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Thanissaro Bhikkhu: With Each and Every Breath

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Thanissaro Bhikkhu: With Each and Every Breath

Personal notes and quotes from the book With Each and Every Breath: A Guide to Meditations on the Breath by Thanissaro Bhikkhu.

General Principles

The Mind's Basic Problem

The mind’s most basic problem: the stress and suffering it brings on itself through its own thoughts and actions.

Self-Respect & Effort

The practice of meditation teaches you to respect the things within you that are worthy of respect: your desire for a genuine happiness, totally reliable and totally harmless; and your ability to find that happiness through your own efforts.

Freedom & Compulsion

Remember, nothing in the practice of meditation is ever forced on you. The only compulsion comes from an inner force: your own desire to be free from self-inflicted suffering and stress.

Present Moment Awareness

The more clearly you see what’s happening in the present, the more likely you are to make skillful choices.

Meditation focuses your attention on the present moment because the present moment is where you can watch the workings of the mind and direct them in a more skillful direction. The present is the only moment in time where you can act and bring about change.

The Causal Approach to Action (Karma)

Action as a Chain of Cause and Effect

The basic approach in each part of this training is the same: to understand all your actions as part of a chain of causes and effects, so that you can direct the causes in a more positive direction. With every action in thought, word, or deed, you reflect on what you’re doing while you’re doing it. You look for the motivation leading to your actions, and the results your actions give rise to. As you reflect, you learn to question your actions in a specific way:

  • Do they lead to stress and suffering, or to the end of stress and suffering?
  • If they lead to stress, are they necessary?
  • If not, why do them again?
  • If they lead to the end of stress, how can you master them as skills?

Training in virtue and generosity asks these questions of your words and deeds. Training in meditation approaches all events in the mind as actions—whether they’re thoughts or emotions—and questions them in the same way. In other words, it forces you to look at your thoughts and emotions less in terms of their content, and more in terms of where they come from and where they lead.

Interlinked Nature of the Training

All three aspects of the training—virtue, concentration, and discernment—help one another along. Virtue makes it easier to settle down in concentration and to be honest with yourself in discerning which members of the mind’s committee are skillful and which ones are not. Concentration provides the mind with a sense of refreshment that allows it to resist unskillful urges that would create lapses in virtue, and the stability it needs to discern clearly what’s actually going on inside. Discernment provides strategies for developing virtue, along with an understanding of the mind’s workings that allow it to settle down in ever-stronger states of concentration.

Virtue, concentration, and discernment, in turn, are all based on the most fundamental part of the training: the practice of generosity. In being generous with your belongings, your time, your energy, your knowledge, and your forgiveness, you create a space of freedom in the mind. Instead of being driven by your various appetites, you can step back and realize the joy that comes when you’re not a slave to hunger all the time.

The Hungry Mind

The Active Feeder

The mind is not passive. Because it’s responsible for a body with many needs, it has to take an active approach to experience. Its actions shape its experience as it looks for food, both mental and physical, to keep itself and the body nourished. It’s driven by hungers both physical and mental. We’re all familiar with the need to feed physically. Mentally, the mind feeds both externally and internally on relationships and emotions. Externally, it hungers for such things as love, recognition, status, power, wealth, and praise. Internally, it feeds off its love for others and its own self-esteem, as well as the pleasures that come from emotions both healthy and not: honor, gratitude, greed, lust, and anger. At any given moment, the mind is presented with a wide range of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, tactile sensations, and ideas. From this range, it chooses which things to focus attention on and which to ignore in its search for food. These choices shape the world of its experience.

The mind’s search for nourishment is constant and never-ending, because its food—especially its mental food—is always threatening to run out.

These incessant questions of “What next?” “Where next?” drive its search for well-being. But because these questions are the questions of hunger, they themselves keep eating away at the mind.

