A Pleasure without Stories (short extract)

"One of the good things about the pleasure of inhabiting the body — what the Buddha calls the pleasure of form, i.e., how you feel the body from within, what we now call proprioception, your sense of the body as you feel it from inside — is that it’s a pleasure that doesn’t have many stories at all. How many stories can you make about the breath? Maybe a few stories about particular times when you used the breath energy and saw immediate benefits, as when you had an injury or an illness, but the stories are a very different kind of story. They’re a lot less sticky than the stories that go with sensual pleasures. They’re a lot less intoxicating. At the same time, the pleasure of the breath is not so much the pleasure in the stories, it’s in the actual immediate experience of the breath right here."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Pleasure Without Stories"

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