Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Ultimately there’s a sense that it really does feel good to be with the breath. It really does feel good just to sit here breathing in, breathing out, and you’re able to create a sense of fullness, making sure that you don’t squeeze the breath out or force it too much in. That way, the body feels balanced. There’s no sense that you’re trying to push the breath into a solid. Try to think of the body as energy already. As the breath comes in, it’s simply new energy pooling into the energies you’ve already got. There’s no clear line between the breath energy already there and the new breath coming in. They mingle together. Think of it that way. When the breath goes out, you don’t have to squeeze it all out. Let the breath do the out-breath on its own, and learn how to read the point that tells you, “Now’s the time to breathe in again.” Keep at it, and a sense of fullness will develop because you’re not squeezing things as you’re breathing out." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu ...

"Pay special attention to the in-breath, because that’s the energizing breath. The in-breath is something you do. The out-breath is something you should learn how not to squeeze out. You do the in-breathing; the body will allow the breath back out again at its own pace. Then when you feel the need to breathe in again, then breathe in." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Savor Your Breath" (Meditations11)

"Pay special attention to the in-breath, because that’s the energizing breath. The in-breath is something you do. The out-breath is something you should learn how not to squeeze out. You do the in-breathing; the body will allow the breath back out again at its own pace. Then when you feel the need to breathe in again, then breathe in." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Savor Your Breath" (Meditations11)

"You try to learn which ways of breathing feel good for the body. I’ve had people ask me what kind of breathing is best, and the answer is that you have to figure out for yourself what your body needs right now. What it needs right now may not be what it needs tomorrow, or even at the end of the hour. You have to be on top of what kind of breathing feels good each time you breathe: what kind of feelings you can create by the way you breathe, different feelings of pleasure in different parts of the body. When you have a feeling of pleasure, how do you spread it around? Think of the image of the bathman kneading water through the dough of the bath powder he’s trying to create. How do you do that in a way where you’re not forcing things too much, one where you allow things to flow? When you force the breath too much — even though it starts out comfortable — the fact that you’re squeezing it too much or pushing it too much turns it into something else. This is a skill you have to lear...

"Breathe in a way that’s refreshing, that gives rise to a sense of fullness in the body. Think of the breath as the energy flowing around the body, and ask yourself: Where does it feel good? Where does it not feel good? Focus on the areas that you can make good by the way you breathe, and hold in mind the right perceptions that allow that to happen. For example, be careful not to squeeze the end of the in-breath or the end of the out-breath to mark the difference between the two. Think of your experience of the body as being primarily energy. It’s not the case that you’re trying to pump the breath energy into a solid body. It’s more like allowing the breath to flow freely into the energy already there without any clear dividing line between the two. When you hold that perception in mind, it gives rise to a floating feeling in the body. See if you can maintain the position of your focus on that perception, on that feeling of lightness, buoyancy. This is what gives fl...

"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"

"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...

"Have goodwill [mettā] towards your breathing, compassion, appreciation, equanimity for your breathing. In other words, allow the breath to be comfortable so 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 become more impressive with time. You’ve got to give them a little space. It’s like oak trees: When they first come out of the ground, they’re pretty small — a little tiny acorn. Of an even better analogy is a coastal redwood tree, which has 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 the sense of well-being in the body. First find areas that are simply not in pain, t...

"Allow the sensation of the breathing to be as relaxed as possible. Think of the breath energy as something that already fills the body. As you breathe in, you’re simply adding more breath energy, infusing it into the energy already there. When you breathe out, you’re not trying to squeeze everything out. If all of the breath were squeezed out of the body, you would die. So try to find the right balance. At what point does an out-breath start feeling uncomfortable? When you sense that point, stop breathing out; start breathing in. At what point does an in-breath start feeling uncomfortable? Stop there and allow yourself to breathe out again. Learn how to surf the breath in the same way you’d surf a wave. In other words, try to maintain a balanced sense of ease in the body whether the wave tends right or left. That sense of ease is going to be your friend." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Warrior's Stronghold" (Meditations4)

"You know there’s air coming in and out of the lungs, but as you begin to get more sensitive to how you experience the process, you begin to see there’s also a sense of energy that flows through the body. And that has a huge impact on how you’re going to be sitting here for the rest of the hour. If the energy is allowed to flow smoothly and freely, you’re more likely to be here with a sense of comfort. In fact, when the Buddha talks about the mind settling in, it’s to develop pleasure and rapture. It’s right here, in the way the breath energy flows, that the pleasure and the rapture are going to appear. So you work with that. Once you find a sense of ease, what can you do to maintain that ease? You can’t clamp down on it. But you can’t take a cavalier attitude toward it, either. It’s something you want to protect. You have to be very observant as to how you’re experiencing the body in the present moment and to what ways you can experiment with that experience. Notice which ways of...

"Pay special attention to the in-breath, because that’s the energizing breath. The in-breath is something you do. The out-breath is something you should learn how not to squeeze out. You do the in-breathing; the body will allow the breath back out again at its own pace. Then when you feel the need to breathe in again, then breathe in." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Savor Your Breath" (Meditations11)

"If you think of the body as being a solid lump and you’ve got to pump the breath into it, that’ll affect the way you breathe, affect the level of pleasure you can get out of the breath. It restricts a lot of your possibilities. But if you think of the whole body as a breath energy field, you can breathe in and out of various places that you might not have thought of before: breathing out of the sides of your rib cage; thinking of the breath coming in from the left and the right as you breathe in and going out the chest you breathe out. Or you can breathe in and out of the shoulders, in and out of the eyes. See if there’s someplace in the body that you’ve never thought of as breath before, and experiment with it: As you breathe in, think of the breath energy coming in right there. You don’t have to pull it from anywhere else. It just comes straight in through the skin. Notice which parts of the body, when you do this, have an especially good effect on how you experience the breath...