Mind & Becoming

The Process of Becoming ( Bhava)

Think of when you’re drifting off to sleep and an image of a place appears in the mind. You enter into the image, lose touch with the world outside, and that’s when you’ve entered the world of a dream. That world of a dream, plus your sense of having entered into it, is a form of becoming. Once you become sensitive to this process, you’ll see that you engage in it even when you’re awake, and many times in the course of a day.

Some of your desires relate to the same mental worlds; others to conflicting mental worlds; and still others to mental worlds totally divorced from one another. The same goes for the different senses of “you” inhabiting each of those worlds. Some of your “yous” are in harmony, others are incompatible, and still others are totally unrelated to one another.

The Unconditioned

There are many dimensions to the mind, dimensions often obscured by the squabbling of the committee members and their fixation with fleeting forms of happiness. One of those dimensions is totally unconditioned. In other words, it’s not dependent on conditions at all. It’s not affected by space or time. It’s an experience of total, unalloyed freedom and happiness. This is because it’s free from hunger and from the need to feed.

The Threefold Training

Three aspects of training the mind: virtue, concentration, and discernment.

1. Virtue (Sīla)

Skillful Approach to Regret

If you react with regret over the harm you’ve done, you find it difficult to stay settled in the present moment with confidence. If you react with denial, you build inner walls in your awareness that create more opportunities for ignorance and make it harder to look directly at what’s really going on in the mind.

The best way to avoid these two reactions is to stick to the intention not to do anything harmful in the first place, and then make up your mind to follow that intention with more and more skill. If you’ve seen that you have acted unskillfully, acknowledge your mistake, recognize that regret won’t erase the mistake, and resolve not to repeat that mistake in the future. This is the most that can be asked of a human being living in time, where our actions aimed at shaping the future can be based only on knowledge of the past and present.

2. Concentration (Samādhi)

Defining Concentration

Concentration is the skill of keeping the mind centered on a single object, such as the breath, with a sense of ease, refreshment, and equanimity—equanimity being the ability to watch things without falling under the sway of likes and dislikes. Attaining concentration requires developing three qualities of mind:

  • Alertness—the ability to know what’s happening in the body and mind while it’s happening.
  • Ardency—the desire and effort to abandon any unskillful qualities that may arise in the mind, and to develop skillful qualities in their place.
  • Mindfulness—the ability to keep something in mind. In the case of breath meditation, this means remembering to stay with the breath and to maintain the qualities of alertness and ardency with every in-and-out breath.

3. Discernment (Paññā)

Defining Discernment

Discernment is the ability:

  • to distinguish the skillful processes in the mind from the unskillful ones,
  • to understand how to abandon what’s unskillful and to develop what’s skillful, and
  • to know how to motivate yourself so that you can abandon unskillful processes and to develop skillful processes even when you’re not in the mood.

Noble Discernment & The Four Noble Truths

The questions of noble discernment—concerning unnecessary stress, the actions that cause it, and the actions that can help put an end to it—are related to one of the Buddha’s most famous teachings: the four noble truths.

Discernment and Feeding Habits

In the beginning, you step back from the questions of hunger—which demand an answer right now as to where and what to feed on next—and take stock of how you’ve been feeding: In what ways do your feeding habits lead to stress? In what ways is that stress unnecessary? To what extent does the pleasure gained from feeding compensate for the stress?

In the beginning stages, as you develop virtue and try to master concentration, the questions of discernment are simply looking for better ways to feed. In other words, they’re refined versions of the questions of hunger.

Understanding the Breath as Energy

Breath as Energy

We tend to think of this breath as the air coming in and out of the lungs, but this air wouldn’t move if it weren’t for an energy in the body activating the muscles that draw it in and allow it to go out. When you meditate on the in-and-out breath, you may start by paying attention to the movement of the air, but as your sensitivity develops, you become more focused on the energy.

In addition to the energy of the in-and-out breath, there are subtler flows of energy that spread through all parts of the body. These can be experienced as the mind grows more still. There are two types: moving energies; and still, steady energies.

