Evaluating the Breath

Ajaan Lee talks a lot about using the breath energies in the body as you’re trying to settle down. The Buddha doesn’t talk much about that sort of thing. But when he talks about breath mindfulness, he does talk about being aware of the whole body. When he talks about jhāna, he talks about taking the sense of pleasure and rapture and spreading it throughout the body in the same way that a bathman, back in those days, would mix water with soap powder, working the water through the powder to make a kind of soap dough. And when the Buddha talks about the elements of the body, he does talk about breath sensations throughout the body.

Ajaan Lee puts all that together and solves the problem: When you have a sense of rapture and pleasure coming from the way you breathe, how do you work it throughout the body? Well, if there’s a flow of energy, associate the flow of energy with the pleasure, and then it flows. As for being aware of the whole body, the Buddha gives an analogy. He says that when you’re aware of the short breathing and the long breathing, you’re like a turner who’s aware of a short turn and a long turn.

Now, a turner is someone who, back in those days, worked pretty much like a lathe worker would work today, although they didn’t have mechanical lathes then. If you’re an old-fashioned turner, you have to do the turning. If you have a stick that you’re trying to carve into a baluster, put one end of the stick on the ground, hold that end down with your toe, and then right next to the toe you have a knife. You use the knife to carve. With your other hand, you have a bow with a string that you wrap around the piece of wood. As you move the bow back and forth, the wood turns. If you want a deep cut, you make a long turn. If you want a short cut, you make a short one.

I’ve seen videos of people who do old-fashioned turning like this. On the one hand, they’re very focused on one spot where the blade is meeting the wood, but on the other hand they also have to be very much aware of the hand that’s doing the turning, pulling the bow back and forth. It’s not a mechanical process, because sometimes the bow has to go for a short turn, sometimes for a long turn. So you have to be aware of the whole body if you’re going to be an expert turner.

In the same way, as a breath meditator, you have to be aware of the whole body as you’re trying to settle down with a sense of ease and well-being throughout the whole body, so that the mind can get into a good, solid concentration. Working with the breath energies is an ideal way of using your directed thought and evaluation as you’re trying to settle down.

So when you breathe in, where do you feel energy flow in the body? Before you settle down, ask yourself, “Do you feel it in the head? Do you feel it in your shoulders? In your abdomen? Are there subtle feelings that go down the arms and the legs? How do they feel? Do they feel like they’re working together or working at cross purposes?”

Sometimes we talk about blockages in the breath energy. But what’s blocking what? In one sense, it may be the fact that you’re associating the movement of the breath energy with the movement of the blood. The blood pushes against the walls of the vessels, so there’s pressure there.

But sometimes you’re holding tension, either because of the way you sit or because of an old trauma—psychological trauma, physical trauma—and you’re holding a memory of that. You’re trying to protect something, so you create a little energy shield around it. That’s why these shields are easy to work through, especially if it’s a physical trauma.

I found early on in my meditation that I had a sense of tightness in my right foot, right at the arch. I worked with it gently, because it wouldn’t respond immediately. But one day the whole thing broke, like a dam bursting, and I had a sudden memory of a time when I was a child. I’d jumped out of the second story of our barn on to a pile of hay, and a nail had gone through my foot there. I guess I had instinctively tensed up around that area to protect it as it was healing, but then it stayed tense for all those years. I was able to release it, then I was done with it.

Psychological traumas are more difficult to work with. You have to feel confident that whatever comes up, you’re going to be able to handle it. So for the time being, don’t push too hard if there’s a blockage and it pushes back. But think of it either as blood pushing against the walls of the vessels, or simply as breath energy in one part pushing against breath energy going in the opposite direction in another part.

There are also cases where parts of your body disappear. There seems to be no connection, say, between the shoulder area at the neck and the upper arm. Part of the shoulder is missing. Look very carefully, though. Forget about what you think your body shape is. Ask yourself, where does the energy flow? Sometimes it flows around and outside the body and then goes back in again. Well, allow that connection to happen, that you have this weird sense of breath body not in alignment with your physical body. As the breath is allowed to flow, sometimes it will get back in alignment, sometimes it doesn’t. You don’t have to force it.

