Play with the breath to help inhabit the body more and more comfortably as a good place to stay

"You give yourself a nice, comfortable place to stay. If you’re going to be sitting here for an hour, nobody’s going to know if you’re playing with the breath, right? I mean, I don’t know how many people have asked me, “Can I really do that? Am I allowed to do that?” Of course you’re allowed to do that. And even if you weren’t, how could anyone enforce that prohibition? As you’re sensitizing yourself to the body in this way, you find that you can create a place where it’s really good to stay. And you can stay there for long periods of time. That’s precisely what you’re trying to do in concentration practice: bringing the mind to a stable state. It’s not going to want to stay there if you’re beating it.

It’s like a child in a house: If you treat the child well, you can open the windows and doors, and the child’s not going to run away. If you close the windows and doors, and beat it, it’s going to find a crack, an opening, and it’s going to go and not come back. So you have this opportunity to get the mind on good terms with the breath, on good terms with the body.

And you learn that the breath has a lot of uses like this. When you’re ill, there are certain ways of breathing that help you overcome the illness. When you’re tense, when you’re tired, there are ways of breathing that help you overcome those issues. The breath is a resource that we all have, but it very rarely gets cultivated. We very rarely make full use of it.

So think of the length, the depth of the breath; whether it’s shallow, deep, light, heavy; how it goes down the back, down the front. Again, it’s not just the air coming out of the lungs, it’s the whole energy flow through the body. As you sensitize yourself to that, it helps you inhabit your body more and more comfortably, so that when you want to practice mindfulness in daily life, you’ve got a good place to stay. It’s easy to stay. It’s attractive."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Antidotes to Anger"

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