  • The moving energies are directly related to the energy of the in-and-out breath. For instance, there is the flow of energy in the nerves, as all the muscles involved in breathing, however subtly, are activated with each breath. This energy flow also allows you to have sensation in the different parts of the body and to move them at will. There is also the flow of energy that nourishes the heart with each breath, and then spreads from the heart as it pumps the blood. This can be felt with the movement of blood through the blood vessels and out to every pore of the skin.
  • As for the still, steady energies, these are centered in different spots in the body, such as the tip of the breastbone, the middle of the brain, the palms of the hands, or the soles of the feet. Once the in-and-out breath grows calm, these energies can be spread to fill the whole body with a sense of stillness and fullness that feels solid and secure.

Three Points to Keep in Mind

  1. You’re not concerned with your breath as it might be observed by a doctor or a machine outside you. You’re concerned with your breath as only you can know it: as part of your direct experience of having a body. If you have trouble thinking of these energies as “breath,” see if thinking of them as “breathing sensations” or “body sensations” helps —whatever enables you to get in touch with what’s actually there.
  2. This is NOT a matter of trying to create sensations that don’t already exist. You’re simply making yourself more sensitive to sensations that are already there. When you’re told to let the breath energies flow into one another, ask yourself if the sensations you feel seem unconnected to one another. If they do, simply hold in mind the possibility that they can connect on their own. This is what it means to allow them to flow.
  3. These energies are not air. They’re energy. If, while you’re allowing the breath energies to spread through the various parts of the body, you sense that you’re trying to force energy into those parts, stop and remind yourself: Energy doesn’t need to be forced. There’s plenty of space even in the most solid parts of the body for this energy to flow, so you don’t have to push it against any resistance. If there’s a sense of resistance to the energy, it’s coming from the way you visualize it. Try to visualize the energy in a way that can slip around and through everything with ease.

The best way to get in touch with these energies is to close your eyes, notice the sensations that tell you where the different parts of your body are, and then allow yourself to view those sensations as a type of energy. As you get more sensitive to those sensations and see how they interact with the energy of the in-and-out breath, it will seem more and more natural to regard them as types of breath energy. That allows you to get the most use out of them.

Benefits of Breath Meditation

Inner Food for the Committee

The pleasure and refreshment that can come from working and playing with the breath provide your ardency with a source of inner food. This inner food helps you deal with the obstreperous members of the committee of the mind who won’t back down unless they get immediate gratification.

You learn that simply breathing in a particular way gives rise to an immediate sense of pleasure. You can relax patterns of tension in different parts of the body—the back of the hands, the feet, in your stomach or chest—that would otherwise trigger and feed unskillful urges. This alleviates the sense of inner hunger that can drive you to do things that you know aren’t skillful.

  • A Mirror for the Mind: The breath is the perfect place from which to watch the mind, for it’s the physical process most responsive to the mind’s own workings. As you grow more sensitive to the breath, you’ll come to see that subtle changes in the breath are often a sign of subtle changes in the mind. This can alert you to developments in the mind just as they’re starting to happen. And that can help you to see more quickly through the ignorance that can lead to stress and suffering.
  • A Solid Foundation: The sense of well-being fostered by working and playing with the breath gives you a solid foundation for observing stress and suffering.
  • Refined Sensitivity: The sense of pleasure that comes from concentration, as it gets more refined, allows you to see more subtle levels of stress in the mind. It’s like making yourself very quiet so that you can hear subtle sounds very far away.
  • A Cooperative Mind: Being able to attain this inner level of pleasure puts the mind in a much better mood, so that it’s much more willing to accept the fact that it has been causing itself suffering. This is the main issue with the mind: It’s causing itself suffering through its own stupidity, its own lack of skill, and usually it doesn’t want to admit this fact to itself. So we use the sense of well-being that comes with playing and working with the breath to put the mind in a mood where it’s much more willing to admit its shortcomings and to do something about them.
  • Strategies for Pain: As you work and play with the breath, you also find that you have strategies for dealing with pain. Sometimes allowing breath energy to flow right through the pain can help lessen it. At the very least, the pain becomes less of a burden on the mind. This, too, allows you to face the pain with confidence. You’re less and less likely to feel overwhelmed by it.
  • Skillful Shaping: Finally, working with the breath in this way shows you the extent to which you shape your present experience—and how you can learn to shape it more skillfully.

