If you can create this sense of well-being inside, then even when you're dealing with someone you don't like, you don't feel the need or the hunger to get back at that person.

"The ability to talk to yourself skillfully can be strengthened by a different kind of feeling: not emotions, but feelings of pleasure. The mind doesn’t operate totally on its understanding of things. Feelings of pleasure and pain do play a role in the way we act, the way we think. This is one of the reasons why we try to give rise to feelings of well-being within ourselves, through the breath, through the meditation: so that we can gain a sense of nourishment, a sense of inner contentment. That sense of inner contentment makes it a lot easier to look at things we have to look at but don’t like to look at, or to do things we have to do that we ordinarily don’t like to do, or to act in harmless and kind ways toward people we don’t ordinarily like.

When the mind is feeling hungry, when it feels a lack of pleasure, it will look for pleasure anywhere. Sometimes it takes pleasure in getting revenge on others, or doing things that we know are really unskillful, or in pretending that those unskillful things are actually okay. The pleasure there is a pretty miserable pleasure.

It’s like finding that you have a taste for rotten food. You’re embarrassed about it, so you don’t want anyone else seeing you eating it. You don’t even want to admit to yourself that you like eating it. But then you go ahead and nibble on it in the dark. That’s because you don’t have a greater sense of well-being inside, so you’re really hungry for just about anything that you can think of.

This is one of the reasons why meditating on your breath — giving rise to a sense of fullness, rapture, pleasure — is a gift not only to yourself but also to other people, other beings. If you can create this sense of well-being inside, then even when you’re dealing with someone you don’t like, you don’t feel the need or the hunger to get back at that person or to act on your feelings of dislike. You can see those feelings of dislike as something separate. They’re part of the committee of the mind. But just because a committee has a few unskillful members doesn’t mean that they have to take over. If you’re nourishing the good members of the committee, the good members can get stronger and overrule the unskillful ones.

This comes under the Buddha’s teachings on fabrication. There are three ways we fabricate our emotions, our intentions. One is through the way we breathe. And this is something we can have some control over. Try to breathe in a way that’s comfortable. Breathe in a way that feels nourishing. Second, there’s the way we talk to ourselves about things. For instance we try to keep in mind this mindfulness of goodwill, that we want to act on good intentions. We don’t want to harm other beings. Even though there may be contrary desires in the mind that actually want to harm people, we can say No. We recognize those desires as something we don’t want to identify with. And in talking to ourselves in the right way, we can give ourselves lots of good reasons for why acting on skillful intentions really is in our own best interest. It’s a lot easier to convince yourself of that and to actually act on those understandings if you have that sense of well-being inside. This is why we start with the breath.

Third, there are perceptions and feelings. “Perception” here means the labels the mind uses, or the images it uses, when you’re thinking about a particular issue. You can practice with this in your concentration. You learn how to perceive the breath, to picture it to yourself, in different ways. This is something that’s very intimate. Just the way you picture the breathing to yourself can have a huge impact on how you actually feel the breath. And this will have an impact on the mind.

If you can put aside your image of the breath as just the air coming in and out of the lungs and think of it more as an energy that suffuses the body, then when the breath comes in, it doesn’t have to fight against the sensations that are already there in the body. Think of it as energizing them, blending with them. That’s a different perception. Hold that in mind and see what it does to the way you feel the breath and the sense of pleasure or well-being that arises."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Feeling & Intention"