Become mature about pleasure and pain, with part of the mind fixated on the pleasure and another on the other duties you have to do

"The important point is that you don’t avoid the pleasure. You actively cultivate it. You learn how to be a connoisseur of the pleasure, learning to appreciate how really nice it can be to breathe, with a sense of fullness in the body, how refreshing that can be, because you’re going to need that appreciation to deal with your thoughts of sensuality.

So appreciate the breath. Savor the breath. As the Buddha says, when the mind settles down, indulge in it, but make it an indulgence where there’s also a part of the mind separate from the pleasure. It stays with the breath, stays with the cause separate from the pleasure. The mind stays with the breath despite the pleasure, and lets the pleasure do its work.

You want to actively cultivate the part of the mind that can be with the pleasure — can be with intense pleasure — and not be overwhelmed by it, because that’s when you get to use the pleasure well. You get to do your duties with regard to the path. After all, the pleasure of concentration does make you more sensitive to levels of stress you would’ve overlooked otherwise. For a person who’s lived in a lot of pain and a lot of unhappiness, even a little bit of pleasure seems wonderful. But if you learn how to develop a pleasure that’s higher than that, when you look back at that little bit of pleasure you had before, you realize there’s stress buried in it.

That’s what you want to see. That’s how you come to comprehend suffering, by getting more sensitive. It’s strange: We’re trying to develop almost a resistance to the pleasure so that we’re not overcome by it, but at the same time we want to be very sensitive to it. It’s actually a very balanced state of mind that you’re trying to develop: sensitive but tough; sensitive but resilient; actively working at pleasure but not being overcome by it. A large part of the skill of meditation comes from achieving that balance so that you can get the full benefits of the pleasure. You learn how to use it properly.

A lot of it has to do with your attitude. In the beginning, it’s very easy to get hungry for the pleasure and get very attached to it. But after a while you should begin to realize, okay, it’s there, you can tap into it when you need it, but there are times when you can’t be developing it. You have other duties to do. Or even though you can try to maintain a sense of well-being as you go through the day, part of the mind can be fixated on the pleasure, while another part is fixated on the other duties you have to do. This way you become mature about pleasure and mature about pain. You began to see that neither one is a big deal. That’s when you grow up."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Mastering Pleasure & Pain"

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