Remember that the breath is energy, it's not just air coming in and out of the lungs. You can hold your breath but you can't hold the energy.

"Remember that the breath is energy, it’s not just air coming in and out of the lungs. The air can be held, as when you hold your breath, but the energy of the breath can’t be held. It can be blocked, but you don’t really hold it. So even as you’re holding the air in your lungs, there will be a flow of breath energy in different parts of the body. This means that when we focus on the breath as energy, we’re focusing on something that’s very light, very quick, and very pervasive.

It also helps to think about the breath as something that comes in and out of the body very easily. Even when you’ve got a stuffy nose or congestion from a cold, there’s still a subtle energy coming into different parts of the body. It’s like working around a traffic jam: If you know that the traffic is congested on a main street, you drive through the side streets.

You can think about the breath just waiting to come in at any time, so you don’t have to pull it in.

At the same time, you don’t want to squeeze it out. Sometimes when your out-breath is too long, you end it off with a little squeeze. That doesn’t really help. As you breathe out, you want to keep all your breath channels open so that when the body is ready to breathe in again, they’ll be open, just waiting for the in-breath. If you squeeze things out, there’s a tightening up and then you have to loosen that up before the breath is going to come in again. That gets in the way of allowing a sense of fullness to develop in the breath energy. Even though you’re focusing on the in-and-out breath you don’t want to develop the habit of trying to create a very clear marker between the in-breath and the out-breath. They’re all part of one element, and the element is continuous through time.

If you can think of the body as a large sponge or some other porous material, with lots of breath channels all over the place and then just hold that perception in mind, see how the body responds."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Perceptions of the Breath"

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