Practical Instructions

Six steps for focusing on the breath

  1. Find a comfortable way of breathing.
  2. Stay with each in-and-out breath.
  3. When the blatant sensations of breathing are comfortable, expand your awareness to different parts of the body to observe more subtle breathing sensations.
  4. Choose a spot to settle down.
  5. Spread your awareness from that spot so that it fills the body through every in-and-out breath.
  6. Think of the breath energy coursing through the whole body with every in-and-out breath.

Leaving Meditation

There are three steps to leaving meditation skillfully:

  1. Reflect on how your meditation went.
  2. Spread thoughts of goodwill again.
  3. Try to stay sensitive to the breath energy in the body as you open your eyes and leave the meditation posture.

Judging Your Progress

Judging Wisely

Useful judgments focus on actions, not on your worth as a person or a meditator.

Regard your meditation as a work in progress.

The relation between actions and results is complex, so don’t jump to quick conclusions about what caused what in your meditation.

Don’t be surprised by sudden reversals in your meditation.

Maintaining Motivation

Here are a few voices that other meditators have found effective:

  • The voice of heedfulness: the one that reminds you of the unnecessary stress and suffering an untrained mind can cause for itself and for those around you. This is the voice that also tells you, “If you don’t train your mind, who’s going to train it for you? And if you don’t do it now, don’t think that it’ll get easier as you get older.”
  • The voice of compassion reminds you of the ways in which meditating is an active expression of goodwill to yourself and to those around you.
  • The voice of healthy pride reminds you of the satisfaction that comes from doing something well.
  • The voice of a healthy sense of shame grows out of healthy pride. It reminds you of some of the ways in which you’ve let the unskillful members of your inner committee take over even when you knew better. Do you want to keep being their slave? And if there really are people in the world who can read minds, what would they think if they read yours? (This sense of shame is healthy in that it’s directed not at you as a person, but at your actions.)
  • The voice of inspiration reminds you of the examples set by other meditators in the past.
  • The voice of a wise inner parent promises you a little reward to get you through difficult patches in the practice: a harmless sensory pleasure you’ll grant yourself if you stick to your meditation schedule.
  • The voice of good-natured humor points out how foolish some of your rationalizations for not practicing would look if you stepped back from them a bit. Not that you’re more foolish than the norm—just that the human norm is pretty foolish. Good-natured humor about yourself comes from the ability to step back from your actions, just as discernment does. That’s why famous meditation masters have such sharp senses of humor. Your foibles and rationalizations, when you can laugh at them, lose a lot of their power.

Disruptive Emotions

When dealing with disruptive emotions, it’s useful to remember the three types of fabrication mentioned in the Introduction: bodily fabrication (the in-and-out breath); verbal fabrication (directed thought and evaluation); and mental fabrication (feelings and perceptions). These are the building blocks from which emotions are fashioned.

To get yourself out of an unskillful emotion, you change the building blocks. Don’t allow yourself to be fooled into thinking that the emotion is telling you what you really feel. Every emotion is a bundle of fabrications, so a skillful emotion you consciously fabricate is no less really “you” than an unskillful emotion you’ve fabricated unconsciously out of force of habit. So learn how to experiment with adjusting the various types of fabrication. Sometimes just changing the way you breathe will pull you out of an unskillful emotion; at other times you have to fiddle with the other forms of fabrication to see what works for you.

Whatever the emotion, it’s simply one of the committee members—or a disruptive faction—claiming to speak for the whole committee and trying to overthrow the members who want to meditate. The number one lesson in dealing with disruptive emotions is that you have to identify with the members who want to benefit from the meditation. If you don’t, none of these methods will work for long. If you do, the battle is half-won.