The Karma of Breath Meditation
Last night, we talked about the mental factors you use to shape the results of past karma arising in the present moment: acts of intention, acts of attention. Intention is your purpose. Attention covers the issues and questions you think are worth paying attention to.
Then there are the three kinds of fabrication: bodily fabrication, which is the in-and-out breath; verbal fabrication, the way you talk to yourself; and mental fabrications, which are your perceptions and feelings. We also mentioned how, when we practice meditation, we’re focused on the present moment so that we can handle these factors more skillfully.
This morning, I’d like to focus in more detail on exactly how you’re engaging in these factors as you meditate—whether you realize it or not—and particularly on how you can do it more skillfully if you get a good vocabulary for describing to yourself what you’re doing. It’s like professional tasters. They have to develop a precise vocabulary to describe the things they’re asked to taste. So today we’re going to give you the vocabulary you need to become a professional breather.
First, you have to set up the intention that you’re going to try to stay focused on the breath as continuously as possible. Then you pay attention. Learn how you can stay focused on the breath as comfortably, and with as much alertness, as possible. In other words, learn how to ask the right questions as you go along—in particular, on how to encourage more mindfulness and alertness.
Mindfulness, you may remember, is a faculty of your memory. It’s not simply bare awareness of what’s happening. The Buddha defines it as remembering things that have happened long ago—and particularly things that are relevant to what you’re doing right now: remembering to stay right here with the breath, remembering how to recognize skillful and unskillful qualities arising in the mind, and remembering what has worked and what has not worked in the past in dealing with those qualities.
One of the things you’ll be paying appropriate attention to is how to make the breath interesting. In other words, you’re not just watching the breath coming in and going out, in, out, in, out. You’re also observing how to make it more comfortable and more helpful for the body and the mind. On top of that, you want to pay attention when distractions come up, asking yourself how to put them aside as quickly and as effectively as possible.
This is where you’re going to run into what I call the committee of the mind—all the different opinions you have chattering inside your mind right now. There are many different versions of you inside there. As you focus on the breath, you find that there are other parts of the mind that want to think about something else. Their questions are going to be: how to enjoy a potential distraction and how they can slip out during a moment when the meditator in your mind is not alert.
The more you get to know your mind, the more you realize that these conversations are going on, on a subterranean level, all the time. They tell themselves, “As soon as the meditator slips, we’re going to go.” So it’s important that you not pay attention to their questions and that you pay more attention to your questions, in particular, how to recognize a distraction as a distraction, and how to drop it as quickly as possible. We’ll go into these issues in more detail tomorrow morning.
These are some of the ways in which you make use of skillful intentions and appropriate attention as you meditate.
As for the question of how to stay comfortably focused and alert, this is where the three fabrications come in. For example, with the breath, you want to notice where you feel the breath most clearly. Remember, the breath is not the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s the feeling of energy flowing through the body.
As for verbal fabrication, which is directed thought and evaluation, you direct your thoughts to how important it is for you to try to master this skill now in order to get to know the basic force of life. If you have any chronic pains or illnesses, you can focus on how to use the breath to alleviate them.
As for evaluation, there are lots of questions you can ask yourself. What kind of breathing feels best for the body right now?—energizing if you’re feeling tired, relaxing if you’re feeling tense, soothing if you’re feeling frazzled. You can try different rhythms of breathing: long, short; heavy, light; deep or shallow. You can try different textures of breathing: heavy, light; coarse or refined. Then you can combine and compare the different ways of breathing. An important part of evaluation is having different things to compare.
Once you’ve found something that’s comfortable, the question is how to maintain it and when you need to adjust it further. After all, as the mind settles down, you’ll find that the needs of the body will change. At first long breathing may feel best, but after a while shorter breathing might feel better.
Once you’re able to maintain a sense of comfort, then the next question is how to spread that comfortable sensation throughout the body, at the same time expanding the range of your awareness to fill the whole body to be aware of that sense of comfort all around.
This is where we get into mental fabrication. For example, with the issue of perception: What perception of the breath is most conducive to comfort? You can perceive the body as a sponge, surrounded by pores on all sides. The air can come in and out very freely through the pores from all directions. This perception can help you get past the sensation you sometimes have that you have to fight against obstructions in order to breathe.
At the same time, try not to perceive a sharp dividing line between the in-breath and the out-breath, because when you create a sharp dividing line, there’s a little bit of tension that goes with that sharp dividing line, which cuts through any sense of comfort or fullness that may be developing from the breath. Think of the out-breath flowing into the in-breath, and the in-breath flowing into the out-breath. Hold in mind the perception that you don’t want to squeeze the out-breath out of the body. Remember: You’re aiming at a sense of fullness as you breathe in and as you breathe out. So don’t force the breath out. Allow it to go out on its own, while you maintain a relaxed sense of fullness inside.
Another series of perceptions you can ask yourself about are: Where does the breath start in the body? Does it actually come from outside? If so, where does it come into the body? Does it come in many places? Or if it starts inside, where does it start? One point? Many points? Every cell? This last perception is especially useful as the in-and-out breath gets softer and even stops. That will happen as the mind gets very still and you begin to realize that you’re not breathing. You have to remind yourself you’re not going to die. If the body needs to breathe, it’ll breathe. If you’ve developed the perception that you’re already full of breath energy, that helps to overcome the fear of dying.
