Understanding Breath Energies

We spend so much time concerned with affairs of the world outside, our responsibilities outside, that we tend to neglect our responsibilities inside—how our mind relates to the body, how we experience the body directly from within. Our culture doesn’t even have much of a vocabulary to describe that.

So this is one of the things we do as we meditate: We put aside our outside responsibilities so that we can work on our inside ones, because no one else is going to take care of them for us. How you relate to the body, the way you move the energy around in the body: For most of us, that’s something we’re barely conscious of. Most of the time, we don’t even know we’re doing it.

We have a lot of knee-jerk reactions to how we hold the body, how we breathe in response to events, how the energy in the blood vessels flows. All these things are happening, and we’re hardly aware of them at all, even of the fact that we’re subconsciously influencing them.

This is going to have an impact both on the health of the body and on the health of the mind, so it’s good to get to know this. Drop all your concerns about things outside. Look at the work that needs to be done inside.

As the Buddha said, even when we just breathe in an ignorant way and think in an ignorant way, we create a lot of suffering. By creating suffering for ourselves, we weigh ourselves down, and then we’re actually less able to be helpful outside, because we’re carrying so much around already.

However, we can learn to do these things with knowledge, with awareness, and that can actually be a path to the end of suffering. Then, when the mind isn’t weighed down by suffering, you have a lot more strength to help yourself and other people.

When you’re working with the breath, start out with the breath energies that you do feel clearly, wherever you feel them in the body. Try to hold in mind a perception that allows the idea of breath energy in the body to make sense.

I was talking this morning to a doctor, and he was saying that everything he learned in physiology told him that breath doesn’t go through the nerves, it doesn’t go through the blood vessels. Well, part of that idea is based on the definition of the word “breath.” Another part, though, is that with modern physiology, they’re looking at your body from the outside. If they were to take your body apart, this is what they would see.

But here you’re working from inside the body. That’s a part of your awareness that you can’t share with anyone else. You can’t take it out to show anyone else. This is why it’s difficult to teach the concept of breath energy to people for whom it’s new. I can’t take my breath energy out and say, “This is where it’s running. You see this happening here or there.” You have to get a sense of your body as you feel it from within.

This is how Ajaan Fuang explained it to me. It’s the feeling of having a body, something you already feel. You work with that to begin with. Then you ask yourself, “Does it feel light? Does it feel tense? Does it feel open?” If there’s any tension anywhere, try to relax it, because that’s a sign that the breath energy is blocked there.

As you scan down through the body and notice where you feel tension, see what you can relax and which knots of tension or ribbons of tension you can’t relax. Work around those for the time being. Come back to them later. Then breathe calmly. Hold in mind the idea that energy can flow anywhere in the body.

As you work with the breath energy, you find that your sensitivity to it will grow as your concentration grows steadier. Then, as you get more sensitive, that allows your concentration to grow more refreshing. The sensitivity and concentration help each other along.

People often ask, particularly around the issue of calming the mind and gaining insight, “How calm does the mind have to be before you gain insight?”

Ajaan Lee’s image is that it’s like having two legs. You have to walk with both. It’s a just question of which one you’re going to emphasize at any one time. You don’t ask, “How strong does my right leg have to be before I start using my left leg?” You use the two of them together, and they strengthen each other through walking together.

It’s the same with insight and the calmness of the mind. The more you understand what’s going on inside, the more you can work with it in a way that feels calming and soothing: energizing when you need energy, relaxing when you need to be relaxed. It makes the body a much more pleasant place to be. That makes it easier for the mind to settle down. As the mind gets more quietly settled in, it can see things even more clearly.

So as you survey through the body, try to notice: When you breathe in, how does this part of the body feel? When you breathe out, how does it feel? Can you detect any difference?

If not, move on to another part, until you find a part of the body where, yes, it’s clear that now the breath is coming in, now the breath is going out. You may find that you can sense this in areas of the body that you didn’t expect.

So try to be thorough in your survey of the body. Go through it as many times as you like, to get more and more familiar with this territory. If any thoughts of outside responsibilities come up right now, you can say, “No, I’ve got these inside responsibilities I’ve got to work with.”

The greater the sense of well-being, the sense of feeling settled and belonging in your own skin, then the more strength you’ll have to deal with those things later outside.

So give yourself some time. It’s not that you’re being irresponsible by focusing here. You’re learning how to manage things—manage your attention, manage your intentions—so that they actually are helpful and give you the best results.

As you work with the breath, you can begin to get a sense, “Okay, now it’s flowing and now it’s not.” Or, “It’s flowing here, but not flowing there.” And you may find that the reason for the blockage is not where you feel the blockage.

Sometimes there’s a sense that the leg is falling asleep, but the problem may actually be up in the back of your neck. The energy is not flowing well there, and the blockage there causes trouble further down the spine.

So again, try to be thorough in your search, in your survey of the body. Search for any knots of tension that are causing a blockage or a lack of flow someplace.

You’ll also find sometimes that pain puts up barriers—although it’s not so much the pain itself that puts up the barrier. It’s your perception of how things relate to the pain. As little children, we had to deal with pain. There was nobody to explain it to us. We had to figure it out on our own, and we may have come up with some pretty strange ideas that still influence our relationship to pain now.

