Don’t Weigh Yourself Down

Close your eyes. Focus on the breath. And show some goodwill for yourself by breathing comfortably. We go through life burdened with so many burdens, so there’s no need to burden yourself extra with a breath that doesn’t feel good. You’re totally free to breathe any way you want. So breathe well.

Breathing well means breathing in a way that’s energizing when the body is tired, soothing when you’re feeling frazzled, relaxing when you’re feeling tense. So get a sense of what your body needs right now, and then use the breath as medicine.

Medicine is one of the requisites of life. That means not only outside medicine but, more importantly, inside medicine. In fact, the Buddha’s teachings are considered to be medicine for curing all the sufferings of the heart. And one of his medicines is this breath meditation. Breathe in a way, he says, where you’re sensitive to pleasure. Where is the potential for pleasure in your breath right now? You might find a spot in the body that feels extra sensitive to how you breathe. It’ll be affected by the rhythm, the depth, the gentleness, the harshness, heaviness of the breath.

So try to find a spot that would like to be satisfied and satisfy it. This way, you can compensate for a lot of the imbalances in your body. When the mind lives in a body that feels balanced like this, then it’s more likely to be balanced in its attitudes. Otherwise, you’re carrying around a body that feels tense and irritable inside, and it’s going to be very easy to be very irritable with people outside because you’re burdening yourself already. They add one more straw on top of the burden, and all of a sudden it becomes too much to take.

So when you’re doing breath meditation like this, it’s a gift not only to yourself, but also to other people. You’re less irritable. You feel more solidly grounded in the present moment, and it’s easier to deal with the unpleasantnesses of life. The things that people say, the pains you come up with, are a lot easier to take when you’re not weighing yourself down. So take some time to be sensitive to how the breathing feels and then sensitive to how you can adjust it to produce comfortable breath sensations. When you can make it stay comfortable, then you spread it around the body. That way, you have a skill that you can take with you wherever you go.