Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Ask yourself if you’re being too demanding. Does the breath feel okay? Are you trying to force it to be better than okay? If that’s what’s happening, be patient. Stick with the okay breath and give it some time. Your impatience may be putting too much strain on it. Allow it some time to relax and develop on its own." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"As the Buddha said, a real test of your discernment is seeing the things that you like to do that are going to give trouble in the long run, and learning how to talk yourself out of them. The same with the things that you don’t like to do, but are going to be good for you in the long run: like meditating every day. You’re able to talk yourself into wanting to do them. You have to ask yourself: Well, why don’t you like it? You’re just sitting here breathing, and if the breath is uncomfortable, you’ve got permission to make it comfortable. Experiment, learn to gain some control, learn to gain some familiarity with your own breathing. After all, this is going to be with you all the way to the end. If you can gain some sense of how to make the breath comfortable, it makes everything a lot easier. You have better associations with the meditation, so that it’s something you remember that you do like to do. It’s a comfortable time. Even if your mind is wandering off, every time you com...

"Okay, good enough. Plunge into the breath and leave the thinking behind. Just focus right in, focus, focus, focus. It’s not that you’re going to block out other things or that you’ll be unable to hear things happening outside. It’s just that you’re not paying attention to them. This is the point where the Buddha says the mind attains internal assurance. You know it’s okay just to focus in. You don’t have to hold anything back. Tell yourself: You’ve listened to yourself talk for who knows how long. It’s time to stop for a bit and get a taste of the pleasure and rapture, the sense of fullness and refreshment that can come when you’re willing to stop the chatter." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Stop the Chatter"

"When you breathe in, you train or tell yourself, “I will breathe in aware of the whole body.” When you breathe out, you tell yourself, “I will breathe out aware of the whole body.” This is another feature of ardency. You set up a clear intention, making up your mind that you’re going to do something skillful. In this case, you make up your mind to expand your awareness. The intention here, too, is a type of kamma in the present moment." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Karma of Mindfulness: The Buddha's Teachings on Sati and Kamma"

"As Ajaan Lee says, learn to converse with your breath, asking it how it feels, listening to what it has to say. Make the breath your companion for the time being. And as you get to know the breath, you get to know the mind a lot better as well. It gives you a good foundation so that when someone else comes in and wants to talk, you can say, “No, I’ve already got a good conversation going right here.” And no matter how insistent they are, you can say, “Look, I want to develop this relationship and then we’ll talk about you after a while.” Most of those other thoughts that are coming in are old friends, old enemies, old whatever anyhow. You don’t need to go with them. You know them already. You want to make better friends with the breath right now. So as long as the mind is going to be chatting with itself, chat with the breath, chat about the breath. This way you can shed a lot of the other things that would come in and bother you. You can really focus on this one con...

"Okay, good enough. Plunge into the breath and leave the thinking behind. Just focus right in, focus, focus, focus. It’s not that you’re going to block out other things or that you’ll be unable to hear things happening outside. It’s just that you’re not paying attention to them. This is the point where the Buddha says the mind attains internal assurance. You know it’s okay just to focus in. You don’t have to hold anything back. Tell yourself: You’ve listened to yourself talk for who knows how long. It’s time to stop for a bit and get a taste of the pleasure and rapture, the sense of fullness and refreshment that can come when you’re willing to stop the chatter." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Stop the Chatter"

"Find someplace, such as the breath, where you can stay with a sense of well-being. And when the question is: “What to do next? What to do next?” the answer is always, at least for the time being: “Just stay right here. Stay right here. Stay right here.” In the beginning, this requires some adjustment. That’s why in the first jhana, there’s directed thought and evaluation. You’re talking to yourself about how well you’re staying with the object: adjusting the mind, adjusting the object so that they fit together well. You hover around both the mind and the object. When you feel that the object is good enough, you can just be with the object. Just be with the breath. It gives you something to rest with." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Poison Your Fantasies"

"As Ajaan Lee says, learn to converse with your breath, asking it how it feels, listening to what it has to say. Make the breath your companion for the time being. And as you get to know the breath, you get to know the mind a lot better as well. It gives you a good foundation so that when someone else comes in and wants to talk, you can say, “No, I’ve already got a good conversation going right here.” And no matter how insistent they are, you can say, “Look, I want to develop this relationship and then we’ll talk about you after a while.” Most of those other thoughts that are coming in are old friends, old enemies, old whatever anyhow. You don’t need to go with them. You know them already. You want to make better friends with the breath right now. So as long as the mind is going to be chatting with itself, chat with the breath, chat about the breath. This way you can shed a lot of the other things that would come in and bother you. You can really focus on this one conversation, ...