One of the things we tend to do is to tense up around the pain as a way of containing it, the subconscious idea being that “Maybe if I can create enough tension around the pain, it won’t spread.” Even though on a conscious level we realize that that doesn’t help much anymore, still there’s a subconscious way of relating to pain, going back to our childhood, that can actually make the pain worse. The more you tense up around it, the less blood flow you have, and the more the tension begins to spread throughout the body.

So if there’s a pain someplace in the body, even before you gain a sense of really feeling the breath energy, hold in your mind the picture that the energy can flow right down through the pain. Remember that all the atoms in your body contain a lot of space, so there’s always room for something to flow.

If there’s a pain in your knee, think of the energy going down the leg and then out through the tips of the toes. Don’t let it stop at the knee or even at the toes. The mental image that the pain is a barrier or a wall: That’s what creates unnecessary tension, which can then spread. That’s the irony: To prevent the pain from spreading, we create a wall of tension, but then that tension is what spreads a sense of constriction in different parts of the body.

So change the image.

What we’re doing here is using the Buddha’s teachings on present karma to create a difference in how we experience the body. We use things like our perceptions and our intentions and our attention—i.e., the questions we pay attention to, the way we frame the questions in the mind. What we want to do with all this?

This is our present karma in relationship to how we’re experiencing the body right now.

So look at your intentions, look at your acts of attention, look at your perceptions. See which aspects need to be changed. For example, if you have the perception that the breath can’t flow, that perception will get in the way.

But remember, we’re not talking about physiology from the outside. This is physiology from the inside—how you feel your body from within.

We do have the word proprioception in English to indicate how you sense the body from within. The fact that you know where your arm is right now: Part of it is due to the fact that the arm or the hand may be touching the lap. But there’s also part of the arm that’s not in contact with anything, yet you know it’s there. What is that sensation?

Assume that that’s breath.

If you can hold that perception in mind, it changes things. You begin to realize that your experience of the body actually has to come through this property of breath everywhere in the body. If you think of the breath as being prior, and your sense of the solid parts of the body as coming later, that changes the dynamic.

Then it’s not a question of forcing the breath through the solid. The breath is potentially there first. It’s through the breath that you sense what’s solid, so you can change the breath anywhere you’d like.

This brings you closer and closer to your own mind, your awareness of what’s going on right here—an awareness that’s already there in the body, but that we tend to block out, again, because we’re so much more concerned with our responsibilities outside. We feel that paying attention inside is an unnecessary luxury or a distraction. But it’s not.

This is home base.

This is where you’re coming from. The more fully aware you’re of this level, and the more you can sense the body from within, then the more firmly grounded you’re going to be as you go through the day, through the week, through your life. You know that this area right here is something nobody else can penetrate in to get unless you allow influences from outside to come in. But you can decide you’re not going to allow them in. This area is yours.

When you’re dealing with other people, don’t go flowing out from this. Try to keep your sense of your hands in your hands, your sense of your feet in your feet, and don’t think of your inner self flowing out to other people, because when you flow out, even if it’s out of compassion, you’ve lost your grounding. You’ve lost your source of nourishment that can actually come from allowing the breath energy to be soothing and refreshing inside. You weaken yourself, and you weaken your ability to be helpful.

You can be in here and still be sensitive to the world outside, sensitive to the needs of other people, but at the same time realizing that you need this area to be yours in order not to get knocked around by all the issues in the world outside.

So to make this yours, you’ve got to inhabit it fully and gain an understanding of what’s really going on.

And learn to talk to yourself about what’s going on inside here. This is why the Buddha’s vocabulary around breath, around the other elements of the body, is the way it is. We’re not talking about the chemical elements. We’re talking about the properties of how you sense the body from within. Part of it is cool. That’s the liquid part. The warm part, of course, is fire. The solid parts are earth. The energy flow is breath. Then there’s space that surrounds all this and actually permeates through everything inside.

When you can hold those perceptions in mind, then you can give yourself a handle on how to deal with imbalances inside. Sometimes, when you’re weak, you can find reserves of strength that you didn’t realize you had before. You’re getting more and more acquainted with what you’ve got here, and you get a better sense of how to move the energies around to your advantage.

What’s to your advantage in here places no burdens on anyone else. It’s not as if you’re taking advantage of anyone else. You’re just exploiting fully what you’ve already got here.

In Ajaan’s Lee’s image, it’s like having your own piece of land and learning how to plant it with good crops instead of letting weeds grow up inside. If you have nothing but weeds on your property, where are you going to get any food? You’ve got to go steal food from other people or beg them for it. Either way, you’re placing a burden on them.

But you’ve actually got your own good resources here, so make the most of them. Learn how to plow your field, how to sow the seed, how to gather the crops, and you’ll have your own inner nourishment. When you have your inner nourishment, that means you don’t have to go feeding off other people.

When you’re not feeding off other people, that means that the ups and downs in their lives, the ups and downs in their behavior, don’t have such a huge impact on you. You can even use your strength to help them when necessary.

So it’s not a selfish thing, the amount of time we’re spending here, learning to develop our own inner resources, gaining a sense of the body from within.

This can be our source of strength. This can be our inner source of food that allows us to live in the world but not be overcome by the world—and actually have good things to share with the world. That’s because we’ve learned how to make the best use of what we’ve got. We do it fully, consciously. That’s what makes all the difference.