With the pleasure from concentration, you begin to realize the good it's going to do for the mind is just there, the pleasure will take care of itself

"The Buddha’s observation is that the fact that of being alert to the breath is one of the causes for pleasure. If you keep that alertness continuous, the pleasure smoothes out, and as it gets smoother, it gets more intense. It develops a kind of momentum. It builds up. And whatever good it’s going to do for the body, whatever good it’s going to do for the mind, you don’t have to go making exclamations about it to yourself.

This is not like sensual pleasure. Sensual pleasure requires that you dress it up. You go and spend a lot of money, say, for a meal in a restaurant. You have to anticipate how really great it’s going to be and what great chefs they’re going to have and how nice the atmosphere is going to be. And you make comments about it. Nowadays, people even take pictures of their meals and send them to friends. Then you think about it afterwards.

Our habit is the more we make a big deal out of something, the greater the satisfaction we get from it. After all, when you look at eating, there are a lot of the aspects of eating that are not all that attractive. You have to sit there and chew and chew and chew and swallow. Sometimes you swallow and you didn’t chew it properly and it goes down the wrong way, or it gets stuck someplace. Think of all the work that goes into getting the food, the work that goes into earning the money to buy the food. The more you think about it, the more miserable it is. Just that little bit of flavor and that sense of fullness that comes, the nourishment that comes, that’s what makes it worthwhile. But if that’s all we have, then why do we have to spend so much money on getting fancy food or special food or dressing it up?

Sensual pleasures require a lot of elaboration to make them seem worthwhile, whereas with the pleasure from concentration, even though you have to work for a while to get to really appreciate it, you begin to realize that the pleasure itself doesn’t require a lot of elaboration. The good it’s going to do for the mind is just there. Whether you’re exclaiming to yourself about it or not, it soothes the mind. It soothes the body. It’s good for you, which means that your attitude should be more that you do the work, and the pleasure will take care of itself.

Then it becomes more a question of how you make sure that this sense of ease gets translated into the rest of your life so that it’s not something you experience only while you’re sitting here. If you don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by it, you can start noticing: This is how you breathe. This is where you focus. This is how you think about the breath, how you picture the breath to yourself. You can carry that knowledge into other activities. You want to start out with simple things like walking meditation, and then with simple chores. Can you stay with the breath as you’re working, say around the monastery?

When we were building the chedi at Wat Dhammasathit, people were noticing that on the days when they were actually meditating, they could sling a lot of buckets of cement and rake up a lot of gravel to go into the cement and do all the other pretty heavy physical chores that were required and not lose energy. The energy stayed up. The breath was helping them. It was their cushion as they worked. It was their nourishment as they worked. If they forgot about the breath, though, then they would work for about an hour and get totally worn out.

So once you have a sense of pleasure that comes from the concentration, don’t just let it sit there. See if you can carry it into other activities. Otherwise, you become a sitting junkie. All you can think about is you want to sit, sit, sit, sit, sit, sit and meditate. But as human beings, we have work we have to do. To get the most out of this pleasure, you want to learn how to regard it as a skill and focus on mastering the skill. Get some satisfaction in mastering the skill as you carry the sense of being centered — along with a soothing, healthy breath energy — into lots of different activities.

As you get better and better at this, you can take it into activities that otherwise would have you upset or have you worked up or afraid. You realize that you can breathe through all that. The fact that the breath is comfortable gives you a sense of well-being, a sense of belonging there that you wouldn’t have had it otherwise."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Pleasure on the Path"