Other perceptions you might try asking yourself about include, “What directions does the breath flow in the body?” If you’ve read Ajaan Lee’s “Method Two,” you know he talks about the breath energy flowing down the spine, then down the legs to the feet. But even he explored other directions. For example, in one of his Dhamma talks he mentions the breath that starts at the soles of the feet and runs up the spine. So you can try different perceptions and see which ones feel best for you.
Another perception that you might investigate: Do you sense the breath-body ending at the skin or does it surround the material body, like a cocoon of energy? If you sense a cocoon of energy around the body, can you make it feel healthy? Once it’s healthy, can you draw that healthy energy from it into the material body?
Here we might want to stop and ask a question that people sometimes ask: “I thought meditation was supposed to be seeing things as they are, so why are we imagining things?” The answer is that our purpose is not looking at things as they are, but exploring things as they can be, in other words, seeing what potentials we have and how we can develop them into a basis for solid and alert concentration. Sometimes, in order to see these potentials clearly, you have to expand your imagination.
This is a principle that applies throughout life. For example, when you tell a child that the world is round, as far as the child is concerned, he has no way of knowing whether that’s true or not. But once you understand that it is a possibility, you can start exploring that possibility and use it to actually benefit. For example, if I’m going to fly from Los Angeles to Bangkok, then because the world is round, the shortest route is to fly near Alaska. Sometimes in order to see the truth, you have to first imagine the truth. These exercises of perception are basically opening our mind to possibilities that our current perceptions have closed off.
So those are some of the issues around perception, combined with appropriate attention: questioning your perceptions to find which ones are most useful for developing concentration.
There’s also the issue of feelings, the other form of mental fabrication. Sometimes very strong feelings of energy come up in the body and become unpleasant. Here again, you can use some perceptions to help you deal with them. For example, you can imagine that the excess energy is going out the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet, or out your eyes. Sometimes there’s a feeling of fullness and after a while it begins to feel uncomfortable. I’ve had this happen to a couple of my students. In every case, it turns out that they had almost drowned at some time earlier in their lives. If that’s happened to you, hold in mind the image that you’re surrounded by air, which you are. Hold that perception in mind and the feeling of fullness will become more and more pleasant.
If there are pains in one part of the body, focus on another part of the body that you can make comfortable by the way you breathe. Then when you’re well established in that comfortable part, think of the comfortable breath energy flowing from there through the pain. For example, if there are pains in the knees, focus on opening the breath channels starting with the back of the neck, and then going down the spine, down the legs, through the knees, and out the feet. If there’s a perception that the pain creates a wall that the breath cannot go through, destroy that perception. Hold in mind the perception that no matter how solid the wall, its atoms are surrounded by spaces, and the breath can flow through the spaces.
An important point is that you not force the breath energy into different parts of the body. A good image to hold in mind is that you’ve cut a road through the wilderness. Once the road is open, the trucks and cars will run along the road on their own. You don’t need to push them. If the body doesn’t seem to want to breathe, maybe it doesn’t have to. The breath coming in through the pores of the skin may be enough. At the same time, don’t force the body not to breathe. If it wants to, let it breathe.
These are just a few examples of how you can use the three fabrications along with appropriate attention to maintain the intention to stay with the breath, at ease and alert.
When you get used to shaping your meditative experience in this way, you become more sensitive to how you use the same fabrications to shape all your experiences at home, at work, and at play. The importance of these skills is indicated by the fact that when the Buddha describes the causes of suffering, the three kinds of fabrication come right after ignorance; right after them come intention and attention—which means that these factors are the first things you should pay attention to when you try to put an end to your ignorance.
All of the Buddhist teachings can be seen as instructions in what kind of intentions are best to develop, what questions are best to pay attention to, how to talk to yourself, which perceptions and feelings you should focus on. For example, if you’ve read any of the suttas, you may have noticed that there are lots and lots of similes. It’s through these similes that Buddha teaches you what perceptions to hold in mind. He even teaches you how to breathe.
In this way, you can learn how to use the power of your present moment karma, to lead to the end of suffering.
In a few minutes, we’ll have a period of walking meditation. The instructions are these: Find a path that’s at least 25 paces long. Stand at one end of the path. Hold your hands either in front of you or behind you. Walk at a fairly normal pace and focus either on your breath or on your feet. When you get to the end of the path, make up your mind that each time you reach the end of the path, you will turn either always to the right or always to the left, all throughout the meditation session. When you get to the end of the path, turn around, stop for a second to make sure you’re focused on your spot in the body, and make up your mind to stay with your meditation object all the way to the other end of the path.
If you’re focusing on the breath, you ideally should focus on your breath in a part of the body that moves the least while you’re walking: the middle of the chest, for example, the abdomen, or the head. We recommend that you focus on the breath rather than the feet, because this is the first step in learning how to be with the breath as you go through the whole day. In other words, you can walk and breathe at the same time. You don’t have to try to make the breath go in and out together with the steps of the feet. Let the breath flow whatever way it feels most comfortable.
If you have trouble focusing on the breath while you walk, you can focus on the movement of the legs and feet.
The image they give in the Canon is a man walking with a bowl of oil on his head, filled to the brim. Behind him is a man with a raised sword. The first man has to take a path between a beauty queen on one side and a crowd excited by the beauty queen on the other side. If he drops one drop of oil, the man with the sword will cut off his head. So at the end of the walking meditation period, I want you all to come back with your heads on.