The important thing is that you have a sense of ease in your body, and it feels good enough to settle down. We’re not here to create a perfect breath body. We’re trying to make it as good as possible so that it’s good enough to settle down with. That’s what the direct thought and evaluation are all about: You’re adjusting the mind to the object of the meditation, and the object to the mind.

Some people talk about this stage in concentration as being an unfortunate wobbling—you’re not steady enough. But the reason you’re not steady is because things are not yet ready to come together. So you work with them to bring them together. You change your mental image of the body so that it doesn’t cause you to force the breath energy in areas it doesn’t want to go. You change the energy until it becomes a good place for the mind to settle down and to stay.

After a while, you get a sense that you’ve worked with the breath throughout the body as best you can. There may still be some spots that are resisting, but you can work around them. Don’t push into them. If something is very sensitive, the more you push it, the more it’s going to push back. So you have to show that you can be trusted. You’re very gentle with it, very patient. You allow the breath energy around it to flow smoothly. And then you settle in.

After a while of settling in like this, someday that part of the body will just open up. It’s as if it’s a wary wild or wounded animal who finally decides it can trust you. Meanwhile, when you’ve got the breath energy good enough, and any more effort doesn’t seem to make anything better, your directed thought and evaluation have done the best they can. As Ajaan Fuang would say, it’s like a big jar full to the brim with water: You can add more water, but it’s not going to get any more full than that. Once it’s full, it’s full. In this case, once it’s good enough, it’s going to be good enough. Then you settle in.

At this point, you begin to realize that, as you’ve been working with the breath, it’s as if your awareness is in one area and the breath is in another. Your awareness is hovering around the breath. Now allow it to seep in, so that it becomes one with the breath. One effective way I’ve found of doing this is to think of my eyes focusing on my eyes. You stop focusing on the body as something down below you. Just focus on the eyes in the eyes and think of all the different parts of the body getting into their parts of the body. Your awareness of the hands is in the hands. Your awareness of the shoulders is in the shoulders. You’re getting away from the mental image you have that things should be other than where they are. As you can settle in like this, there’s a greater sense of oneness, a greater sense of confidence, what the Buddha calls “internal assurance.”

So step in and stay. If something pushes back and you don’t feel ready to stay, that’s a sign you have to do some more directed thought and evaluation. Otherwise, you just stay right here. All you need to keep your focus here now is the perception of breath in the body. It’ll flow in and flow out. You don’t have to do the flowing in and flowing out. It comes naturally.

This is where the image changes. This is where the Buddha said it’s like a lake with a spring at the bottom of the lake. The spring is fed time and again by the rain, so it provides cool water all the time. You don’t have to think about where the cool water is going to spread. Just allow it to come up and to spread throughout the lake on its own. In the same way, allow the breath energy to flow on its own. You don’t have to do any more directing. You’re just sitting, surrounded, bathed by the breath. In that way, the directed thought and evaluation have done their work.

This is a good lesson. The Buddha gives hints in the texts about what you’re going to do as you settle down, but sometimes they’re like riddles. You have to figure them out. Ajaan Lee has provided his answer to this riddle. Try it out and see if it works for you, because a lot of the meditation is going to depend on your own powers of observation. The Buddha talks about how, as you approach awakening, there are certain things you’re going to have to let go, even of the path. Let go of any perception you have around the deathless.

But when he’s teaching people who are actually gaining awakening while they’re listening to Dhamma talk, he doesn’t mention these things. In one or two cases he hints at them, but otherwise he doesn’t mention them. It’s up to the individual meditator to observe, to ask questions, to notice. Develop your own independent powers of observation and you’re going to have an unscripted moment where you make the move—it’s your insight into what you’ve been doing.

So try to develop this quality of observing for yourself—what the breath energies feel like, how you can work with them. Ajaan Lee gives some recommendations, but there’s a lot to play with, a lot to explore on your own. You want to develop that assurance that you can explore on your own and learn some useful independent lessons. This is training in independence. You’re going to gain some independent insights, and you do that by asking some independent questions. See where the texts give you advice that’s useful, and then do what you can do with that on your own. That’s when the meditation gets really interesting.