"Remember that the breath is energy, it’s not just air coming in and out of the lungs. The air can be held, as when you hold your breath, but the energy of the breath can’t be held. It can be blocked, but you don’t really hold it. So even as you’re holding the air in your lungs, there will be a flow of breath energy in different parts of the body. This means that when we focus on the breath as energy, we’re focusing on something that’s very light, very quick, and very pervasive. It also helps to think about the breath as something that comes in and out of the body very easily. Even when you’ve got a stuffy nose or congestion from a cold, there’s still a subtle energy coming into different parts of the body. It’s like working around a traffic jam: If you know that the traffic is congested on a main street, you drive through the side streets. You can think about the breath just waiting to come in at any time, so you don’t have to pull it in. At the same time, you don’t ...

"Breathe in a way that’s refreshing, that gives rise to a sense of fullness in the body. Think of the breath as the energy flowing around the body, and ask yourself: Where does it feel good? Where does it not feel good? Focus on the areas that you can make good by the way you breathe, and hold in mind the right perceptions that allow that to happen. For example, be careful not to squeeze the end of the in-breath or the end of the out-breath to mark the difference between the two. Think of your experience of the body as being primarily energy. It’s not the case that you’re trying to pump the breath energy into a solid body. It’s more like allowing the breath to flow freely into the energy already there without any clear dividing line between the two. When you hold that perception in mind, it gives rise to a floating feeling in the body. See if you can maintain the position of your focus on that perception, on that feeling of lightness, buoyancy. This is what gives fl...

"The steps in this second tetrad are these: You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure, to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication — which are your feelings and perceptions — and then to breathe in and out calming mental fabrication. With regard to the first step, of inducing rapture, note that the word for rapture here, pīti, can also mean refreshment. In some instances and for some people, these sensations will be strong and clearly rapturous, even ecstatic. For others, they will be gentler and simply refreshing. This is not a measure of the power of your concentration. It’s simply an indicator of how much energy your body has been lacking, and how it responds when the energy becomes more full. The Buddha says elsewhere that the kind of rapture you’re trying to induce here is both physical and mental. You induce physical rapture or fullness by the way you breathe; you induce mental rapture by the percept...

"Ultimately there’s a sense that it really does feel good to be with the breath. It really does feel good just to sit here breathing in, breathing out, and you’re able to create a sense of fullness, making sure that you don’t squeeze the breath out or force it too much in. That way, the body feels balanced. There’s no sense that you’re trying to push the breath into a solid. Try to think of the body as energy already. As the breath comes in, it’s simply new energy pooling into the energies you’ve already got. There’s no clear line between the breath energy already there and the new breath coming in. They mingle together. Think of it that way. When the breath goes out, you don’t have to squeeze it all out. Let the breath do the out-breath on its own, and learn how to read the point that tells you, “Now’s the time to breathe in again.” Keep at it, and a sense of fullness will develop because you’re not squeezing things as you’re breathing out." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The C...

"One of the instructions in breath meditation is to learn how to breathe in and out in a way that makes you sensitive to rapture, makes you sensitive to pleasure in the body. Now, it takes a while to figure out how to do that. Part of it has to do with the way you breathe, part of it has to do with how you focus your mind. But it’s a skill you can figure out. Part of the problem, of course, is with that word, “rapture.” It sounds like Saint Teresa going into ecstasies. And sometimes there is a very strong sense of thrill that goes through the body. But what the Buddha’s having you focus on more is the sense of refreshment. 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 g...

"Before you take up the three perceptions of inconstancy, stress and not-self, [the Buddha] has you develop other perceptions first — in particular the perceptions that lead the mind to concentration. While you’re here practicing concentration, focus in on your breath. What keeps you with the breath? A perception, a mental label that says “breath.” And a lot of the concentration practice is learning how to gain a perception of breath that you can hold in mind for long periods of time with a sense of ease, a sense of well-being. You test different perceptions of the breath to see which ones hold — in other words, which ones you can stick with. This would seem to go against the perception of inconstancy, and it does. You’re actually looking for a perception you can hold onto as constant. You want to see the breath as something consistent and pleasant you can stay with. For example, if you see the in-breath and the out-breath as two radically different things, it’s going to be hard t...

"Allow the sensation of the breathing to be as relaxed as possible. Think of the breath energy as something that already fills the body. As you breathe in, you’re simply adding more breath energy, infusing it into the energy already there. When you breathe out, you’re not trying to squeeze everything out. If all of the breath were squeezed out of the body, you would die. So try to find the right balance. At what point does an out-breath start feeling uncomfortable? When you sense that point, stop breathing out; start breathing in. At what point does an in-breath start feeling uncomfortable? Stop there and allow yourself to breathe out again. Learn how to surf the breath in the same way you’d surf a wave. In other words, try to maintain a balanced sense of ease in the body whether the wave tends right or left. That sense of ease is going to be your friend." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Warrior's Stronghold" (Meditations4)

"Breathe in a way that’s refreshing, that gives rise to a sense of fullness in the body. Think of the breath as the energy flowing around the body, and ask yourself: Where does it feel good? Where does it not feel good? Focus on the areas that you can make good by the way you breathe, and hold in mind the right perceptions that allow that to happen. For example, be careful not to squeeze the end of the in-breath or the end of the out-breath to mark the difference between the two. Think of your experience of the body as being primarily energy. It’s not the case that you’re trying to pump the breath energy into a solid body. It’s more like allowing the breath to flow freely into the energy already there without any clear dividing line between the two. When you hold that perception in mind, it gives rise to a floating feeling in the body. See if you can maintain the position of your focus on that perception, on that feeling of lightness, buoyancy. This is what gives flavor to that i...