Friends with the Breath
March 04, 2024

As you go through the day, you want to be friends with the breath. An image Ajaan Lee gives is that as you’re walking along, you’ve got a companion, and if you don’t talk to each other, it’s going to be a long walk. If you have a good conversation, then you can walk together and the long journey becomes short.

So, learn how to talk with the breath. See how it responds. You can ask all kinds of questions: “How is long breathing going to feel? How is short breathing going to feel?” As you go through the day, it may be a little too much to keep track of every in-and-out breath, but you can keep track of the general quality of the breath energy in the body.

And you can also notice what perceptions you use. Use your imagination. Try to be sensitive to which parts of the body tense up before the others, center your attention there, and think of different ways in which you could imaging the breath. Imagine the breath as a cocoon around the body, or as a big cloud with no clear boundaries. The solid parts of the body have boundaries, but the breath doesn’t. It is not clearly demarcated. It’s like a cloud. So think of the cloud of breath surrounding you, penetrating you, and see if that perception helps to ease up the tension in the body.

Then use your imagination: When you notice pains in the body or patterns of tension in the body, where are they? Are they really where you think they are? Sometimes a pattern of tension that your mind tells you is in the back is actually in the front, or vice versa. So, learn how to question things. When you ask questions like this, when you get interested in what’s going on with your sensations in the body, with your sensations of the breath as you feel it from within, you find that there are a lot of potentials. If it’s just in-out, in-out, in-out, the mind is going to run out and not come back.

Think about what the basic steps of imagination are: (1) You create an image in the mind, and (2) you try to hold it there. Then (3) you investigate it, then (4) you make changes in the image, and then (3) you investigate it again to see whether the changes improve the original image or not. So: This image that you have of the body and the image you have of the breath, are they really the best images you could have right now? There is no one best image to hold in mind, but there are lots of potentials. You can ask, “How about this perception? How about that perception?” Use your imagination.

You’re often told that you are here to meditate just to see things as they are, so it may seem strange to be told to use your imagination. Well, things as they are, are being fabricated by your intentions right now, and the only way you’re going to see that clearly is to change your intentions, change your perceptions, and see what effect that has. You’re actually here to see things as they’ve come to be, which is basically a causal process. Things are not static. The present moment is not given. You’re playing a role in shaping it, and all too often you’re not aware of the extent to which you are shaping it.

So, meditation gives you a chance to explore. You’ve got the whole day, so learn to become friends with the breath, have conversations with the breath, have conversations with your mind around the breath. That way, you’ll find that it becomes easier to stay with the breath as you go through the day. It becomes interesting, it becomes entertaining, you learn a lot, and as Ajaan Lee says, the long journey becomes short. The long day, when you’re facing nothing but breath in and out, in and out, becomes a short day because it’s more than just in and out. The breath has lots of ins and outs, and you’re here to explore them.