Mindfulness of Breathing: Feelings

This morning I’d like to continue with some instructions based on the Buddha’s instructions on breath meditation, this time focusing on the second tetrad, which deals with feelings as its frame of reference.

As I noted yesterday morning, it’s not the case that the four tetrads are to be followed in numerical order. Actually, each tetrad deals with an aspect of experience that’s constantly present throughout the meditation. So even though we’ll be talking about feelings today, remember that you want to stay grounded in the breath as you observe how feelings play a role in developing both tranquility and insight as you meditate.

The steps in this second tetrad are these: You train yourself to breathe in and out sensitive to rapture, to breathe in and out sensitive to pleasure, to breathe in and out sensitive to mental fabrication—which are your feelings and perceptions—and then to breathe in and out calming mental fabrication.

With regard to the first step, of inducing rapture, note that the word for rapture here, pīti, can also mean refreshment. In some instances and for some people, these sensations will be strong and clearly rapturous, even ecstatic. For others, they will be gentler and simply refreshing. This is not a measure of the power of your concentration. It’s simply an indicator of how much energy your body has been lacking, and how it responds when the energy becomes more full.

The Buddha says elsewhere that the kind of rapture you’re trying to induce here is both physical and mental. You induce physical rapture or fullness by the way you breathe; you induce mental rapture by the perceptions you cultivate.

For instance, if you breathe out in a way where you’re squeezing the energy out of the body, that’s not going to help with the physical sense of rapture. You have to breathe out in a way that doesn’t squeeze things. You can tell yourself, “I’ll put energy into breathing in. Let the body breathe out on its own. I don’t have to squeeze the breath out.” You also have to be careful not to squeeze anything at the end of the in-breath or the end of the out-breath. This, too, is a common mistake when people are doing breath meditation: They want to have a clear dividing line so that they can know, “This is the in-breath; this is the out-breath.” So they make a little squeeze between the two in the energy field of the body.

Learn how to resist that temptation. You don’t need that clear a dividing line. Think of the in-breath flowing into the out-breath, and the out-breath flowing into the in-breath: breath breathing breath. Don’t squeeze to make a distinction between the two. You’ll find that if you don’t squeeze the energy out as you breathe out, and you don’t make a little squeeze as you’re switching from one breath to the next, a sense of fullness begins to develop in the body. That, Ajaan Lee would identify with rapture. It’s a sense of refreshment, a sense of energy flowing around.

Then you can do the same thing with pleasure—sukha, which can also be translated as ease. Wherever there are feelings of ease or pleasure in the body, breathe in a way that protects them. Don’t squeeze them; don’t destroy them.

Once you’ve got these feelings established, then allow them to spread through the body, following your sense of the breath permeating the whole body.

As you do this, you’re using your intentions to shape the breath and the feeling, and then the feelings will turn around and have an effect on the mind. The perceptions of breath energy flowing, the pleasure flowing, will also have an impact on the mind, making it more focused, happier to be here in the present moment. You’re seeing feelings and perceptions as mental fabrications in action. That’s the third step in this tetrad.

Then, for the fourth, you want to see which perceptions, which feelings, will calm the mind down. There might come a point after a while when you decide that the rapture is just too much. This is where you have to learn how to change your perceptions. Ajaan Lee and Ajaan Fuang would talk about having the energy flow out the arms, out the palms of your hands, flow down your legs, out the soles of the feet. I’ve also found it useful to think about the energy flowing out through the spaces between the fingers—or else flowing out through your eyes if there’s an excess energy in your head. You can simply hold these perceptions in mind—without pushing anything physically—and that will allow the excess energy to release.

Or you can think of the body being like a big colander: You’ve got little holes in the pores of the body, through which the excess energy can flow out. Or your body is like a sponge: The energy can flow out in any direction; there’s nothing to hold it in. Usually, the problem with excessive rapture is that you start identifying the breath with the flow of the blood in the body, and the flow of the blood begins to push against the walls of the blood vessels. That leads to a perception of pressure or containment. You want to hold in mind the perception of permeability, through which that energy can flow out.

Another way of calming mental fabrications has to do with perceptions of the breathing process as a whole. When you begin meditating, there’s a sense that the breath is coming into the body from outside. After a while, though, you develop a sensitivity to how the breath energy actually originates inside the body: the only thing coming from outside is the air. This is in line with the Buddha’s way of analyzing the breath: He doesn’t say that it’s a tactile sensation felt at the skin. Instead, it’s part of the wind property in the body itself: the flow of energy in the body as felt from within.

So look into the body to see where the breath seems to originate. Ajaan Lee talks about “resting spots” of the breath—the tip of the nose, the middle of the head, the base of the throat, the tip of the breastbone, above the navel—but there are other possible spots as well. Focus attention on wherever the breath seems to originate, and think of breath energy radiating effortlessly from that spot. If there are any feelings of tension that seem to get in the way of that radiating energy, think of them dissolving away.

An even subtler perception is one where you think of every cell in the body breathing, and all the cells are breathing together: No one spot takes precedence; your attention is evenly distributed throughout the whole body. It’s like a photograph of the Alps taken in the pre-dawn hours when the light is diffuse and every detail has equal importance. This perception can have an extremely calming effect both on the breath and on the mind. At the same time, it helps you not feel threatened or fearful if the breath stops, because you sense full breath energy in every part of the body. You’re not starving yourself of breath energy at all. In fact, the opposite: The breath energy feels satisfying and still.

These are some of the issues that come up when you’re dealing with rapture and pleasure, and then trying to calm the effect that these feelings—along with the perceptions that go with them—have on the mind. You calm the mind down, one, by the way you breathe, two, by the perceptions you’re holding in mind, and you ultimately get to a feeling of equanimity, the calmest type of feeling, which will have a very calming effect on the mind. You can get the mind into very deep states of concentration this way, by using perceptions that are more and more calming.

The overall process is similar to the first tetrad. As I said yesterday, when you calm bodily fabrication to the point where the in-and-out breath seems to stop, it can take you all the way to the fourth jhāna. In this tetrad, when you calm mental fabrication, you can develop states of concentration that take you all the way through the formless jhānas, where there are very refined feelings of equanimity, and perceptions so subtle that it’s hard to say whether they’re perceptions or not. In the very highest level of concentration, the texts say that perceptions and feelings can actually cease. The two tetrads help each other along in this way.

So that’s the second tetrad.

Here, as with the first tetrad, you’ll notice the emphasis on the role of the mind, in the components of mental fabrication. In the case of perceptions, this is obvious: Perceptions are products of the mind. But this is also true in the case of feelings: The Buddha says elsewhere that the pleasant feelings engendered in concentration come from careful attention, which is an act of the mind. And, of course, we’re fostering feelings not-of-the-flesh—the feelings that result from concentration—which can occur only when you intend to give rise to them.

It’s in this way that even though the first two tetrads focus explicitly on body and feelings, their real purpose is to call attention to the role of the mind in shaping your sense of the body and your feelings: through the way you talk to yourself about the breath, intentionally change the breath, and create feelings of pleasure by the careful way you pay attention to the breath. As you gain more sensitivity in this area, you come to see that the Buddha’s basic principle in the first lines of the Dhammapada is right: All phenomena really do have the heart and mind as their forerunner. This is the beginning of real insight into how the mind contains the causes of suffering, but also the potentials for bringing suffering to an end.