Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"Ajaan Chah says that sometimes your mind will say, “How much longer am I going to sit here?” And your answer should be, “I don’t know. Let’s see. Can I sit with this breath? Can I sit with the next breath?” Sit with one breath at a time and you find after a while that you get a lot of breaths under your belt without you’re having to carry them around or find them oppressive or burdensome." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Four Bases of Success"

"The Buddha’s observation is that the fact that of being alert to the breath is one of the causes for pleasure. If you keep that alertness continuous, the pleasure smoothes out, and as it gets smoother, it gets more intense. It develops a kind of momentum. It builds up. And whatever good it’s going to do for the body, whatever good it’s going to do for the mind, you don’t have to go making exclamations about it to yourself." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Pleasure on the Path"

"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"

"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...

"Ajaan Chah says that sometimes your mind will say, “How much longer am I going to sit here?” And your answer should be, “I don’t know. Let’s see. Can I sit with this breath? Can I sit with the next breath?” Sit with one breath at a time and you find after a while that you get a lot of breaths under your belt without you’re having to carry them around or find them oppressive or burdensome." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Four Bases of Success"

"Regard each present moment as a gift. There’s something new that’s going to come, there’s a new potential for energy in each present moment. In this way, what’s been going through the day, the narratives you’ve been telling yourself in the course of the day, don’t have to determine the meditation right now. You’ve got this breath; you’ve got this opportunity to talk to yourself in a new way. You can breathe in a new way; you can hold new perceptions in mind. And as you change the dialogue inside, and change the pictures you hang on the wall — in other words, the perceptions that run things — you find that even though the breath may not be the best breath possible, at least you’ve got the right attitude. After all, the attitude is what you’re going to be able to take with you, even as you leave the body." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Free Sources of Energy"

"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"

"We all have different pleasures that we know how to stay focused on regardless of possible or potential distractions. Well, you’ve got to learn how to develop that same habit around the breath. Even though you may be talking to someone, you can still be with the breath. Your mind may be talking at you, it may be shouting at you, but you can still stay with the breath." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Breathing Easy"

"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, ...

"Ajaan Chah says that sometimes your mind will say, “How much longer am I going to sit here?” And your answer should be, “I don’t know. Let’s see. Can I sit with this breath? Can I sit with the next breath?” Sit with one breath at a time and you find after a while that you get a lot of breaths under your belt without you’re having to carry them around or find them oppressive or burdensome." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "The Four Bases of Success"

"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"

"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...

"Usually a thought, once it’s finished, will lead to another thought and then another one. Learn to drop the thought right in the middle and come back to the breath. When you come back, reward yourself with a really nice breath, one that feels really refreshing. That way, the next time you wander off, you’ll be more inclined to come back because you know when you come back it feels good. While you’re with the breath, try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. The more sensitive you are, the more subtleties you’ll find. And the more subtleties you find, the more interested you’ll get: What’s actually going on here? Areas of the body where you’ve been carrying tension around for who-knows-how-long: You can begin to loosen them up. You notice all kinds of things about how you relate to the body, and how the mind relates to itself in the present moment. If you find yourself talking to yourself about the breath, that’s fine. That’s an integral part of th...

"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"

"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...

"Usually a thought, once it’s finished, will lead to another thought and then another one. Learn to drop the thought right in the middle and come back to the breath. When you come back, reward yourself with a really nice breath, one that feels really refreshing. That way, the next time you wander off, you’ll be more inclined to come back because you know when you come back it feels good. While you’re with the breath, try to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels. The more sensitive you are, the more subtleties you’ll find. And the more subtleties you find, the more interested you’ll get: What’s actually going on here? Areas of the body where you’ve been carrying tension around for who-knows-how-long: You can begin to loosen them up. You notice all kinds of things about how you relate to the body, and how the mind relates to itself in the present moment. If you find yourself talking to yourself about the breath, that’s fine. That’s an integral part of the concentrat...