Learn how to maintain a protective energy barrier of the breath flowing throughout the whole body

"It’s important to think of the breath energy in the body as giving off a kind of radiation, a protective field to prevent those other negative energies from coming in to affect you. If you just leave yourself wide open, you pick up negative things from other people. So you’ve got to be careful. This is when you need a kind of barrier around you, a protective energy barrier, the breath flowing throughout the whole body like this does provide that. Just be alert to that potential, learn how to maintain it.

As you do this, you find another effect happening as well: your energy becomes a more positive influence on other people. The way people react to you will change, the influence you have on other people will become a better influence. And you begin to see that the effort put into maintaining this inner sense of openness and well-being while you’re doing other things is not simply adding one more task onto all the other tasks you’ve got in the world. It actually simplifies things a lot. Try to make this your center of gravity. Make this the point from which you’re operating, your position of strength."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "A Sense of Well-being"

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