Thanissaro Bhikkhu on Refreshing Breathing

"You’ll begin to realize that there’s a lot right here in the breath that you haven’t been taking advantage of. Going out, looking for pleasure outside, is like someone who has a really good piece of land but tries to plant crops in somebody else’s land: There are bound to be problems. Turn around and look at your own piece of land right here. Take care of that. See what you can grow right here. And you’ll find not only that you will get a great sense of well-being, but it also begins to spill out for other people as well through your thoughts, words, deeds. Your sense of well-being here makes it a lot easier for you to act in skillful ways. You’re not so hungry for things that are going to cause trouble." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Practicing from Gratitude"

"If there’s a chronic pain in some part of the body, how do you breathe around it? How do you breathe through it? How do you get your awareness around it? Get so that you feel that you inhabit the body, you feel that this is your space, in the sense that you’re not going to let the pain push you out. Of course, there’s a paradox here. On the one hand, ultimately we don’t want to lay claim to the body as us or ours, but before you can really let go of it, you’ve got to fully inhabit it, make use of the space. Because only if you can fully inhabit the space can you be fully at ease with your own mind. And that’s when the mind can really settle down." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Occupy Your Body"

"In addition to the worlds we intentionally carry around, there are also lots of unintentional ones that come blowing through our minds. Those come because of the force of our old actions. As those storms come blowing through, sometimes the best thing you can do is simply hold onto the breath. Just as you would batten down for a storm, you just lie low and try to hold tight to the breath for dear life as the winds blow through. You hang onto the breath as tenaciously as you can. Even though it doesn’t fill your awareness, it at least gives you a corner where you’re still in the context of the present moment." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Worlds" (Meditations2)

"Look at the way you perceive your relationship to other people. If you feel that you’re victimized by other people, that’s a perception that’s not going to help. You have to have the sense that you’re well-grounded and safe, solid in your own well-being. And the breath helps here. If the bodily sensations feel uncomfortable, you’ll have a hard time maintaining any real sense of well-being here, and that will make it harder to wish for the well-being of others, because the well-being has to start in here. As Ajaan Lee says, “If you say the thoughts of goodwill, but you don’t really feel any sense of happiness or well being inside, it’s like opening up the faucet to an empty tank of water. Nothing but air comes out.” The coolness of air and the coolness of water are two very different things. What you want is water. So you want to develop the cool water of a sense of well-being inside you. And the breath is a good place to start." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "High Lev...

"You focus on the breath coming in and going out. As you do that, there’s always the question of which of your sensations in the body right now are related to the breath. A lot of it depends on your perception, the way you conceive of the breath. If you think of the body as a big bellows, and the breath simply as the air coming in and out, you’re going to have one series of perceptions around the breath. You’ve got this solid body, or this relatively solid body, which can’t be permeated by breath just like the bellow is not, and then there’s the big space inside where the breath comes in, goes out the tiny nozzle. That’s one way of perceiving the breath. But then you notice that there are these other feelings that flow through the body as you breathe in and breathe out. What are you going to do with them? Are they useful to focus on or not? As Ajaan Lee pointed out, you can really get the mind into a good state of concentration if you focus on them as “breath” as well. In other wo...

"So try to be aware of what you’re doing. And the best place to be aware of that is right here at the breath, because the breath is where the body and the mind meet. If the mind is going to have an influence on the body, it’s going to be through the breath. If the body’s going to have an influence on the mind, it’s through the breath. So here you get to see the traffic going back and forth. What’s coming out of the mind? Is it being alert? Is it being wise? Or is it just being its ordinary old self? You can train it, you know. This is why we’re here meditating: to train the mind, realizing that the big issue in life is what the mind does." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Straighten Things Out Inside"

"There was that great comment by Stephen Colbert one time about Buddhism. “What is this? You wrap yourself up in a cloth and sit under a tree and breathe?” And the answer is, “Yes, if you know how to do it right.” And right resolve points out a lot of effective ways how to do that so you do find a sense that this is where you really do belong. And this is where you’re happy to be." ~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Happy to Be Here"