Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"So that the breath energy flows smoothly throughout the entire body, that’s your work. And the work gives rise to the results: a sense of ease, fullness, refreshment. That sense of well-being helps you an awful lot, because it makes it easier to do the right thing. When you have a sense of well-being you can tap into at any time, you’re not so hungry to go after unskillful ideas or unskillful motives or impulses. The reason we go after unskillful things is because part of the mind demands a hit of pleasure right away. So you try to feed that demand in a more skillful way, just by the way you breathe. This is a huge area of our awareness that most of us don’t take advantage of. When the body feels uncomfortable, we just accept the fact that it’s uncomfortable and we look outside for some ease to distract ourselves. But many times that lack of comfort can be changed simply by the way you breathe. So here’s free medicine. Take advantage of it. It doesn’t cost anything and it can pre...

"You’ve got to convince yourself this is a worthwhile activity, sitting here focusing on your breath. Then you have to think about letting the breath be comfortable, trying not to force the breath too much, just noticing what kind of rhythm of breathing feels good right now. This requires some thought, but it’s constructive thought. It’s okay to think and pose questions around this issue, because that kind of thinking and questioning gets you more absorbed in the breath. It’s not a matter of forcing the mind to stay with the breath no matter what. If you put too much force on the mind like that, it’s going to rebel. It’s like trying to hold a beach ball under water. As soon as your grip loosens up a bit, the ball goes shooting up out of the water. What you’ve got to learn is how to get the mind interested in the breath. Realize that this energy in the body that goes along with the breathing is an important factor in keeping the body healthy: not just alive but health...

"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 as you breat...

"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"

"You’ll notice that there are subtle sensations in the body as you breathe in, as you breathe out, that correspond to the grosser sensations of the movement of the rib cage, the movement of the diaphragm. Allow those subtle sensations to blend together in a way that feels harmonious. Think of every part of the body being connected, all the energy channels in the body being connected, so that the breath energy spreads through them instantly and automatically, independently of the in-and-out breath, without your having to do anything to breathe it in or out. Here you’re using one of the aggregates, the aggregate of perception, to help calm the breath down. And you notice that it does also induce a sense of piti, which is usually translated as “rapture,” although in some cases it’s not quite as strong as what we would ordinarily call “rapture.” It’s more a sense of refreshment. The body feels full, satisfied." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "On the Path of the Breath...

"If you give the breath an hour to do its healing work, totally opening up the body to allow the breath to bathe every nerve out to every pore, you know that you’ll come out at the end of the hour with a body and mind in much better shape. The body will be soothed; the mind, bright and alert. And you don’t need to stop being bathed in the breath when the hour is up. You can keep it going in all your activities. That way, even though you may not be armed with a whole set of plans for facing the future, at least you’re in a position where you don’t need that kind of armor. You’ve got the armor of a healthy body and mind. You’ve got an invisible armor: the force-field of this all-encompassing breath, continually streaming out from your center to every pore, protecting you on all sides. That’s something you feel in every cell of your body, something you know for sure, for you can sense it all around you, right here, right now. And you know that whatever the future brings...

"If there’s pressure in any part of the body, remind yourself that it’s blood pressure. Breath doesn’t have to exert pressure on anything. It goes right through atoms. So if there seems to be a wall of pressure that you can’t push the breath through, remind yourself that you’ve made the mistake of pushing something else beside the breath. You’re trying to push the blood there. Just hold the thought in mind, “Breath can flow there, it doesn’t push anything.” The simple thought of allowing can relieve a lot of the pressure. So do your best to get acquainted with the breath energy issues in the body, what it means for the breath to flow well, and be ingenious at finding new ways of solving new problems as they come up. That way, this area of the body, this area of the mind that tends to get closed off, you can start to reclaim and you can use that dimension of your awareness to your own advantage — your own skillful advantage. This is one of those meditative skills that’...