It may be too much to ask of yourself to be conscious of “in and out” in the breath, but you can be attuned to simply the general quality of the breath energy.

"I received a phone call this evening from someone who asked, “How do I stick with the breath throughout the day? Do I just not care about other people? Do I not take in what they’re saying?” I said, “No, that’s not the case at all.” When you’re with the breath, you’re giving yourself a solid place to stand as you take on your other responsibilities. And you’re actually more able to be sensitive to other people when the basis of your attention is your breath, rather than what it normally is: your moods, your preoccupations.

So you look for whatever opportunity there is to practice. There’s a common phrase that you try to bring your practice into your life. Actually, it should be the other way around. You try to bring your life into the practice. In other words, the practice is the container. Your awareness of the breath should be the container for the day.

And even when you can’t focus entirely on the breath, or give it your 100% attention, you can still make it the framework. Even though you’re aware of what’s going on outside and you’re responding to what’s going on outside, you can still be aware of the breath energy in the body. It may be too much to ask of yourself to be conscious of “in and out” in the breath, but you can be attuned to simply the general quality of the breath energy. That’s something you can sense immediately and deal with immediately, especially if you’ve been working in your formal meditation on how to breathe through tension in the body, breathe through blockages in the body, expand your awareness, expand the sense of the breath throughout the body. As you get better and better at that skill, it doesn’t take all that much to bring it into the rest of your life. And if you do it well, you find that, yes, it is a grounding. It does provide you with a good foundation.

That way, your breath is the container for the rest of your life, as it should be. After all, without the breath, you wouldn’t be dealing with anything at all, doing anything at all, having any contact with the outside world at all. You’d be dead. So spread your awareness around — a larger awareness, a larger sense of what you can do. And this is how you have goodwill for yourself. This is how you have compassion for yourself."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Harmlessness" (Meditations8)

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