Concentration Food

One of the reasons why we focus on the breath is because it’s so responsive to your thoughts and perceptions.

You tell yourself to breathe in long, and it goes long. Tell it to be shorter, it becomes shorter. Deeper, more shallow, heavier, lighter: The breath responds. You can tell it to go to different parts of the body.

Here, of course, we’re not talking about the air coming in and out through the nose. The Buddha classifies the in-and-out breath as part of the wind property in the body itself. It’s the energy flow in the body. It goes through the nerves, through the blood vessels, out to the pores.

As you breathe in and out, and you get more sensitive to how the breath element feels in the body, you may begin to notice that sometimes it flows up as you breathe in, and sometimes it flows down. Sometimes the breath energy in the body seems to be harmonious, as everything’s breathing together. Other times it’s not. It’s as if different parts of the body were doing different things.

We’re trying to use the breath to make the body a good place to be here in the present moment, which means you want to think about the breath in ways that are more soothing when the mind is feeling frazzled, more energizing when you’re feeling tired, more relaxing when you’re feeling tense.

So, first make a survey of how things actually feel as you breathe in and breathe out. Then do some correction.

You don’t have to force things. Sometimes you’ll find that if you push the breath into the different parts of the body, you’re actually pushing the blood. It runs up against the walls of the blood vessels and it can create pressure. You can create headaches and other problems that way.

So, think of it as purely energy. And you don’t have to push it.

There are occasional times when the breath energy gets into a weird feedback loop, and you do have to push it just as a way of resetting the body. Back when I had migraines, I sometimes found that I would get into a strange feedback loop with my breath. To avoid the pain of the migraine, I would breathe in constricted ways. And of course, when you breathe in constricted ways, it creates more pain in the body. So, to counteract that, I would deliberately breathe in a way that was uncomfortable, expanding my abdomen as much as I could each time I breathed in, and squeezing it each time I breathed out. I’d do that for about five minutes, and it seemed to reset the clock.

But more generally, you want to be more gentle with the breath. Remember that it does respond to words in the mind, to sentences in the mind. Sometimes it responds more easily to pictures that you create in the mind. So, we’re working with both: words and pictures.

The Buddha calls this directed thought and evaluation. You direct your thoughts to the breath, and then you evaluate how it’s going. If it’s not going well, then you tell yourself, “How about this? How about that?” See how the body responds. You keep this up until you’ve got the breath comfortable enough that you feel okay settling down.

Then you can switch to individual words, like “deep,” “soothing,” “calm,” “energizing,” or just “breath, breath, breath.”

Or you can visualize a picture that you hold in mind of how the breath flows in the body. Sometimes you can think of it coming in from outside, not only through the nose, but also through the eyes and the ears, in from the back of the head, down from the top of the head, going deep into the brain, and then deep down into the body.

You can think of it coming in and out the palms of your hands, the soles of your feet.

You can visualize a cocoon of breath energy around the body and ask yourself if what you’re feeling of the breath energy in the body right now extends beyond the physical body. Is the cocoon healthy? Or are there holes in it? Ragged edges?

Sometimes you can sense that something doesn’t feel quite right. Well, picture it becoming better—because the breath is really responsive to pictures you hold in mind.

That way, the mind gets into deeper concentration with less conversation and steadier images, steadier directions, because you’ve got the breath energy here all the time. If the perceptions lapse, the breath is there to pick up the slack.

This is one of the reasons why you work with the body first before you go to the more formless attainments. With the formless states, like space or consciousness, you really depend on the consistency of the perception because there’s nothing else to hold your attention in place, nothing to fill in the gaps if the perception goes.

So first you work with the breath, because the breath is there even when the perception lapses. That helps to create some continuity. In this way, mindfulness develops.

There’s some confusion about what mindfulness means. It’s not just your awareness. It’s not just your consciousness. It’s the act of holding something in mind. In this case, you’re holding the breath in mind. It’s a way of reminding yourself, “Any other thoughts that come in are not welcome right now.” They’re off topic. You’re not here to think about other things. You’re here to establish a good relationship with the breath and, through the breath, with the whole body.

Mindfulness goes together with alertness. That’s what’s aware of what’s going on. Here your alertness is focused on what you’re doing and the results you’re getting.

Then finally there’s ardency, which is trying to do this well. These’re all things you develop.

Your consciousness is there, but it’s constructed. If there’s clinging to it, that’s part of the first noble truth. It’s to be comprehended.

But mindfulness is part of the path. It’s to be developed. Your alertness is to be developed. And you do it through the ardency.

This is why Ajaan Lee places ardency, among those three qualities, under the heading of discernment. You’re wise enough to realize that we’re not just here to watch. We’re here to make a difference, and the desire to make a difference in a skillful way is part of the path. It’s to be developed.

Craving simply to have things be the way you want them to be—to get the sensual pleasures you want or sensual fantasies you want; to take on an identity; or to abolish an identity you’ve already taken on: These three forms of craving are part of the cause of suffering. Those are to be abandoned.

But the desire to do this well is part of the path. Which means it’s to be developed.

So, we work on mindfulness. We work on ardency. We work on alertness. We work on using our directed thought and evaluation, our inner conversation, in a way that’s really helpful to getting us to settle down.

Why do you want to settle down? Because you can see things a lot more clearly when you do. We can run around in our thoughts, even good thoughts, but it’s just a lot of running around. When we run off into a thought world, it’s another state of becoming. It’s another identity that we take on temporarily.

When you’re in the identity, it’s hard to see it. It’s hard to see how it’s formed. Only when you’re able to step back can you can see what’s going on.

It’s like the difference between watching a movie simply for the enjoyment or stepping back a bit to ask yourself, “How did they create these effects? What is the purpose, the director’s vision? How is the actor going about trying to create the character?” In this case, you’re analyzing things, and you’re stepping back from it. As a result, you’re not sucked in.

In the same way, you don’t want to be sucked into your thoughts. You want to see them from the outside.

Getting a good firm foundation in the breath is a good place to stand outside your thoughts. When they come up, you’re in a position to decide, “Do I really want to go into this? Do I really want to encourage this?”

Learning how to still your thinking as much as possible allows you to gain some control over your thinking, so that when you do decide you want to think about something, talk to yourself about something, it’s a lot more productive. It’s a lot wiser.

There will be a part of the mind that says, when you get really still, “This is stupid. Nothing’s going on. You’re not analyzing anything. You’re not coming to any new understandings.” Just tell yourself you’re learning an important skill that you’re going to be using. It’s not the whole skill, but it’s a really important piece.

So, learn to encourage yourself to want to stay here, to appreciate the stillness, to appreciate the sense of well-being that comes as the mind settles down and you can spread that sense of well-being throughout the whole body.

You want to learn how to enjoy this. The Buddha never says to beware of enjoying this too much. After all, it is your food, the food for the practice. So, allow it to nourish you: to nourish the mind, nourish the body. Then, when things are nourished, you can do your work.

In one of the Buddha’s images, the practice is like maintaining a fortress on a frontier. You need mindfulness as the gatekeeper to make sure that the enemy doesn’t come in. In other words, you need mindfulness to recognize skillful and unskillful thoughts. If an unskillful thought starts moving in, you cut it off as quickly as you can. Then there are the soldiers. The soldiers are right effort. They have their weapons, which is knowledge of the Dhamma. But both the gatekeeper and the soldiers need to be fed, and that’s what concentration is for.

Concentration is compared to the food stores: grass for the horses; honey and ghee for the soldiers and the gatekeeper. So, nourish your mind well with stillness, so that the other aspects of the path can have strength.