Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"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...

" Ardency: The breath is one of the few processes in the body over which you can exert conscious control. An important part of breath meditation is learning how to make skillful use of this fact. You can learn which ways of breathing foster pleasant sensations in the body, and which ones foster unpleasant ones. You learn a sense of time and place: when and how to change the breath to make it more comfortable, and when to leave it alone. As you develop this knowledge, you can use it as an aid in developing skillful qualities of mind. This sort of knowledge comes from experimenting with the breath and learning to observe the effects of different kinds of breathing on the body and mind. You can call this sort of experimentation working with the breath, for you’ve got an ardent purpose: the training of the mind. But you can also call it playing with the breath, for it requires that you use your imagination and ingenuity in thinking of different ways to breathe and to picture the br...

"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 immediate sense of pleasure. You can relax patterns of tension in different parts of the body — the back of the hands, the feet, in your stomach or chest — that would otherwise trigger and feed unskillful urges. This alleviates the sense of inner hunger that can drive you to do things that you know aren’t skillful. So in addition to helping with your ardency, this way of working with the breath can help with your practice of virtue." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"

"This is a practice where you’re making the Buddha’s instructions your own meditation. He gives you the basic outlines for your own exploration. He tells you to breathe in and out in a way that’s conducive to feelings of refreshment, and why you do that. You ask yourself, where’s the potential for refreshment in here? Look. Listen. He tells you to breathe in ways that give rise to a sense of ease. Again, look, listen: Where’s the potential here? When there’s a sense of ease, he says to think of it spreading throughout the whole body. One of the images he gives is of a bathman. In those days, they didn’t use bars of soap. They would take soap powder and mix it with water and you’d get a kind of dough, like the dough we make bread out of. You have to mix the water and the powder until the water moistens every bit of the dough. In the same way, you want the pleasure to moisten and refresh every part of your body. How do you do that? Ajaan Lee gives some ideas. Think of the breath ene...

"When the body is in pain but the mind is strong, you can be with the pain and not suffer from it. When people are being harsh with you, you can develop an energy field around the body by staying with the breath, letting the breath fill the whole body so that their energy can’t penetrate your energy field. When you fully occupy your body in this way, their negative energy goes right past you. You don’t suck it in. You don’t absorb it. So in that sense, the concentrated mind is tough. But it’s tender in the sense that it becomes very sensitive. And particularly, you become sensitive to your own actions so that your virtue is not simply a matter of the precepts. It becomes a deeper quality of the mind so that even though the things you do may not be against the precepts, but if they’re harmful, you know. And that knowing helps refine your restraint." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Turtle Meditation"

"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 immediate sense of pleasure. You can relax patterns of tension in different parts of the body — the back of the hands, the feet, in your stomach or chest — that would otherwise trigger and feed unskillful urges. This alleviates the sense of inner hunger that can drive you to do things that you know aren’t skillful. So in addition to helping with your ardency, this way of working with the breath can help with your practice of virtue." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "With Each & Every Breath: A Guide to Meditation"