Friends with the Breath

When you focus on your breath, you want to be on good terms with your breath. When you think of it spreading throughout the body, you don’t have to push it. You don’t have to squeeze it. If you’re pushing or squeezing, that’s the water element in the body, the blood and the other liquids in the body, that you’re pushing around. You don’t necessarily want to do that, because sometimes you can build up blood pressure. You can get a headache.

Think of the breath flowing smoothly. After all, it is energy, and it’s flowing through all the spaces in the nerves, all the spaces in the atoms, around the atoms. Think of nothing blocking it at all. In that way, by giving it a good place to flow, it becomes your friend.

Ajaan Lee talks about how we’re not really on good terms with our bodies most of the time. When we start meditating, it’s like asking them questions, and they don’t answer because they’re used to being pushed around. But you give them some space, give them some time, after a while all the different breath energies and elements in the body begin to give you one word answers. Eventually you get on better terms and you can have real conversations. In other words, the more you listen, the more you pay attention to what’s going on inside without pushing things around too much, the more you learn.

Of course, you don’t just sit there and watch without doing anything at all. It’s like a friendship. You don’t know your friend unless you’ve tested the friend a little bit to see how they respond. See how they respond when you make them angry. See how they respond when you’re quiet. You get a sense of them. As you get a sense of each other like this, then you get the friend to be happy to do what you want, as long as you pay attention to what its needs are.

So it’s like developing a friendship. It takes time. And there’s going to have to be a back and forth. But over time, you can gain a sense that, yes, you are on good terms with each other. The breath can do all kinds of things for you that you might not have imagined. This way, wherever you go, you’ve got a good friend. The world outside may be crazy, but you’ve got a good, safe place inside. You can maintain that wherever you go.