An Interest in the Breath

When we focus on the breath, we want to be as sensitive as possible to how the breathing feels, not just at one spot or two spots in the body. We want to be able to feel the breath in* all* the parts of the body. That requires that we have the conception, or the perception, that breath can be everywhere in the body.

If you think of breath simply as air, the first question is how you’re going to get the air to go through the nerves and the blood vessels. But that’s operating with the wrong perception. Breath is energy, part of the wind element in the body. And the wind is not moving air. It’s a movement of energy.

We try to make it comfortable, and we try to make it interesting—because if you just focus on making the breath comfortable and succeed in settling down, it’s easy for the mind to zone out. You’ve worked through the obvious patterns of tension in the body, and the body feels comfortable enough for you to rest. So if you’ve had a long day, here’s your chance to rest. That’s what you think.

But as one of the ajaans who I listened to one time in Thailand was saying, there are three stages in settling down. He equated them with the three stages of concentration mentioned in the commentaries: momentary concentration, access concentration, and then fixed penetration.

Momentary concentration is your ordinary, everyday concentration—the concentration that allows you to follow when someone is speaking or to read a book. It lasts for a while, then stops, then lasts for a while, then stops again. It stops usually because of boredom, lack of interest, or anything unpleasant. As you’re sitting here thinking of comfortable breath going through, say, the tension in your torso, the tension in your stomach, the tension around your eyes, that enables you to get past that unpleasantness.

That brings you to the next stage, access concentration. You’ve settled in a little bit more. You’re not fully fixed on your object but you’re getting close, which why it’s called “access” or “neighborhood” concentration. This kind of concentration can’t withstand pleasure. It’s the stage where you zone out. For people who tend to have easy visions in their meditation, this is where they come. To get past that, you have to give the mind work to do.

This is where you have to really take an interest in the breath. Give the mind a task. As long as you’re paying attention inside the body to what the body feels like, to how you visualize the body to yourself, that kind of work is fine. It doesn’t tire out the mind or get it distracted. It’s not as restful as just zoning out, but it’s a lot more useful because you want a state of mind that’s alert, ardent, clearly discerning. You don’t get that by zoning out.

One thing you might do is to think of the bones in the body. Start with the first joints of the fingers. Where are they right now? Visualize them to yourself. Then ask yourself, “Where do you feel them right now?” You may not feel the bones, but you can feel the tissue around the bones. Is it relaxed? Tense? How’s the breath flowing there? If it’s tense, relax it.

Then you go up to the next joints, the third joints, the bones in the palms and the back of the hand. Wherever you feel any tension, relax it. Then the wrists, the forearms, the elbows, upper arms, shoulders. Then you start down with the first joints in the toes. Work up, joint by joint, through the feet, through the ankles, up the legs, through the pelvis, through as many vertebrae as you can. Try to do them one at a time if you can.

If you’ve studied any anatomy, you can visualize starting down at the sacrum, down at the tailbone, and then working your way up the spine, thinking about the ribs as you pass through the chest, heading to the neck, and finally up into the skull, each time moving your awareness so you’re sensitive to that part of the body. Wherever there’s any tension around the bones, let it relax. This makes it interesting, because you can use the breath to learn about two things: one, about the body; and two, about the mind.

As you get more sensitive to the energy flow in the body, you begin to realize that it’s going to have an impact on your health. In fact, it was this issue that got Ajaan Lee really interested in the breath in the body to begin with.

He was off in the forest. He had walked three days into a jungly area where he and another monk were going to spend the rains retreat. There were no roads. The trails were pretty rough. They finally made it to the spot where they planned to stay. Then, within a few days, he had a heart attack. The monk accompanying him wasn’t paying attention to Ajaan Lee. There was no medicine. The food they had was really not conducive to heart health at all. So Ajaan Lee had what? He had his breath and his determination to come out alive.

So he worked with the breath energy in the body. When you look at his instructions in Method Two, you notice that he starts with the back of the neck. Now, anyone who’s had heart problems knows that the back of the neck is Tension Central in the body if you have a heart problem. He thought of the breath energy there not coming in from the front, but coming in from the back to best disperse the tension.

This teaches you something about the relationship not only between the breath and the rest of the body, but also between the breath and your perceptions. We’ll get to that more in a moment.

Think of the breath coming in from the back, dissolving the tension in the neck, going down the spine, going down the legs; coming in the back of the neck again, going down the shoulders, the arms, down to the tips of the fingers; starting in the middle of the chest, right at the heart, going down through the organs down through the intestines. He found that by breathing in this way, focusing on his breath in this way, he could actually reassemble his health. At the end of the rains retreat, he was able to walk out. He had heart trouble off and on for the next eight years, but he lived another eight years after that, using his breath as medicine.

You’ll notice, if you look at his Dhamma talks during that period, that he would play with other ways of perceiving the breath. Instead of just going down the spine all the time, sometimes he would think of the breath energy coming up from the soles of the feet, up the legs, up the back, and also from the navel up through the front of the chest. There’s lots to explore in what the breath can do.

Ajaan Fuang had a different disease, rheumatoid psoriasis. As he said, it wasn’t just a skin disease. It came out of the bones. One time he was talking about the breath in the bones. If you get really sensitive, there is a breath energy that flows through the bones.

