Each part of the body has its own way of getting the breath energy without having to push it or pull it across something else. Try thinking of the breath in that way. It’s as if your body is a big sponge.

"Take, for instance, your sense of the body right here, right now. Buried deep down inside in many of us is the idea that we’re sitting here with a solid body that has liquid coursing through it, and then the breath comes in and out certain parts of it, through openings in the solid parts, but our primary experience of the body is its solidity. Try turning that perception around. Think of your basic experience of the whole body as breath: either in-and-out breathing or the breath flowing through the blood vessels, through the nerves. After all, without that breath you wouldn’t sense the body at all. You’d be dead. The experience of the breath comes prior to the experience of the other properties.

So learn to look at your sensation of the body as a set of variations on the breath energy. And then work with that perception. If there’s a blockage or a sense of tightness in the body, don’t perceive it as solidity. Perceive it as a sign that the breath isn’t running right. Maybe you’re trying to push it in a direction that it doesn’t want to go. Well, try reversing your idea of how the breath should flow as you breathe in, how it should flow as you breathe out.

And then there’s that whole issue of pulling the breath in and pushing it out. What’s doing the pulling? What’s doing the pushing? That’s breath energy, too. So you want to coordinate that with the other sensations that you’ve labelled breath, so that there’s no fighting in the body. When there’s no fighting, then it’s a lot easier to settle down and stay with the body. There’s a sense of fullness that comes when there’s no fighting, when each part of the body is allowed to be energized and is not being squeezed or pushed aside in order to energize something else. Each has its own right to be. Each part of the body has its own way of getting the breath energy without having to push it or pull it across something else. Try thinking of the breath in that way. It’s as if your body is a big sponge, with all sorts of openings for the breath to come in and out, so that there’s no fighting, no quarreling in the body.  That’s one set of perceptions you can play with."

~ Thanissaro Bhikkhu "Agreements to Perceive"