a sense of refreshment — some space; give it some time. You’ll find that it really can strengthen your practice and give you a source of energy that you can tap into whenever you need it at any time throughout the day. Whether you’re in formal meditation or not, these potentials are always there. When you can recognize them and learn how to allow them to grow, you’ll have a constant source of food, a constant source of energy that you can take with you wherever you go." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Rapture" (Meditations6)

"Just make sure that you keep at the breath and try to get on good terms with the breath. Don’t regard the meditation object as your enemy or something to be conquered. Think of it as something you want to live comfortably with. You want to be friends. So keep chipping away, chipping away, chipping away, making adjustments here and there, so that the present moment is pleasant. It may not be rapturous, there may not be any bells or whistles or lights flashing, but maybe it’s saving its bells and whistles and flashing lights for later on. Because the thing about pleasure is that if you allow it to stay just pleasant enough, after a while it begins to grow and grow and grow. Not because you pushed it, but because you’ve given it space." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breath by Breath"

"Learning how to breathe skillfully in the midst of difficult situations can give you a foundation of well-being inside, so that you don’t feel so oppressed, so hemmed in by events. You realize that regardless of what’s happening outside, you can still inhabit the full space of your body with pleasant breath energy, so that you’re acting from a position of strength." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Heart & Mind"

"We talk about giving rise to a feeling of pleasure with the breath, pleasure with the concentration. Where does it come from? You can’t push pleasure into the body. You have to realize that there are lots of little centers in the body, little sensation centers, and all you have to do is give them a little bit of space, and then a feeling of what seems like neutrality to begin with will actually become pleasurable — if you give it space, if you’re not pushing and pulling it around too much. Then the more consistently you can maintain that sense of space, the greater the pleasure grows. And you let it spread without pressure. It becomes rapture: a sense of refreshment, fullness." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Isolating the Aggregates" (Meditations6)

"I went through a period once when I found it very difficult to breathe. At the end of the meditation, everything in the body seemed to be clamped down. Ajaan Fuang was far away. It was a month or so before I saw him. So I mentioned this to him when I finally met him. He said, “You’re focused on the earth element; focus instead on space.” That solved the problem right there. So sometimes our problems are due to things we don’t really know we’re doing. I was holding the perception of earth someplace in my head, and that was getting imposed on the body. And thinking of the body as really solid, it seemed impossible to squeeze the breath into that lump of solidity. So you can think of the space in the atoms or between the atoms. Or you can think that your experience of the body is primarily energy. You look at the body in the mirror and what you see is solid. You hit it against things and it’s solid. But how you feel it from inside: That’s energy. So don’t use your perce...

"As the Buddha pointed out, this is a harmless pleasure — harmless in the sense that it doesn’t place any burdens on anyone else and in the sense that it doesn't obscure your vision. If our pleasure depends on things outside, we get blinded because pleasure that’s based outside has to have its drawbacks, yet we don’t want to see the drawbacks, so we close our eyes to them. But this is a kind of pleasure that doesn’t require that you close your eyes. You may need to close your eyes in the beginning, as you meditate, just to prevent distractions. But as you get more and more grounded in the breath, more absorbed in the breath, you not only keep your physical eyes open, you keep your mental eyes open as well. You see where the pleasure comes from, and you can see that it causes no harm to anyone. That allows the mind to open and be more sensitive to all kinds of areas that it used to desensitize itself to. So as long as the mind is going to feed and cling, have it fe...

"Have good will [mettā] toward your breathing, compassion, appreciation, equanimity towards your breathing. In other words, allow the breath to be comfortable so that you can have a foundation. Where it’s not comfortable, work at making it more comfortable: That’s compassion. Where it is comfortable, appreciate it. Sometimes, especially in the very beginning, the states of comfort seem to be very minor and not impressive at all. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have the potential to be more impressive. You’ve got to give them a little space. It’s like oak trees. They start out as tiny little acorns. Or even better, think of coastal redwoods. They start as the tiniest little seeds, and yet the tallest trees on earth come from these tiny, tiny seeds. Develop the conditions, allow them to grow and they become a huge forest. It’s the same with a sense of well-being in the body. First find areas that are simply not in pain, that seem okay. That’s good enough. Just be very ...