So this is one way of getting interested in the breath, realizing that it’s very important for maintaining your health. I noticed with the Ajaan Fuang’s students, the laypeople who would sit and meditate with him: After he died, they found it harder to meditate without him. The ones who really stuck with it were those who had chronic illnesses. They realized that this is what kept them alive, this is what kept them healthy: working with the breath.

The other people who stayed interested were those who were looking at what you learn about the mind as you work with the breath in this way. Here it’s largely a matter of the power of perception. You hold a perception in mind about the breath and see what happens.

Now, it’s important here that you not try to force things to fall in line with the perception. You just hold the perception in mind and be patient, because perceptions have more power the steadier they stay. If you just think about a perception just once, there’s very little power. Once or twice, there’s very little power. Think of it steadily. Hold the perception in mind that the breath can do different things in the body. After a while, you begin to see, “Oh yeah, that the perception does have some power.” At the very least, it allows you to see things you didn’t see before.

They say that when the Spaniards arrived in Mexico, the natives didn’t perceive the galleons as ships. They saw mountains, they saw temples, because they had no concept of that kind of ship. The perception of mountains and temples wasn’t useful. As they got to know the ships better, they began to realize that “Okay, this is a sea-going vessel and it can be used in this way.”

So allow your perceptions to change your breath, and allow what you may notice about the breath to change your perceptions. You begin to see that often your perceptions of the way things are can really get in the way.

Take, for example, your understanding of fire. I know people who say, well, when the Buddha says that nibbāna is like a flame going out, what happens to flames? They’re totally non-existent after they go out. Total cessation. Everybody knows that. Everybody sees that that’s the commonsense way of viewing fire.

Well, that’s just the commonsense way of viewing fire in the West at this point in time. Back in the time of the Buddha, though, they saw burning fires as the aggravation of the fire element, which exists everywhere. You aggravate it, say, with a fire starter. You provoke it. It latches on to fuel, and as long as it’s latched on to fuel, it’ll burn. When it lets go, then it goes out, and the fire returns to its diffuse, latent state.

For people back in the time of the Buddha, that was perfectly obvious: Of course, fire clings to its fuel. Take a stick that has a flame on one end, try to shake the flame off the stick, and it won’t let go. It’s holding on.

What happens is that our perceptions make us focus on certain things as relevant and other things as irrelevant. If you change your perceptions, you begin to notice things that have been happening all along that you didn’t see before.

The Buddha used the image of fire not to say that you’re going back to your original diffuse state or your original natural state when you go out. It’s more that when you let go, you’re free. It’s an image to make the point that we’re not trapped by the things we cling to. We’re trapped our act of clinging. If we can let go of the clinging, then we’re free. That’s the meaning of the fire analogy.

They saw fire differently because they were focusing on different things and ignoring different things. We nowadays are ignoring some things and focusing on others—because perceptions are like that. They focus on certain details, highlight them, and block out others. So what you’ve got to do as you’re practicing is learn perceptions that are useful for the purpose of the practice.

As the Buddha said, perceptions are like mirages. They give a distorted view of reality, but they give some details correctly, and others not. So you’ve got to figure out which details are actually useful for you right now, realizing that whatever perceptions you have, eventually you’ll have to let go of all of them, but you use them as tools in the meantime.

Here you are working with your breath. The breath, of all the elements in the body, is the most sensitive to the power of perception in the mind. This is where you can watch it. Once you get really sensitive to how the breath responds to perceptions, then you can start working with the other elements.

Think of fire, the warmth in the body. Focus on whatever spot in the body is warmest. It’ll get more intense after a while, as long as you hold that perception of fire or warmth in the body. Then you can spread the warmth.

If the warmth becomes unpleasant, especially at this time of year, you can think of water: whatever sensations in the body are the coolest. You’ll begin to notice there were sensations that you were ignoring because they didn’t seem relevant to what you were planning to do with the body. But as you sit here, or as you sit down under a tree, there will be cool sensations even on a hot day, cooler than the rest of the body. Well, focus on those. Then think of them spreading. Again, the power of perception: You don’t force these things to happen. You just think.

The same with earth, the solidity of the body.

At that point, Ajaan Fuang would have you balance the elements: not too heavy, not too light; not too warm, not too cold. Hold that perception of “just right” throughout the whole body. Then you can move on to perceptions of space, perceptions of consciousness. These are all constructed things, constructed through your perception. And this is how you’re learning about the process of construction.

So when you take an interest in the breath, you learn about the body, you learn about the mind. There’s work that you can do here. There are times when you stop the exploration and stay with a sensation of breath for a while to rest. Then when you’re ready, you get to work again.

Take an interest in the breath because it can teach you a lot of things about how you fabricate or construct your experience, and how you can deconstruct a lot of things you’ve been holding on to, especially the things that have been weighing you down, so that you can let go of them and be free.

So the breath is not just “in out, in out.” There was an ajaan one time who complained to Ajaan Lee: “Why do you teach people breath meditation?” he said. “There’s nothing there. It’s just in-and-out.”

As Ajaan Lee said, “If that’s all you see, then that’s all there is.” What he meant, of course, is that there’s a lot more there, but you have to learn how to look. And looking means taking an interest. It’s not that the breath will grab you by the shirt collar and make you take an interest. You have to take the interest. And if you take an interest in the breath, it’ll reveal a lot to you.