Finding wellbing and pleasure in the breath

So just beginning to open more to your immediate experience—whatever that might be in the first instance—just noticing what you’re already paying attention to. So then maybe the meditative habit of coming into the body… or we may find that we’re distracted, the mind has harnessed some portion of our attention. And then, just encouraging the body to come more into focus. It usually takes a little while—a few minutes—to really come to the body with this thorough, bright and sensitive presence. Our immediate contact with the body is often quite superficial, so we usually need to take some time to notice more of what’s happening in the body: the temperature of different parts of the body; the sense of tension and relaxation, both in identifiable muscles and also in more vague and subtle ways. We can just tell that there’s tension or relaxation without always being able to pin it on a region of the body. Noticing the felt sense of the edges of your body—where your body appears to make contact with what’s around it—and noticing those subtle sensations: the tingles, the currents of energy, we could call them, that don’t really correspond to any obvious physical cause. If we look closely enough at any part of the body, there’s some sensation—some subtle sensation. And noticing how your emotional state, mental state, shows up in your body: with anxiety or stress, there’s a kind of shaky feeling in the body or movement, a scattered feeling. With joy, or well-being, contentment, there can be a sense of harmony, unification, a warmth, a spaciousness. With tiredness, there can be a kind of downward pull, a heaviness. Become aware of how you know how you’re feeling in your body. And then we can begin to encourage the breath to be in the foreground. And by the breath, as always, I mean the whole galaxy of moving sensation that corresponds with the body breathing—not just something in the nostrils or in the belly, but this whole body rising and falling. It may be centred on your belly—that may be the most sensible place to settle your awareness. As the belly expands, the whole body receives an influx of aliveness, brightness, energy. And as we gather and steady ourselves with the breath, we really want to establish this attitude of welcoming, allowing, appreciating the breath and the whole body. This will have different flavours depending on how the body feels. When the body feels uncomfortable or tense, it can feel more like compassion—like soothing the breath and the body with this compassionate attitude, rather than wishing it was different and trying to get somewhere else where things might be different. And if the body already feels quite nice, quite relaxed, it’ll feel more like appreciation. Just before we start deliberately tuning to whatever we can enjoy in our practice right now, it can be helpful to bring to mind why we meditate. Whatever our reasons—probably multiple reasons—whatever brings us to practise, to find pleasure and enjoyment in being present with the body, can be a very helpful and beautiful thing. Just to really gather ourselves wholeheartedly around this intention towards finding pleasure, finding enjoyment. What a resource—to be able to enjoy just the breathing body. So, with this intention, we’re going to bring the kind of attention to the breath that’s like the attention of a connoisseur—like we really want to taste every flavour in the breath. It will really help to slow the breathing down if it’s not already quite slow. Without straining or forcing anything, we can encourage the breath to be as smooth as it can be, and at least a little bit longer than it habitually is. So we allow the breath to be smooth, and we enjoy that smoothness as much as we can. It is nice—a smooth, silky breath, bringing energy, oxygen, life into the body. Even if other parts of the body are uncomfortable, or even in pain, enjoying the breath like this can bring a kind of ease. So with this smooth breath, and this attitude of enjoyment, pleasure, we can centre in the belly, so that the belly is the receiver of the breath. We can allow the belly to grow big on the inhale, taking in all of that breath energy. And if it feels useful or possible, you can imagine that the breath is made of love, or joy, or compassion—whichever of these qualities, or any other quality, feels most welcome right now. And so as the breath fills up the belly, it fills up the belly with love, joy, or compassion, which then naturally flows into the whole body. Sometimes it’s helpful to visualise this love, joy, or compassion with a kind of colour—maybe sense that it’s coming from the ground or from all around you. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that your belly feels some glimpse of this quality growing in it with each breath. You can contemplate that compassion, love, joy, pleasure are infinitely available—if we can open to them, if we can allow them in. We’re not trying to create something that has a limited supply, or that we need to really make out of some other raw material. We’re actually just using a renewable resource—something ever-present, waiting in the background for us to tune into it. So as you fill your belly with these beautiful qualities, notice any sense of pleasure—however small, however subtle. It might be constant, or it might be just in one part of the breath. There’s a little glimmer of pleasure that we can feel in the belly. And then this pleasure becomes what we’re breathing into, what we’re feeding with the breath—this reservoir of well-being that we’re establishing, topping it up, growing it with each breath in, as relaxed and easy a way as possible. You’re playing two roles here in this meditation. You’re encouraging the breath to bring love, joy, pleasure into the belly, and you’re also the one receiving this into your belly. We can sometimes neglect that role a little bit. Be your belly receiving this lovely well-being. Appreciate it. Welcome it. Allow it in. Relax any resistance to receiving it. It’s possible, at some point, that these roles don’t need conscious attention anymore—they just dissolve. And then, if you’re loving this practice with the belly, you can stay there. Or you may be curious what it would be like to breathe this love, this pleasure, into your heart. If you are curious about that, you can give that a try—again, making sure you’re also the one receiving this, as well as the one encouraging it, tuning to it. It will have a different flavour in the heart than in the belly. This is interesting to notice. Physically, your belly still wants to be expanding with the breath, but it’s like you can send this energy of the breath to your heart. It can feel more vulnerable, more sensitive to do this. So just treat your heart with care. There may be other parts of the body that would enjoy receiving this love-infused breath, so we can just choose to send it wherever feels good. We might stay in the belly the whole time. We might explore some other parts of the body. We might even just sense that it’s coming into the whole body now. And the right thing to do is whatever feels nicest, whatever feels most pleasurable. And whatever pleasure is available, we really welcome that, really appreciate that, savour it. So we relax the body, encourage the breath to be smooth, allow the breath to be a carrier of love, joy, compassion, pleasure, and find where feels best to receive this energy. And then whatever pleasure, well-being arises, we notice, include, and appreciate this. And that’s what we’ll do for the last couple of minutes together in silence.