Connoisseur of the Breath

Close your eyes and feel the breath in the body. Where is it flowing? When you breathe in, it’s not just the air coming in through the nose, but there’s also a feeling of energy flowing around the body that allows the air to come into the nose to begin with. Where do you feel that energy flow? Pay attention to that. Just be with that for a while. If long breathing feels good, keep it up; if it doesn’t, you can change, because if the breath is the force of life, it only stands to reason that if the force of life feels good, it’s going to be good for the body, good for the mind. So ask yourself, what kind of breathing would the body like right now? Try to be on top of that.

It’s good to associate a sense of enjoyment with the practice. Sometimes it gets onerous because it feels like it’s a duty you’ve got to do. And it is a duty. After all, if you want to put an end to suffering, you have to develop the path. Concentration is a very important part of the path. As the Buddha said, all the other factors of the path are its supports. Getting the mind into right concentration is the heart.

But just because it’s a duty doesn’t mean it can’t be enjoyable. It doesn’t have to be a chore. After all, the Buddha describes it as a state of ease, pleasure, rapture. Your mind is single; it’s not scattered around all over the place. So learn to enjoy that. Find some pleasure in the breathing. Become a connoisseur of the breath. Then you have food you can take with you wherever you go—because this is food for your practice.

There are a lot of things you’re going to have to give up in the course of the practice. And it’s a lot easier when you have something good to hang on to—something that feels nourishing, something that feels pleasurable—so that you have good associations with the meditation, good associations with the duties that you take on for abandoning unskillful qualities in the mind and saying goodbye to them.

Sometimes there’s a sense of nostalgia. We feel some nostalgia for our old greed, aversion, and delusion. But you have to realize that you’ve got something much better right here, right now. So try to breathe in a way that’s nourishing, refreshing, so that it feels really good to be right here. In that way, you’re strengthening all the skillful voices in your mind. You make it a lot easier for them to function to win out over the unskillful voices.

So take some time to get to know your breath and to appreciate the breath. Some people say they don’t feel any sense of real pleasure with the breath. Well, hold your breath for as long as you can. Then, when the breath comes in with a sense of refreshment, you know, “Okay, that’s the part of the body that needs the breath.” Focus there. And you find it really does feel good to be just sitting here breathing—nourishing, refreshing, strengthening—good all around.