Changing the Perception of the Breath

You can also change your perception of the breath.

When you breathe in, exactly what’s happening? What’s moving? And what’s moving what?

Often we have cartoon ideas about the process, and those ideas determine which muscles we’re going to expand, which ones we’re going to contract, which sensations we believe have to be part of the in-breath, which sensations have to be part of the out-breath.

But if you can learn to question those presuppositions, you find that the breathing opens up. There are lots more possibilities. You can conceive of the body as a sponge: When you breathe, there’s energy coming in and out through every pore. If you apply that perception to the breathing, the actual physical sensation of the breathing is going to change as well. The rhythm is going to change.

Or you can think of having an energy core that runs down the center of the body. The in-breath comes in to that central core; when it goes out, it leaves that central core. Or you can think of breathing in and out through parts of the body that normally aren’t associated with the breath. You can breathe in and out through your legs, for example, or through your brain or your hands.

As you experiment with notions of the breathing, you discover lots of varieties. And they have different results in terms of feelings of ease or discomfort, pleasure or pain. You find that patterns of tension in the body that you assumed were a necessary part of having the body sit upright, or having the body breathe, are actually not necessary at all. You can breathe through them, and they begin to loosen up. This leads you to explore other feelings of blockage or pain in the body as well.

Say there’s a pain in your knee. How much of that pain is actually the result of physical causes and how much of it is a result of the way you’re breathing? You can experiment, and in this way the technique gives you a different framework for looking at sensations of pleasure, sensations of pain.

In other words, where there’s pleasure you realize that to maintain that pleasure you can’t just wallow in it or create a sense of yourself as gulping it down because that usually puts an end to it. But if you stay with the breath and maintain your perception of the breathing in the right way, you can maintain that sense of pleasure, too. It’s a positive thing.

After all, the pleasure that comes from concentration is one of the factors of the path: Right Concentration. It’s something to be developed.

This reflection by Ajaan Geoff is from the Dhamma Talks Section, Meditation Series book, Meditations 3, “Suppressed Emotions .” (Also in audio format at “Suppressed Emotions,” December 11, 2004 .)