Play With the Breath
September 03, 2023

When you focus on the breath, you want to be on good terms with it. Don’t force it too much. Take a couple of good, long, deep in-and-out breaths, and see if it feels good. If a long breathing does feel good, keep it up. If it gets tiresome after a while, you can change. Longer, shorter, faster, slower, deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter: There’s lots to play with there, just with the in-and-out breath.

When we talk about the breath, it’s not so much the air coming in and out through the nose. It’s the energy flow in the body. You may notice it in the chest, in the abdomen, in the shoulders. You may find yourself creating sensations in the head that seem to help pull the breath in. Those are unnecessary. Think of the whole body relaxing, everything from the toes up to the head, head down to the toes. Breathe in a way that feels refreshing for the whole body.

That’s just the beginning of playing with the breath, because you can also think of the breath sensations going to specific parts of the body and in specific directions. In Ajaan Lee’s “Method 2,” he talks about the breath coming in at the back of the neck: in other words, a sensation of the energy starting at the back of the neck, going down the spine, out the legs. There are other places, though, where he talks about the breath energy starting at the soles of the feet and coming up the legs and up the spine. That’s a perception you could also keep in mind. And as you perceive things this way, it actually creates the conditions for the energy to flow in those directions in the body. As you get more sensitive, you can decide, what does your body need right now?

So play with the breath. We’re doing something serious here in training the mind, but you don’t want to be grim. Otherwise, you start getting frustrated. You want to stay with the breath, other thoughts come in, and you run with those thoughts, and then you get upset because you ran away, and you yank yourself back to the breath. Sometimes you set up a bad relationship with the breath when you do that. It seems as if the breath is the hardest thing to stay with. But you don’t want to be on bad terms with your breath. After all, it is the force of life. So come back to it in a friendly way, and it’ll be happy to play with you. If you just sit and watch it passively, the breath can’t develop much of a friendship with you. It’s like trying to develop a friendship with a mannequin. You say hello and the mannequin just sits there.

Now, there will be parts of the body that are not cooperative. These often correspond to parts of your own mind that you’ve been harsh with, so they close up. When you find that happening—in other words, there’s a part of the body that you try to relax, and it simply won’t; you try to breathe into it and it seems to repel the breath—you can gently work around it. You have to show it that you mean it well. After a while, it’ll begin to trust you. It’ll open up a little bit.

It’s like trying to make friends with a wild animal. At first it’s resistant. Even if you pay attention to it, it’ll run away. But if you glance at it out of the corner of your eye and focus on other things, it’ll feel more at ease with you. If you deal well with those other parts of the body, after a while the parts of the body that are tense and tight will begin to open up. In other areas, you may be very surprised at how readily the body responds, almost as if it wants to play.

There’s that story of Charcot, the French explorer who took some ships down to overwinter in Antarctica. He wrote a journal about it. During their second trip down there, they were setting up camp—and the French liked to set up their camps near Penguin colonies. They would eat the penguin eggs and quietly kill a few penguins to make penguin paté. But they managed to do it in such way that the penguins, which were naturally friendly toward people anyhow, didn’t really notice what was going on.

At any rate, when they were setting up their second camp, one penguin came over from the colony and watched them. So one of the sailors took his glove, put it on the head of the penguin, and the penguin ran around, ran around, ran around, trying to shake the glove off its head. It finally was able to do that, and then it came back. It wanted to play some more. So they put a sailor’s cap on it, and it ran around, ran around, ran around, finally shook it off, came back for some more.

So sometimes you’ll be surprised at parts of the body that do want to respond. They do want to have you breathe into them in a way that’s more refreshing, more energizing when you’re feeling tired, more relaxing when you’re feeling tense.

Sometimes it’s good to hold that perception in mind, that you want to play with the breath and the breath wants to play with you. But play nicely. Don’t force things too much to fall in line with your preconceived notions of what should feel good inside. Get a sense of which parts of the body are most sensitive to how the breathing goes. Many of them happen to be in the line you can draw down from the throat down through the chest, the heart area, down into the abdomen. Someplace along that line will be some spots that are especially sensitive to how the breathing feels. Locate your awareness there. There already is a sense of awareness in that part, but just highlight it.

And make sure that when you focus, you don’t clamp down on things. All too often that’s our idea of what it means to focus or to concentrate, so we tense up around the parts of the body where we’re concentrating. That interrupts the flow of the energy, doesn’t feel good. So spread your focus in a more scattershot way. Wherever you focus, you relax. Wherever you focus, you relax, like an atomizing beam that atomizes whatever tension or tightness may be there.

You may notice that there are networks of tension in the different parts of the body. There’s a tense spot here and a tense spot there, and there seems to be a line connecting them. Then there are other tense spots with more lines connecting them, so that you’ve got a whole network. Here again, think of your focused awareness as focused on dissolving those lines away. Think of the breath going right through them. Deep into them.

In other words, there’s a lot to play here, both with the breath and with your perceptions of the breath. And in playing, you get skilled.

It’s like playing a musical instrument. Say you’ve got a guitar: You take it into your room, close the door, and experiment with different sounds. You may know a few songs already and you try to pick them out. But then you can experiment with new ones. You find that some of the new songs don’t sound particularly good, but others are more interesting. And the fact that you’re exploring on your own makes it that much more entertaining.

This is one of the ways in which we develop a sense of patience with the meditation. After all, it may take a while for the mind to settle down, and it’s easy to get discouraged in the meantime. But if you can entertain yourself with the breath in the process, then even though there may be gaps in your concentration or in your mindfulness, they don’t get you so discouraged. You come back and there’s more work to do. There’s more in terms of potentials that you can explore and experiment with.

You become friends with the breath; the breath becomes friends with you. You spend more and more time together because the friendship is rewarding.