"What kind of job are you doing as you put your experience together? You want to do a good job. Talk to yourself about the breath. Ask yourself: What kind of breathing would be comfortable? What kind of breathing would not be comfortable? How can you breathe in ways that feel satisfying? And what would be satisfying right now? What does the body need right now? When the breath feels satisfying, how do you keep it satisfying? How do you spread it around? As the Buddha says in his instructions for getting the mind into deeper concentration, you want to take any sense of ease or fullness or refreshment and let it fill the whole body. Let the whole body get saturated with it. How do you do that? Ajaan Lee gives some pointers. He says to think of the breath energy flowing through the blood vessels, flowing through the nerves, out to the pores of the skin, so that as you breathe in, you’re suffused by breath. It’s a good perception to hold in mind. That would be a mental fabrication. T...

"The ability to talk to yourself skillfully can be strengthened by a different kind of feeling: not emotions, but feelings of pleasure. The mind doesn’t operate totally on its understanding of things. Feelings of pleasure and pain do play a role in the way we act, the way we think. This is one of the reasons why we try to give rise to feelings of well-being within ourselves, through the breath, through the meditation: so that we can gain a sense of nourishment, a sense of inner contentment. That sense of inner contentment makes it a lot easier to look at things we have to look at but don’t like to look at, or to do things we have to do that we ordinarily don’t like to do, or to act in harmless and kind ways toward people we don’t ordinarily like." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Feeling & Intention"

"Find someplace, such as the breath, where you can stay with a sense of well-being. And when the question is: “What to do next? What to do next?” the answer is always, at least for the time being: “Just stay right here. Stay right here. Stay right here.” In the beginning, this requires some adjustment. That’s why in the first jhana, there’s directed thought and evaluation. You’re talking to yourself about how well you’re staying with the object: adjusting the mind, adjusting the object so that they fit together well. You hover around both the mind and the object. When you feel that the object is good enough, you can just be with the object. Just be with the breath. It gives you something to rest with." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Poison Your Fantasies"

"The ability to talk to yourself skillfully can be strengthened by a different kind of feeling: not emotions, but feelings of pleasure. The mind doesn’t operate totally on its understanding of things. Feelings of pleasure and pain do play a role in the way we act, the way we think. This is one of the reasons why we try to give rise to feelings of well-being within ourselves, through the breath, through the meditation: so that we can gain a sense of nourishment, a sense of inner contentment. That sense of inner contentment makes it a lot easier to look at things we have to look at but don’t like to look at, or to do things we have to do that we ordinarily don’t like to do, or to act in harmless and kind ways toward people we don’t ordinarily like. When the mind is feeling hungry, when it feels a lack of pleasure, it will look for pleasure anywhere. Sometimes it takes pleasure in getting revenge on others, or doing things that we know are really unskillful, or in prete...

"Find someplace, such as the breath, where you can stay with a sense of well-being. And when the question is: “What to do next? What to do next?” the answer is always, at least for the time being: “Just stay right here. Stay right here. Stay right here.” In the beginning, this requires some adjustment. That’s why in the first jhana, there’s directed thought and evaluation. You’re talking to yourself about how well you’re staying with the object: adjusting the mind, adjusting the object so that they fit together well. You hover around both the mind and the object. When you feel that the object is good enough, you can just be with the object. Just be with the breath. It gives you something to rest with." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Poison Your Fantasies"

"The ability to talk to yourself skillfully can be strengthened by a different kind of feeling: not emotions, but feelings of pleasure. The mind doesn’t operate totally on its understanding of things. Feelings of pleasure and pain do play a role in the way we act, the way we think. This is one of the reasons why we try to give rise to feelings of well-being within ourselves, through the breath, through the meditation: so that we can gain a sense of nourishment, a sense of inner contentment. That sense of inner contentment makes it a lot easier to look at things we have to look at but don’t like to look at, or to do things we have to do that we ordinarily don’t like to do, or to act in harmless and kind ways toward people we don’t ordinarily like. When the mind is feeling hungry, when it feels a lack of pleasure, it will look for pleasure anywhere. Sometimes it takes pleasure in getting revenge on others, or doing things that we know are really unskillful, or in pretending that tho...

"Try to content yourself with the breath right now. After all, it is a path, a path that leads somewhere good, and it doesn’t save all of its goodness for the end of the path. If you’re willing to watch the breath, get to know it, play with it a bit, try to see what kind of breathing feels good, it gives you an anchor in the present moment so that the mind isn’t running out after all kinds of things. It’s got a basic sense of well-being right here. In the beginning, the well-being may not be all that impressive, but it’s like a plant. You don’t get upset at a seed because it doesn’t give you fruit right away. You realize the seed is going to take time, so you water it, you care for it, and the seed will grow. So talk to your mind to make it contented with what it’s doing right now. This principle of contentment is very important." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Customs of the Noble Ones (2017)"