The breath doesn’t have to be squeezed in, it’s totally free to go anywhere at all, all the time.

"There are times when you’ll find that your conception of the breath gets confused, as in the tendency to confuse the breath energy with the liquid energy in the body. When liquid runs up against obstacles, it can’t go through. It gets squeezed in. It builds up pressure. But the breath doesn’t have to be squeezed in. Yet when we start breathing as if it were, that creates problems. So, remember: It’s totally free to go anywhere at all, all the time. The neat boundaries we place around it are artificial. Learn to erase them and see what happens.

As for the pleasure or rapture you want, that will happen on its own. You can squeeze it, you can force it, but squeezed and forced pleasure is not going to last very long. It’s like squeezing a piece of fruit to make it ripe. You know that ripe fruits are supposed to be soft, so you squeeze your piece of fruit, squeeze it and squeeze it until it’s soft, but that doesn’t ripen it. You just get mush. The right way is to leave the fruit on the tree, water the soil, make sure there are no insects eating your fruit, and give the tree some fertilizer. In other words, you focus your attention on the roots, and the fruits take care of themselves. And for the time being, you don’t want to go anywhere else."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Staying, Moving, & Neither" (Meditations6)

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