At Ease with the Breath

Try to get comfortable with your breath. Experiment for a while to see what kind of breathing feels good right now. Try to think of the breath as a whole-body process. The Buddha doesn’t rank it as tactile sensation. In other words, it’s not the sensation of the air going through the nose. It’s more the sense of energy flowing through the body. Where do you feel that right now? Do things feel like they’re flowing well? Are there places where things are tight and constricted? Wherever it’s tight and constricted, see if you can relax it.

As for the flow, you don’t have to push or pull it. All you have to do is open up the way. It’s like cutting roads through a wilderness. Once the roads are cut, anyone who wants to use the roads can do so, but you don’t have to push them around.

So have a sense of lightness as you focus on the breath—because the breath is extremely light. If you find that the lightness is not congenial right now, you can think of earth, which is heavier. Most people, though, find earth to be a little bit too heavy and too weighty in the very beginning.

The breath is also good for clearing up a lot of discomforts in the body. Of the different elements in the body, it’s the most responsive to the mind. We use the word “element” here, not in the sense of chemical element, but in the sense of an elementary feeling. There’s warmth; there’s coolness—fire, water. There’s energy and there’s solidity. Breath and earth. Try to get things balanced, using the breath as the main means by which you balance the other ones out.

And you’ve got a whole day to learn to master this. There’ll be other tasks during the day, other chores, and you’ll be interacting with other people from time to time. But try to keep that extra activity in the context of the breath, the breath that should be your foundation, that should be your framework for the day. As for any other duties and responsibilities, you don’t have any right now. Just learn how to master this skill.

After all, when the time comes to leave the monastery, you can’t take the monastery with you, but you can take the skill. And you find that the skill is useful everywhere. We live in a crazy world. You need something like this to give you an anchor, so that you don’t get swept along with the craziness. So get to be on good terms with the breath. If you’re on bad terms with your breath, that’s a bad sign. If you’re on good terms, then you’ve got a friend wherever you go.

As Ajaan Lee says, you can ask the breath questions. In the beginning, it may not respond all that much. But when it sees that it can trust you—in other words, when your sense of the body and the sense of different emotions that are buried in the body begin to get a sense that you’re treating them with a little bit more gentleness, a little bit more understanding—things will open up.

Then the body and the breath will have lots of things to tell you. Of course, you have to decide which ones are worth listening to. But at least they’ll open up. Remember, we’re opening up communications inside, so you want those communications to flow freely.