Buddhist Insight Meditation - GETTING TO KNOW THE BREATH

"You're getting to know the breath. It's like getting to know a person. As the Buddha said with regard to that kind of knowledge, you have to be observant and willing to put in a fair amount of time. Only then can you gain a sense of familiarity. Think of yourself as becoming friends with the breath. In any friendship there's got to be give and take. There are going to be awkward moments. Ups and downs. But if you stick with it, with the good‐heartedness needed to weather the downs, and the powers of observation to know when you've made a mistake, to admit your mistakes, then the friendship can grow. That's when your friend can start revealing all of his or her secrets.

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And the breath has lots of fascinating secrets. There are lots of interesting things to find out in the energy flow of the breathing. You can start seeing how the breath affects your feelings, exactly which experience is a breath experience, and which experience is a feeling experience--feeling pleasure or pain. As you really look into these things, you begin to see that you've often drawn the lines in your body and mind in the wrong places.

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For instance, the aggregates of form and feeling: the actual movement of the energy is form, the sense of pleasure or pain that goes along with it is the feeling, and it can be extremely fleeting. When you see how fleeting feelings are--much more fleeting than even subtle sensations of breath--that rearranges your notion about how you've been living your life. You realize how much of your life you've spent chasing after pleasant feelings and only to see more and more clearly how fleeting they are.

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So as you really look into this process of breathing, there's an awful lot to see. If you're willing to stick with the ups and downs of that gradual slope, you find that there's always something to do, something to learn. If you're sitting around waiting for Awakening to happen, it gets pretty desensitizing after a while--putting yourself into a dead, dull mood, saying, "We'll just wait here long enough and maybe it'll come." You get so that you no longer look at what you're doing. So the end result is that you're actually desensitizing yourself to a lot of the stuff going on in the mind. You try to hide it from yourself hoping that, "If I hide it well enough, then the enlightenment will be fooled and it'll come"--like a child trying to fool Santa Claus.

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But if you work with the breath--each breath coming in, noticing what kinds of feelings it gives rise to, what you can do to make it a more pleasurable breath--you're engaged in a process that makes you more sensitive. And what is discernment but heightened sensitivity? We often think of discernment as trying to clone our minds into seeing things the way the Buddha tells us to see them. But that ends up just adding one more layer of conjecture to our ignorance.

When the Buddha tells us to look for the inconstancy and the stress in things, he's not telling us to come to the conclusion that they're inconstant and stressful. He's telling us how to develop sensitivity: Can you sense really refined levels of inconstancy? Can you sense really refined levels of stress? What happens when you do?..."